GEe, thanks :)

That is partially accurate. There are several sources of military 'game changing' technology. The first and obvious is R&D procurement contracts. The federal government really isn't in the business of employing 10s of thousands of engineers. Rather, they have a few think-tank types (scientists) that come up with some ideas that may turn into a procurement contract that includes research & development for the company to design/build.

The second way is when the facilities such as the Dept of Energy National Laboratories and DARPA come up with something new, and they do kind of a dutch-auction to sell it to the contractor producing the best bid to commercialize the technology - this usually is either some up-front money paid, or could be a payment from the government to take it the rest of the way to a useful product, and then royalties paid to the lab on the patents it may include as a license fee. A substantial part of the budgets for national labs come from that - some are as esoteric as early network security or IT network management concepts and technologies (NMAP, etc.) to more advanced cyber defensive weapons technologies (you would never see our offensive weapons sold that way for national security reasons).

The other aspect of commercialization is when weapons contractors are freed to sell weapon systems to friendly governments - this is usually be executive order and/or legislation, and good examples would be General Dynamics selling guided missile frigates to Taiwan or F16's to Israel and the rest of the free world. We sell old stuff around the world, but it would be decades before say the F22 would be sold out that way. An exception is the Joint Strike Fighter that can be down-scaled in technology as a common platform sold to other NATO/allied countries - common airframe, weapons hard points, and engines for ease of maintenance around the world but only the US version would have advanced counter measures and targeting or our crypto boxes. Of course, the other countries might put their own tech in them after receipt. There is value to us in having common platforms though, in the event of another land war in Europe, not supporting 20 different aircraft with spare parts is quite a bit easier than everyone having their own stuff and we have a lot of different industries to defend.

As for a commercial technology use for this - I really can't think of one, it is somewhat like reactive armor it sounds like that we have used on our tanks for years. For that, an incoming explosion sets off a directed (outward) reactive explosion that repels some of the energy out (or negates it).

In this case, it's using plasma to disrupt a shockwave - which can be demonstrated easily in water I would think, sound waves don't travel well across different densities (thermal layers) under water, and subs use that as a defensive acoustic advantage. If the plasma creates different densities in the air, we can assume the shockwave would be disrupted by whatever measure according to the amount of energy put in. It probably takes a lot of energy though for a rather modest change in explosive energy received. You're looking at next-generation power cells/capacitors, etc., to charge a system like that for the initial discharge. Could probably adapt the non-lethal sonic weapons for something like this as well, may be where they got the idea from.

As designed, this isn't something you would carry around with you like a Jedi Knight on your person, this would take some serious hardware to support. Probably too much for a fighter jet, or you would give up to much performance & agility to house it and would be an overall negative.

Rather, might make an excellent counter-measure on say, Air Force One, against a nearby shrapnel explosion (for example), and would likely make its way into Boeing commercial jets if eventually declassified or something as an anti-terrorism measure.

I suspect we already have much-more capable systems though on board, such as an aircraft-version of a Patriot Anti-Missle Battery, etc.

GE hasn't been a real military tech player for a long time.

I see. In other words, it intercept a shock wave from a high explosive. And is meant to be manageable enough to protect a cavalry vehicle, like the HumVee in the accompanying diagram.

A shield like that could protect a ship.

So while you couldn't yet imagine the Gulch having a force field to protect it from a direct bomb strike, Ragnar Danneskjöld would likely equip his ship, and the squadron of fighter/attack planes I'm sure he would carry, with this technology. Imagine the protection from flak.

Bingo! But that is why it is so important to say Boeing == Force Fields. It is like saying NASA == warp drive (which they are experimenting with). It opens the door, gives permission, to legitimate investigations by private parties (where qualitative breakthroughs may occur...though, given the cost of physics the breakthroughs may be in mathematics rather than in physics).

Jan

I was one of those sadomasochistic programming types who enjoyed machine language, octal, and hexadecimal, tolerated Fortran and C++, generally hated any structured code, and loathed Ada.