I'm glad we're in agreement. If only Ronald Regan has listened to his
'Star Wars' advisors. And a shame Boeing's 737 MAX software team had
parents who took them to see Smokey and the Bandit in 1977.
RR (rather, the people writing his script) knew that Star Wars didn't need to actually work, as such. It only need to panic the Soviet military brass enough to to get them to crash the Soviet economy.
> Star Wars didn't need to actually work, as such. It only need to panic
the Soviet military brass enough to to get them to crash the
Soviet economy.
It's a good, and perhaps trivially true theory, insomuch as warfare
is always bluff. I think by mid-80's the writing was already on the
wall with respect to Soviet over-reach and CIA knew that.
But don't you think the ruskie scientists knew "space lasers" were
never going to happen? As I understand it, the best we ever got were
some kinds of chemical MASERs (Ammonium liquid phase) that could take
out a slow missile at a couple of kilometres on a perfect day. Any
confirmed advances on that?
Ironically enough, in the context of this thread, such weapons
absolutely could not function without total computer control of the
ranging and targeting angle.
There are many good reasons why one would want a manual over-ride. The imagination of popular script writers is not one of them.