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Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

This is kinda surprising to read. I’ve never known anyone who isn’t incredibly excited at least at the prospect of wireless energy transfers. If you can do 800 watts over 8 km, surely we can do 150 watts across 3 feet in the household, and MANY of our most important discoveries come from DARPA essentially being a black budget skunkworks team.

But much of the stuff DARPA does seems weird. It’s not about ideas with solid foundation and thorough engineering, it’s about crapshoots that might work and would pay off in some way - often any financially feasible way.

They once put “cats” on guns in hopes it would surprise opponents even just for a quarter second, giving your spec ops dudes the advantage. They tried to create angled guns that could shoot around corners like 20 years ago. All kinds of crazy stuff! It would be a lot of fun to work there, I think.

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The germans tried the curved gun with an attachment called Krummlauf during ww2. It would break after just a couple of magazines being fired. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krummlauf

Not sure how you would build one of those without the stress of the bullet during firing would not damage the barrel.

I'm amazed that worked for even one shot. Presumably gp was referring to cornershot or something similar, which seems like a much more reasonable approach.

Yeah, every gun person on youtube capable of getting one has demonstrated it. Unsurprisingly, you cannot aim for shit on these things, and their intended use can be fully replaced by a hand-mirror with a much better rifle (aka, most rifles), without fucking up your barrel trying to curve bullets.

I meant a 90° angled gun. You pull at one end, but all firing happens at the other, out of a straight barrel. Idea being that you can then collapse it to a flat rifle.

> They tried to create angled guns that could shoot around corners like 20 years ago

The IDF got a gun that does this[0] into service in 2003.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CornerShot

Reminded me of "Wanted" (2008)[0]

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493464/

It's the same gun, Angelina Jolie trained with the IDF.

The problem with wireless energy is that the efficiency losses are mostly because of physics, not because of technology just needing to scale up a bit more.

A future with having wireless energy transfer everywhere is one where energy is so abundant that we don't mind throwing out 80% of it powering wireless things.

Ignoring efficiency, you can deal with "physics" by just eliminating matter in the way, like air, via a strong enough laser. I'm not sure I'd suggest this as a consumer product, though.

The actual work is usually done by private companies under contract

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