Comment Re:just a little bigger... (Score 1) 147
That said, if anyone with a knowledge of railguns wants to calculate(or test, be sure to record) exactly how lousy a salmon would be as ammunition, I'd read the hell out of it.
What about a rail gun salmon launcher? After they mate they are completely spent and become zombie fish. Hardly edible.
The engineering considerations surrounding such a device seem formidable indeed. Most of the data available are for humans(who, shockingly enough, have most of the medical budget dedicated to measuring delicate electrical signals through their muscle tissue); but if we assume that salmon tissue is approximately similar to human muscle, at least for the purposes of the currents and voltages a railgun implies, we can conclude that (A) the math is obnoxious. (B) fish are shitty conductors (C) fish have other obnoxious properties like 'capacitance' and non-homogenous conductivity.
Given the substantial resistance of our pisciform projectile, and the railgun's need for heroically high peak currents, supply voltage will have to be quite high, introducing additional insulation challenges, risks of air-gap breakdown between the rails, damaging arcs in other areas of the apparatus, and so on. Further issues may arise because of the projectile's non-uniform conductivity and substantial fluid content: with current flow, and resistive heating, highest along the most conductive regions, the projectile may exhibit substantial internal deformation, or even catastrophic loss of structural integrity, during acceleration or at a very early stage of flight. While it may have valuable specialty applications, this so-called 'frangible fish' effect markedly reduces effective range and almost entirely precludes survival of the projectile.
It is conceivable that advances in Aquatic-Preservation Discarding Sabot technology will allow a suitably packaged salmon to successfully traverse the accelerator rails while retaining the buoyancy necessary for continued survival by discarding the conductive jacket before entry into the target body of water. However, such developments are presently theoretical and cannot form the basis of a viable ecological dominance capability in the near term.
I suspect they protested at S. Lake Union because that is very close to downtown Seattle and an extremely visible location. Microsoft Campus in Redmond is in the in a much more suburban atmosphere, it would be much less of a visible protest there.
There's also the fact that the campus is likely mostly private land, while downtown areas tend to have public ways near them.
Depending on the local PD, your right to peaceable assembly may or may not be treated as adorably fictitious and/or a good chance to break out the cool 1033 program toys and play soldier; but you don't even have a theoretical one if you can just be rounded up for trespassing before things even start.
Trying to protest on MS's campus would just make it a question for PR of whether the visibility is lower for ignoring you and keeping the cameras away, or having you hauled off for trespassing before you make too much noise.
Life is a healthy respect for mother nature laced with greed.