Big Wind is the meanest firefighting tank you ever saw (2021)
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I've always wondered whether some technologies have been given less attention in the west because they were considered 'Soviet'. Bacteriophages, an alternative to antibiotics less likely to induce resistances, come to mind as well. But of course, there might be perfectly valid technical reasons for why it didn't catch on.
Sweet dough/cinnamon/butter/sugar mix is rolled up into a long tube, then you cut the individual rolls using dental floss wrapped around the tube. Generally, the H2SO4 is omitted.
And now I know what I'm making for breakfast tomorrow!
It is awesome.
https://interestingengineering.com/soviet-engineers-detonate...
You're not wrong. The technique was pioneered by Red Adair who was quite a famous firefighter with a speciality in blowout fires:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Adair
It's worth doing a search on YouTube for videos of his "work":
I think a more personalized medical system can do a lot of good with phages given modern tech, but most medical provision systems would have difficultly deploying it, and certainly no one was able to back when it was developed. AFAIK, the ability to easily scale, transport and deploy antibiotics was what led to antibiotics being chosen over phages just about everywhere.
The joke is about cancer cells but is equally applicable to bacteria. Just because something is very very good at killing bacteria doesn't mean that it can also become a practical medicine.
1) There's no such thing as a "broad spectrum" phage. They're organism specific, and that means not only would you need to keep a phage library on hand, but you'd have to do a lot of diagnostic tests. That's going to be both expensive and tricky. There are treatment guidelines for things like sepsis right now that are basically un-doable with phage therapy because of the time it takes to tune a phage library.
2) Phages are living things. Not only is that a weird regulatory framework to be in for a drug, but it also means that you need to be able to keep phage alive. In contrast, antibiotics are inert.
3) Phage therapy is also relatively new in the West (after being abandoned for some very real, very serious safety concerns back in the day), which means there's just less of a R&D infrastructure behind it.
There have been people working on commercializing phage therapy since I was in undergrad (I'm now a tenured professor). The problem is it's hard, and antibiotics are so much better as a treatment that there's kind of a ceiling on the excitement that they can generate, especially when trying to treat at scale.
The space pen vs. pencil story comes to mind, and it seems silly they wouldn't use a pencil except that it is a dust hazard, a short-circuit hazard (especially if you're using circuits more densely packed) etc
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/pike-river-2010/66373/pike-river-...
Only when they’re perfectly balanced does it seem that both come into play and remain (left vs right hand drive, for example).
The first is probably an economic one, but it’s important to consider that it’s not all about the cost of production - the technique may be prohibitive, and could draw out too many strategic resources from other areas in the sector… and it might not even scale, or has a short shelf life, or, or…
The second - customer acceptance - would need to be carefully considered. The doctor offers you two options to treat your babushka, the familiar and reliable antibiotic, or the new drug that sounds like a Matrix virus?
For something to overtake it has to be amazingly exceptionally better; which can be hard to obtain.
A less geopolitical example that I can think of was research in the 50's about limitations of neural networks (XOR problem,...) that some people I take seriously argue has delayed the adoption of these architectures by a generation or two (the only politics here was the battle for government funding by different researchers/labs).
Betamax vs VHS, etc - seems often the "technologically inferior" won and the other died out almost entirely, until both get consigned to the dustbin.
I think this is part of the attraction of steampunk; we know that many technologies have been abandoned long before they peaked.
> In its original form, Big Wind put out nine burning oil wells in Kuwait, more than many teams that were working with the more traditional method of blowing out well fires with the use of high explosives.
while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires#Extinguishin... says:
> The companies responsible for extinguishing the fires initially were Bechtel, Red Adair Company (now sold to Global Industries of Louisiana), Boots and Coots, and Wild Well Control. Safety Boss was the fourth company to arrive but ended up extinguishing and capping the most wells of any other company: 180 of the 600. Other companies including Cudd Well/Pressure Control, Neal Adams Firefighters, and Kuwait Wild Well Killers were also contracted.
180 is clearly larger than 45.
What I was missing was the total number of teams involved. https://rlg.fas.org/Taming%20Wild%20Wells%20of%20Kuwait%2035... says "Nearly 30 crew were used", and the Wikipedia page says Big Wind was used for 43 days across the 7 month period.
Assuming 30 day months, that's a mean of 600 / 29 * (43 / (7*30)) = 4.2 wells per crew in a 43 day period, which is well less than Big Wind's crew.
Big Wind is a fun story but was a drop in the bucket compared to the work of the real well services companies that operated in Kuwait.
What the oil wells did is suggest that the threat from burning cities was also lower outside of the bombs direct fireball which is very effective at transporting material to the upper atmosphere. However, more recent models show that fires across larger areas may be more capable of sending particles to the stratosphere.
Combined the overall threat still exists, but would be less severe than initial predictions.
That's literally where the "uninhabitable, lifeless rock after WW3" idea comes from.
The Day After Tomorrow for example somehow jumped from slowing down ocean circulation resulting in lower temperatures in the north, to ice tornadoes. It’s like stuff can’t just be really really bad for a lot of people it also needs cause people to run somewhere or be flying around in helicopters.
The nuclear winter models and papers were explicitly designed to create that perception for political reasons. Starting with the outcome of your model, then designing your model to produce that outcome is not exactly fine science, and I don't understand why you're trying to act like that didn't happen or whatever it is you're trying here.
Global temperatures where approximately 10C colder during the last ice age which humidity survived. So, initial estimates that global temperatures could briefly drop by 10-20C don’t automatically mean the kind of earth devoid of life that you described. That people looked at a range and only paid attention to the worst case says little about the paper involved.
> The scientists did this work mainly for public consumption. When they announced their results in 1983, it was with the explicit aim of promoting international arms control.
> ... The computer models were so simplified, and the data on smoke and other aerosols were still so poor, that the scientists could say nothing for certain. ...
https://history.aip.org/climate/Winter.htm
Keep in mind that among the assumptions made here are that a 1D vertical weather model is meaningful when trying to estimate global weather effects from localized emissions and that Western and Russian cities are built mostly from wood, like WW2 Japan.
That’s 25+ years after the initial research. “But secret studies supported by the U.S. military suggested that a war's effects on the atmosphere could be quite serious.” I am not saying politics never showed up, but it’s clear the initial research was of a more practical nature as was the 1958 paper.
As to the paper you’re referring to:
“As a side effect, the studies helped to improve scientific understanding of how aerosols could affect climate.” So it was actually an improvement on existing models.
Though science marches on and the debate continued, my understanding is that people found how the early models underestimated a specific issue they investigated and got more concerned. Others would discover areas the model was overestimating impact and investigate that, but overall the models got generally more accurate over time.
https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioa...
>> The crew all wear flame-resistant gear to protect themselves from the immense heat
Can't we add tele-operation to modern versions of such firefighting tanks? Remote controlling the tank and water nozzles wearing VR glasses and intuitive controls, instead of exposing people to those temperatures.
Modern tanks cannot drive-by-wire?
https://imodeler.com/2016/10/the-thunderbird-recovery-vehice...
At-first I didn't get the name, but then I read the bit about the jet engines. This thing is badass.
> Water for the operation was sourced from the Arabian Gulf, with saltwater pumped in using oil pipelines running in reverse.
That's almost as impressive as the tank.
The meanest water cannons are used in riot control.
Big Wind is designed for reasonably contained fires, often fuel-fed as with oil or gas well fires. There, if you can extinguish the immediate flame, you've got a chance at capping the well, cutting off the fuel, and preventing further combustion.
Wildfires are more akin to a battle front, or in their worst cases, a literal storm of fire which behaves unpredictably and doesn't simply advance across terrain but can skip and jump, creating tremendous winds in the process. Fire tornados in recent Northern California fires picked up and tossed trucks and heavy equipment, killing several people in that process.
Wildfires also tend to advance not simply as a flame front but through blown embers, which can carry the fire foreward 100s of metres, or even kilometres, from the primary flame front.
Combatting is more a matter of saving people and property --- evacuations and "treatment" (clearing brush, foaming or gelling walls and roofs, possibly setting sprinklers and soaking ground and surfaces), "fuel denial" through brush-clearing, cutting fire lines, and back-burning, and laying suppressant through aerial attack. Fire lines may stretch for kilometers, with crew deployed along them. Methods used are far more strategic than tactical.
Wendover Productions did a pretty good "How Fighting Wildfires Works" video four years ago: