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Monday, January 12, 2015

Missile Dream

Ask Google for Missile Battery and Google delivers.
I'm working in an office. It's a large room with desks and similar office furniture. There are not too many people around. It's all fairly typical except for the two flat panels mounted in the walls. They are about two feet tall and eight feet wide. There are four small holes equally spaced across the width through which miniature missiles are launched. Each of the four ports is for a different flavor of missile: high explosive, armor piercing, anti-personnel, what have you. The missiles are small, maybe one-eighth of an inch in diameter (3 mm for un-Americans) and about 12 inches long. It may not seem like a good idea to have these launchers pointed into the office, but ours is not to reason why.
      I presume we get an order to launch one missile because we have a designated target which we dutifully communicate to the missile. We launch it and it flies across the room and out the open window. Cool. So far everything in this dream is holding together.
      Now we launch another missile, but somehow no one told this one where to go so it flies across the room and hits the other missile launching panel right below the third port. I see it hit and I watch it burn it's way through the front panel. It takes it a small fraction of a second, but time has definitely slowed down here.
    Shit, this is bad, and it's gonna get worse, because now the entire magazine of missiles stored behind that panel start to detonate. They must be going off one at a time. None of them are escaping, but we can see glowing hot spots in the metal panel every time one of them detonates. The spots are marching their way across the panel in an approximation of the missile's stored locations.
    As soon as the errant missile strikes its target I'm trying to figure out how to shut down the power to the missile launchers. (No, I don't have any idea why that should help.) A Mr. Spock like character (ala Star Trek), that is, higher up the food chain than me, but not in my chain of command, happens by and inquires as to the reason for my frantic scrambling. He is unperturbed by the disastrous situation of the missile launcher. When I inform him of my intent he tells me that I will need to contact San Diego, and no, not to get permission, but because they control the power to the missile launchers. There is no local control. Then he wanders off. Okay, right, contact San Diego.


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