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I told myself that I'd only bump this thread if I managed to actually get something cool and outdated, and I think I succeeded. 3-D Movies are certainly not a new fad, as we all know, but what you probably don't know is that everyone involved in Show Business has been trying to bring it back since it died off the first time.  The problem of course, is that Theatres were using Film, and so were extremely mechanical in nature. Making 3d Films look decent was *hard* and no one was really quite sure how to pull it off while still rolling 24 frames of plastic past a giant bulb. So the fad died for awhile until someone finally got this insane idea. What if instead of two whole projectors,as was the norm to this point, you simply take a normal frame of film and split it in half. One half becomes the left eye, the other becomes the right.  Ah, now suddenly two different reels of film don't have to be constantly kept in sync!(Back in the 50's, if one reel had to be spliced, you had to remove THE EXACT FRAMES on the opposite reel or the whole thing was hosed from that point on. 1950's De-Sync.) But the question now becomes, how do you get both images to overlap?  Mother loving Prisms. Ladies and Gentlemen, Meet The Polarator.   As you can clearly see, the giant loving behemoth shouldn't have ever been considered a good idea. Adding not only massive weight, but length and therefore possible torque to the end of the lens, The two prisms inside of the box would be alligned juuuust riiight so that your half frames would actually project over themselves.  Suddenly every projector in the late 60's were like modern day FPS guns, with these weird attachments slapped to the front of em. Beileve it or not, This worked for awhile up until about 83 or so. Then some massive Sci-Fi Movie that everyone was claiming was going to be Bigger Than Ten Super Bowls was released in 1983 and the whole fad died again.  This is where I come in. Sorta. Turns out only very few movies came out after Spacehunter nearly killed the gimmick. By that point, IMAX was hitting upon the idea of having Precisely Calculated 3-D Shots and no one wanted some schmuck in a booth rotating glass, so they started to hand these out to every theatre that got the few movies to use em. One of em was the 1985 Animated flick StarChaser: The Legend of Orin. Guess how I know this?  I gotta admit, being able to look at tech that's not just older than the building I found this in, but older than my parents, is kinda cool. The fact that this thing could technically still be used is even cooler. But unfortunately, this is likely the last year this can ever be said. Film isn't dead, but it's pretty much Non-Responsive. Almost every major theatre in the country is entirely digital, and anyone who was dragging their feet, simply got bought out or kicked out of their lease. No one who knows even the smallest thing about 35mm Film works at a major theatre. If they're lucky, there was a dollar theatre or an art-house where they could climb into their Gollum Hole, where they can be with their sound cues, and their splicers and their breakdown tables and their platters and motors and turrets and xenon rods and most importantly of all...  Their Preeeeecious...
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Feb 22, 2013 07:54
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The equipment wasn't really a problem as during the original run of 3D as auto-rewind platter systems had yet to be invented. All projection was changeover, and most projection booths by this point would have had 6k capability added. Just have an intermission at the hour point and you're done. What over/under 3D did help eliminate was issues of damage to one eye's print having to be replicated as you noted, also the cinemas that for whatever reason had lovely non-sync projectors that wouldn't keep speed.
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Feb 22, 2013 09:50
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dougie posted:We did spend ages trying to tune this thing in though.. I got that TV tuner despite living in a place where there was one over-the-air channel at best, and only when it was not raining - which is not very often. Didn't know how TV worked at the time. 
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Feb 22, 2013 12:36
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Dick Trauma posted:When I was a little kid in the early 1970s the schooldesks all had a hole in the top. It was years later that I found out they were for placing one's inkwell. We were all using pencils and ballpoint or felt tip pens by then. I use an old one of these as my TV stand actually! The DVR goes in the cubby and I use the inkwell hole for the HDMI cable. And there's an additional shelf complete with hooks from when my PS1 lived there.
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Mar 31, 2013 07:07
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lots of people posted:stuff about using PC speaker for sampled audio The comments about it taking over your CPU are accurate, but I don't think it's because the CPU was working hard, it was more that it tied up the CPU up with IO stuff (causing it to freeze up in similar fashion to what would happen not so long ago whenever you inserted a CD). I remember having a badly labeled wav file which was a rather low quality recording of the song "Bad to the Bone", I remember this because I would sometimes accidentally open it wondering what it was, then immediately regret doing so: playing any long audio file using that driver was a commitment, because for the duration of any sound the inputs from mouse and keyboard could not be read (even ctrl-alt-del did nothing), and even though my Toshiba T3100SX was slow - yanking power and batteries (NI-CAD beasts) and rebooting was quicker than waiting for that song to finish. Ron Burgundy posted:Protip: It's the same tape.
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Mar 31, 2013 12:13
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Astroman posted:Yeah, this is true. drat death of analog tv. I tried to find a picture of the TV but I can't remember the brand or model and infact I can't even find many of similar form factor (kinda like an oscilloscope).
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Apr 1, 2013 02:25
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Though if I could find an old Nintendo that had a VHF adaptor I could hold the contacts up to the antenna of the tv and play sweet, tiny Nintendo.
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Fuzz1111 posted:I did this with a portable 2" CRT black and white TV and an original atari 2600 (the one with wood panelling and 6 switches). Only long enough to prove that it could work mind you as the TV took no less than 12 D size cells and ate through them fast. http://uv201.com/TV_Pages/panasonic_tr001.htm this is the closest thing I can think of with such a small CRT and not as portable as a Sony Watchman. Maybe this http://www.guenthoer.de/doku/werbung-sinclairmtv1-bradshaw.jpg Anything from here: http://www.guenthoer.de/e-history.htm ? What happened to it?
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Apr 1, 2013 02:31
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DNova posted:...What happened to it?  But it looked more late 80's / early 90's and the handle worked more like this:  I remember that the handle sat more flush to the bottom, and when rotated to the position shown in that image could be pushed in to lock it in place. The battery pack was a separate module that could be attached to the bottom, it had a short cord and connected to the same 5.5mm DC jack that the AC/DC brick connected to. What happened to it? After a year or so when first powered up it would display the scan lines with a space between them (stretching the image), or as a single line (squashing it). At first this could be corrected with a combination of letting it warm up, cycling its power and/or a firm slap, but eventually that stopped working and after 11 year old me opened it up (after leaving power disconnected for a week like my mum insisted) and failed to fix it via tinkering it was put in my parts bin and eventually junked. I still have the battery pack at my parents, will post if I ever find out more about it.
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Apr 1, 2013 03:30
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Oh wow, my parent's had this exact TV in their bedroom when I was younger. They mostly used it as a radio, but sometimes I'd watch Saturday morning cartoons in all its black and white glory.
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Apr 1, 2013 04:48
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Arrath posted:Oh wow, my parent's had this exact TV in their bedroom when I was younger. They mostly used it as a radio, but sometimes I'd watch Saturday morning cartoons in all its black and white glory. We used to have one in our old conversion Van. When I was a kid, I used to think that having a TV in car/van was the coolest thing ever. Until I put an NES in there. Then I thought that that was the coolest thing ever.
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Apr 1, 2013 15:00
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I can't even find a picture of one, but every time I open the arm rest on our 97 Mercedes E320, I feel a sense of disappointment that you can't activate analog call phones anymore.
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Apr 1, 2013 19:21
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I was looking for a replacement for my 2006 Accord's boring in-dash GPS the other day, and I stumbled upon this beauty:  The first commercially available car navigation system, the Honda/Alpine Electro Gyro-Cator (god, the name alone) cost way too much for many people to pop for it and was available in Japan only. The coolest part is that it wasn't even a GPS - the engineering behind it was actually an utterly brilliant, comparatively simple design. You can briefly see it in action in this video - it's actually funny how utterly "lo-fi" it is, basically a little transparency projector like in elementary school. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOqig8rixOU My Dad and I would have killed for this thing on our camping trips back in the eighties!
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Apr 1, 2013 19:21
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GWBBQ posted:I can't even find a picture of one, but every time I open the arm rest on our 97 Mercedes E320, I feel a sense of disappointment that you can't activate analog call phones anymore. There's got to be a way to put modern phone guts into that, or a bluetooth receiver and use the handset as a headset.
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Apr 1, 2013 19:43
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It would be pretty trivial to just take a bluetooth headset and connect the earpiece and microphone wires to the earpiece and mic in the handset. Maybe throw in a simple amplifier if needed.
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Apr 1, 2013 19:55
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I am going to do that, but I want to wire it up so it keeps the headset charged and the keypad on the handset works so it'll take some work. I'd also kind of like to either program a microcontroller to emulate the original phone and get the speed dial console in the dashboard working or just gut the thing and use the original LCD and buttons.
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Apr 1, 2013 21:22
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If you're subscribed to this thread you'd probably like Computer Chronicles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_lG8_2UwBU It ran from 1981 to 2002. Apparently. I'm from Ireland so I'd never heard of it, I don't even remember how I found it on Youtube, but there's loads of full episodes. The biggest eye opener for me was probably the episode about Windows 95. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arsaN7xSWnQ I remember when Windows 95 came out, it was what convinced my dad to switch from Macs to PCs - but until I watched this I didn't realize just how revolutionary it was. Windows still basically uses all of the features that debuted in Win95. The earlier episodes are a bit dry, the really good stuff for me was the early web era of 95-98. Nostalgia overload.
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Apr 2, 2013 09:10
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Just in case you weren't aware, they host the MPEG2 files on archive.org
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Apr 2, 2013 09:51
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I don't like to see this thread die, so here's some stuff from the back of the garage at work. Hmmm. should be a gold mine.    An old school surveyor's steel band. Electromagnetic distance measuring equipment (Infrared beam  ) came available early in the 1970s but holdouts still used them up till the end of the 1980s.They replaced the heavier brass chains that must have been a pain in the arse to carry. You had to get a certain temperature coefficient and keep the correct tension on the chain when measuring. What's in the first case?   A Wild T1a theodolite.  This is a pretty typical surveyor's instrument, probably dating from around the  View through the main scope, this van is parked about 5m away.  The cool thing about old school instruments is that they needed no batteries. To get your readings you adjusted the mirror on the side to reflect onto the scale inside, then looked into the small secondary scope to read off the scale itself.  Best photo I could get through the reading scope. When I was at tech one of our projects was to do a series of measurements without using the aforementioned EDM equipment. The instruments supplied were pieces of poo poo(Vickers armstrong armanents co., anyone?) but a coworker suggested I use this one. Even after at least 12 years in the box, our measurements came out perfect. Too Perfect. We fudged our readings to become worse because part of the project was to demonstrate error adjustment calculations. 
Jaguars! has a new favorite as of 12:06 on May 1, 2013 |
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May 1, 2013 11:58
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How about some failed technology that was never built, but could have been: Project Orion! The nuclear battleship. Ahem, the nuclear space battleship.  "Project Rho posted:When the Orion nuclear pulse propulsion concept was being developed, the researchers at General Atomic were interested in an interplanetary research vessel. But the US Air Force was not. They thought the 4,000 ton version of the Orion would be rightsized for an interplanetary warship, armed to the teeth. And when they said armed, they meant ARMED. It had enough nuclear bombs to devastate an entire continent (500 twenty-megaton city-killer warheads), 5-inch Naval cannon turrets, six hypersonic landing boats, and the dreaded Casaba Howitzer, which is basically a ray gun that shoots nuclear flame (the technical term is "nuclear shaped charge"). 
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May 1, 2013 12:50
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Here's a documentary about the Orion project, the link to the video is for when they tested a scale model with conventional explosives. http://youtu.be/v4k_YZAXSEI?t=42m40s
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May 1, 2013 22:01
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The Orion drive has some of the best names I've ever heard. Phased Nuclear Pulse Propulsion Eepy Peepy (Pronounced form of E.P.P.P., External Plasma Pulse Propulsion) Externally Metered Pulse Drive Expulse Drive, compressed form of the above. The Shitpants Machine (named for what politicians would do if you asked for all the nukes to make one)
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May 2, 2013 20:48
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Jerry Pournell's "Footfall" featured a spacecraft with that drive.
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May 3, 2013 05:41
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Fuzz1111 posted:Sorry to bring this subject back up but I didn't see this detail mentioned: there was an audio driver for windows 3.1 (and apparently there were versions that would work up to win98) that allowed the PC speaker to be used as a soundcard, as in, that's exactly how windows saw it and you could play your wav files and hear sound effects in all windows games..... As long as the audio involved was 8bit mono with a sampling rate of 8khz or less. Quite correct about it tying up all inputs etc. I remember in computer class (running 3.11 with pc speakers and this driver) making the startup sound on someone we especially hated about 10 mins long (thanks to soundrec half speed option used many times). Was lots of fun to watch him getting more frustrated at it making a god awful drone while not responding to anything he did, pressing reset in frustration and then having it do it all over again.
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May 5, 2013 04:16
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ol qwerty bastard posted:How about some failed technology that was never built, but could have been: I've always had a soft spot for rho, but I can't wait to see a type of site like it made in 20 years that includes all the changes and developments in technology we've had over the past 30 years. A lot of it will probably stay the same but my hope is it won't be written by someone who wears a pocket protector
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May 5, 2013 07:51
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So my dad was an electronics salesman for Mitsubishi the entirety of his 20s, and even afterwards he had many friends 'in the biz'. As such we ended up getting a lot of ridiculous household electronics throughout the 80s and 90s. Some choice ones I remember (but sadly no longer possess): The Mitsubishi VisiTel  My dad actually got a pre-market pair of these in 1989 or so from a friend of his. Retailing for $800/pair, they were dumb, not video (they sent grainy black and white stills), and both persons had to have a unit hooked up to the exact phone you were calling, which effectively made them a DOA product. They rotted in my basement for a few years until I dug them out around 1992 and gave one to a friend who lived down the block. Even for a pair of bored 9-year olds, sending pictures via phone can get old pretty fast, esp if those pictures are only of your face/surroundings. I did hook it up a reeled spool of telephone cable we happened to have though, and went around the house taking pictures of stuff. The Hitachi K-1100   This was actually a pretty neat little 5.5" B/W portable TV. IIRC, it ran off of either a small-type AC cable (like those found on boomboxes and the like), or on 9 D-cell batteries, which would last ~6 hours (I was like 9 or 10 again, so maybe less/more). It didn't have a co-ax port, so your could only get over the air signals, or hook up an RF to co-ax dongle to get cable/VCR/consoles on it. I often would use it to play SNES after hours in my room, or to stay in bed and watch Tail Spin when I was sick. The Mitsubishi VS507R   For a slightly better look at how the unit appears when open, here's a pic of the VE522R, a later housed model:  Unquestionably, this TV was my dad's pride and joy. This was the reason we by default hosted Super Bowl parties, boxing fights, and Wrestlemanias (or Summer Slams, Royal Rumbles, etc). Priced somewhere well over $5000 in 1983, he picked it up for a song at a tech conference as a show model at the end of its tour run. There are very few good pictures of this TV on the web. Typically, one of the three RGB bulbs would burn out every 5-6 years, and he would have to pay ~$400 bucks just to get it replaced every time. This thing was kept in service until 2006 (and it was still 100% functional), so it was likely well worth the money. For those interested in the mechanics, it was a ~55" (4:3) front-projection TV. The 3 bulbs at the bottom of the centre console would project red, green, and blue versions of the picture onto a large mirror that was suspended in front of them and angled up towards the screen, where they would recombine to form a surprisingly sharp image (though, you needed a good tech to calibrate the bulbs, or else after a replacement you would have a mad dad and a guy would show up in house to dick with it). The mirror housing was attached to the main unit by 2 hydraulic arms, and could fold up to make an incredibly heavy central console. The screen was removable by taking off a few large bolts. IIRC the inputs were 2xRF, 2xCOAX, and a whopping 3xRCA. There was also 2xRCA out for whatever multitude of 80s sound amps you would have hooked into it, as well as totally for real actual quadraphonic speaker outs, since it had a built in amplifier. I am completely unsure of it's ohmage and wattage however. Grraarrgghh has a new favorite as of 19:20 on May 5, 2013 |
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May 5, 2013 19:18
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TommorowComesToday posted:The Mitsubishi VS507R I remember an ad for something like this TV in an old National Geographic from 1980. I even remember it was some dude in a leather chair making GBS threads himself because a pirate on TV had a parrot that had flown off the screen into the man's living room implying the TV produced "life-like pictures that will look like they're in the room with you!" And the pirate on TV is all like   I've seen those color mirror projection TVs in action and they are quite sharp in the image department, but the ones I remember were giant console furniture TVs with plastic screens. You know, those '80s rear projection screens that aimed at the plastic screen and made crude images. I always thought (even as a kid) that they blew rear end and had terrible pictures. These things:  You had to be front and center and not a millimeter off from the exact dead center of the screen to see anything, because otherwise all you were going to see was black moving things if you were off to the side. They had a really dark and dim picture, and I remember you couldn't leave a VCR or video game on pause for more than a minute because the fear was that it would damage the bulbs and screen with burn-in. My friend had one when I was a kid, and he insisted that BIGGER = BETTER when it came to playing NES on it. Okay, so at the time I had this 19" Zenith TV from the early 70s that I had to hook the RF modulator to with one of these:  That is ubiquitous with 1970s and earlier TV sets and the then recent 1980s technology, and man, that TV had an awesome picture when playing NES on it. So what I was seeing on my old rear end TV with my NES looked like this:  Looked like this on my friend's 46" piece of poo poo TV with the same game:  gently caress my childhood friend, and gently caress those old school big screen projection TVs. I mean, the technology did get better because the early 2000s HDTVs with the same technology look mighty fine, but the early technology just sucked really bad and didn't account for BIGGER = BETTER at all.
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May 5, 2013 20:43
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You Are A Elf posted:I remember an ad for something like this TV in an old National Geographic from 1980. I even remember it was some dude in a leather chair making GBS threads himself because a pirate on TV had a parrot that had flown off the screen into the man's living room implying the TV produced "life-like pictures that will look like they're in the room with you!" And the pirate on TV is all like OK I tried to not to sperg out after TomorrowComesToday's post but now I can't help it anymore. First of all, those oldschool front- and rear-projection televisions use three small (5-10 inch) CRTs - one each of red, blue, and green - that run at extremely high brightness levels (relatively) to make the image. Not "bulbs." Sorry, I know that's pedantic. But yes, they were extremely susceptible to burn-in because of the high intensity that was required to throw enough light to make a passable image. Some of them were actually liquid-cooled. Second, The rear-projection HDTVs of the early 2000s did NOT use the same technology - not even close. They used one of DLP or LCoS or LCDs to form the images and white light from a small metal halide lamp for illumination. Finally, TomorrowComesToday, it's really too bad you don't still have some of that stuff still. What happened to it? Some of it would be worth a decent amount to collectors today.
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May 5, 2013 22:38
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I'm glad you did the sperging because I wanted to so, so badly. Those tiny CRTs are actually liquid cooled, yeah. They have a reservoir of some sort of viscous (about like vegetable oil) clear fluid and a second glass pane right across the front and heatsinks mounted all the way around the edges. This is so the high intensity electron beam (which draws the picture on the colored phosphor screen so it can be projected via a series of lenses and mirrors onto the viewing screen) doesn't literally burn holes in the phosphor coating. Even so you have to be careful to turn the brightness down while calibrating them, else the calibration pattern will burn lines in it. 15 year old me had way too much fun pulling one of those TVs apart. No one will miss those things, bulky, dim, and horrible as they were. The lenses in them are awesome for burning ants and setting things on fire in the driveway, by the way.
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May 5, 2013 22:43
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DNova posted:First of all, those oldschool front- and rear-projection televisions use three small (5-10 inch) CRTs - one each of red, blue, and green - that run at extremely high brightness levels (relatively) to make the image. Not "bulbs." Sorry, I know that's pedantic. But yes, they were extremely susceptible to burn-in because of the high intensity that was required to throw enough light to make a passable image. Some of them were actually liquid-cooled. I don't mind the  . I guess it was my bad to neglect the distinction. The fact that they were CRTs was endlessly neat to a little kid however, as I would often just (destroy my corneas) gaze directly into the bulb and laugh at Galaxy High or something BUT IN VARIOUS SHADES OF RED.There's a few more wonky oddities he owned that I will post, but I'm still trying to find pictures to go with the words.
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May 5, 2013 23:56
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DNova posted:Second, The rear-projection HDTVs of the early 2000s did NOT use the same technology - not even close. They used one of DLP or LCoS or LCDs to form the images and white light from a small metal halide lamp for illumination.
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May 6, 2013 00:48
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DNova posted:OK I tried to not to sperg out after TomorrowComesToday's post but now I can't help it anymore. I'm sorry, I grew up poor and didn't see many big-screen TVs or even an HDTV until I was given my first 720p HDTV in 2006. Until then, I was using used CRTs. I have virtually no idea about the inner workings of large projection TVs, but I really meant the burn-in happened, not that it was a myth. People would just yell at you "DON'T PAUSE IT TOO LONG OR YOU'LL BURN THE IMAGE IN!  " all the time, so you listened. I used to take apart old broken CRTs as a kid and found the inner workings fascinating since there were these Radio Shack comics I used to collect and read about how electronics work. Oh, and those comics were and are still boss.By all means sperg away if someone's incorrect, but it's not really so much pendantic as it is condescending when you put "bulbs" in parentheses. Just say it didn't use bulbs to correct me instead of "'bulbs', heh  " When you're a small kid and only see a projection TV like the ones I'm talking about maybe twice in your short childhood life, then try to remember back to how they worked, those miniature CRT screens sure do look like a red, green, and blue stage light v v
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May 6, 2013 02:28
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An HDTV in 2006 made you an early adopter rather than a "poor" didn't it? edit: unless you're counting 480p as HDTV? I got an HDTV for the launch of the xbox 360 and that was before I could even get HD channels in my area (without satellite). I was the first HDTV owner of anyone I knew. I was also installing high end home theatre for a living at the time... although this is in Canada and we can lag a bit behind sometimes. My first HDTV was a lovely "semi flat" thing that weighed about 200lbs. I ended up returning it and trying another one about three times since the picture quality at Best Buy was very different from what I saw on my non-HD cable. Visa called me up to ask what the hell was going on. UnfortunateSexFart has a new favorite as of 02:51 on May 6, 2013 |
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May 6, 2013 02:48
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leidend posted:An HDTV in 2006 made you an early adopter rather than a "poor" didn't it? edit: unless you're counting 480p as HDTV? I remember going to Best Buy around the beginning of the millennium and seeing the first HDTVs for sale. Six years down the road from 2000 isn't exactly adopting to new technology early. Weren't those very early sets upwards of $6,000 to $10,000? I remember they were a ridiculous price at the time. But nah, a family friend won it in a raffle, but since she already had two HDTVs (she rich and shows it off with the newest expensive things), she gave it to me as payment for working on her car. That was nice of her, even though the TV died a year and a half later. I was expecting money to, you know, pay for things that needed paying, though. Still honestly poor.
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May 6, 2013 03:58
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My brother had one of those giant rear-projection TVs when I was growing up, and while looking back the picture was awful, at the time my young mind fixated on HOLY gently caress GIANT NES LOOKS AWESOME I think that's what established my love for giant displays. First thing I bought when I moved into my house [and thus had the room] was my projector. No other furniture was in the home theater room, just the projector and my PC and me sitting on the ground next to it. 
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May 6, 2013 04:12
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HDTVs are really old tech. I mean, the BBC had them in 1936.
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May 6, 2013 04:41
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I can't seem to find any of those old comic book ads for the kit with the cardboard box and Fresnel lens that boasted the ability to make any TV into a giant screen projector, but it'd fit here.
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May 6, 2013 04:48
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I saw an example of something posted in this thread waay back. I was out at a flea market and saw a stack of something in the corner. Seemed like I had seen them before. Found me a stack of Video-discs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videodisc Essentially movies on vinyl, read with a needle in a plastic shell. Neat to find,never seen any in the wild before but essentially worthless. Even Star wars is only like 10 bucks on Ebay, and these were like 9 to 5, Gladiator, Heaven can wait, and some other forgettable 70's movies.
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May 6, 2013 05:03
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I was messing around the other day with putting Blood Dragon through an old mac Monitor. Windows 8 is surprisingly scalable.
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May 6, 2013 05:21
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WebDog posted:I was messing around the other day with putting Blood Dragon through an old mac Monitor. Windows 8 is surprisingly scalable. Well, to be fair, Windows 8 is a failed technology that's arguably already obsolete because Windows 7's more user-friendly.
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May 6, 2013 06:36
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ol qwerty bastard posted:How about some failed technology that was never built, but could have been: This also requires us to mention one of the worst nuclear-age ideas ever, and here I'm talking about one of the very worst ideas from an age full of very bad ideas: Project Pluto - the nuclear ramjet cruise missile. Basically, with 1950s technology, you design a ramjet powered not by burning jet fuel but by passing air through an unshielded nuclear reactor core. It's a robotic craft so you don't have to worry about any crew (presumably they intended to launch the drat thing with strap-on solid-fuel boosters or something). Fucker can cruise along at low altitude and high speed for months, spewing radiation everywhere, and may have a payload of a bunch of thermonuclear bombs which it drops at pre-programmed points. Then eventually it fails/crashes/melts down (over enemy territory, presumably). This was fortunately never built either, but they did get as far as building and testing a prototype of the engine before someone had the sense to cancel the drat thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto
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May 6, 2013 08:00
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