SEATTLE – Boeing’s A160T Hummingbird unmanned rotorcraft flew for 18.7 hours on an overnight flight May 14-15, setting what the company believes is a world endurance record for a UAV in its weight class.

The flight, which was accomplished at the U.S. Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, was one of two key performance tests set by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

[via DefenseTech]

New Scientist has an interesting report on recently declassified documents describing experiments on ‘ray gun’ technologies to cause everything from epilepsy like seizures to putting words in your head. This is the kind of innovation I just love to see in a military, thinking outside the box and trying to port Sci-Fi weapons to real life.

Oh dear. The Danger room has all the gory details and the possible plans to take down the rogue satellite USA-193 on a death dive to Earth and a tank full of toxic fuel. It looks like the satellite’s momentum at the time of the shoot is taking it over Canada at 10:30 EST.

Let’s imagine worst case scenario here: The missile doesn’t get a good hit, the bird is winged, still contains exotic fuels and comes down over Canada as a result of this shoot, spraying the northern part of the continent with toxins. In that case, as reparations to the Canadians, should the USA give them Alaska to move to? After the oil has been pumped out of course, but then they can have it.

If you’re into ’save the whales and hug a tree’, then The “Church of the Apocalyptic Kiwi” has some FUD on the Whales vs. Navy Sonar situation and how the gov’t got smacked down, at least temporarily.

On the one hand, there’s the whole national defense thing and the easiest, bestest way to find those enemy subs sneaking up on your ports is to use active sonar. If the whales don’t like it they’ll quickly learn to stay away from this ‘bad place’.

On the other hand, I used to work on submarines. At times we would play war games and the skimmer battlegroup that would basically be on top of you for hours or days on end going active with their sonar, training they called it. Torture, I called it.

Even though they easily detect you in that situation when we’re forced to remain on station and play the ‘rabbit’, the skimmer Sonar Techs got lots of good real world practice to see what the sonar returns look like with a boat at different depths, with different salinity and different water temperature while we moved through the different layers.

However, while the skimmers are going active on their sonar constantly it would drive me batshit. The incessant ringing and reverberation for hour after hour was ridiculous, keeping me from sleeping or concentrating. It was akin to something like the Chinese Water Torture where just a little bit wouldn’t bother you but that little bit applied every 2-3 seconds non-stop makes you want to pull your hair out.

Here’s some sample audio of an active sonar:

- http://www.dosits.org/gallery/mp3/sonarcl.mp3

Sidebar: On the topic of undersea audio, in case you’ve never heard this before, Snapping Shrimp sound like sizzling bacon when listening through passive sonar. People never believe me until i point it out like here & here. I found those at this audio gallery on the Alpheus heterochaelis (snapping shrimp) page.

I’m hoping one of our military folks that reads Geeknews, specifically Rizzo, can comment on this whole affair.

The Seattle-Times is reporting that Boeing’s opponents and critics are calling their latest design proposal for the military’s new air tanker a clumsily stitched together horror of parts assembled from different models of the 767. Visit the news page to see the bigger pic of the caricature, you can see a Frankenstein bolt sticking out of it’s ‘neck’ right behind the cockpit.

Boeing is competing for the contract against the bids by Northrop-Grumman and Airbus who are combining their efforts. If you haven’t been following this tale there’s been some very interesting twists and scenarios in this hotly contested contract, not the least of which is that Airbus may become Americans since they’d end up moving some of their manufacturing plants to the United States if they win the contract! Imagine that.

The Airbus/Northrop proposal is based on the A330 MRTT, Boeing’s proposal is called the KC-767.

Hey Rizzo - you work on the KC-135 Stratotanker that is to be replaced by the winning design, do you or your team ever talk about the next big thing in air refueling like these bad boys? Do you have any preference or comments?