(08-19-2023, 07:27 AM)Ninurta Wrote:(08-18-2023, 02:37 PM)Snarl Wrote: A plumber ... a firefighter: I just don't know.
Between '86 and '90, I was exposed to some pretty high level sciency weapons stuff under the SDI. I was (as he said) fully read-on. I was just a security guy, but my key access was the same. It opened every door in every facility I traveled to. That, in and of itself, would freak people the fuck out.
What freaked me out were two accidents. The first one I saw the aftermath. They had something like a laser beam. It punched a hole. From what I was able to see ... the hole didn't end. What boggled the mind was that whatever punched the hole left no debris behind.
...
Those things work by vaporizing everything in the way of their path. No debris is "left behind" visibly, because it has been converted to vapor. Now the scary part is, that vaporized stuff, as vapor, is distributed through all the ambient air in the vicinity. Just imagine what you were breathing....
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No tellin'. Those were old-assed Army buildings. They did have central air and they did have separation walls with plexiglass in them. But the air spaces were all robust. And ... I'd guess anything that got vaporized would settle pretty quickly to the floor. There was no one in the space physically observing. I'd assume that was protocol.
Another thing: their stuff was really loud. Not only in their 'control room', but they had a generator (like an RV) they had parked next to the building. I was pretty familiar with our 60KW generators ... and those things were so quiet compared to the one they had.
Post-event, I wasn't allowed to conduct interviews with contractors or do anything that might draw extra attention to that project (there were others going on there in that facility). So, I don't know what people saw (other than the two govies ... who knew nothing ... of course). Don't know the period of time over which the event took. Don't know where the people went who had been working on that project. I do know it was treated as an 'incident'. And, I don't remember ever being read-off of that one. Might have been when I PCSd, but I don't recall now. I was read-off right away (before PCSing) on several of the other programs. And, best as memory serves, was only read-off of only one SAP and SCI access before going back to Korea.
One strong assumption you could make was that no one got injured. Another one is that no one expected what happened to have happened. I think it was dumb luck no one got hurt. I didn't see any rhyme or reason to where that thing sat 'aimed'. It rested about waist height and was 'aimed' parallel to the floor and to the exterior wall. I hope they learned in hindsight to point that sucker at an exterior wall and aim it skyward.
Tell ya another funny thing. All those SAPS had names. I haven't been able to remember a single one of them since even before I retired. Last thing ... for perspective ... we had no desktop computers back then. We _did_ get a "mini computer" for the shop and I had the honor of assembling it and connecting dumb terminals on some people's desks. That was an eye-opener in many ways, but unrelated to the SAPS. Should raise an eyebrow if one thinks about it and what runs a pen-laser these days.