i was wondering that myself.

the wikipedia article on water landing lists about 30 commercial airplanes that either had to ditch or in some other way ended up in the water.

at least 2 of the planes didn't have any floatation devices at all.
and apparently this flight is what started all the safety demonstrations for over-water flights. because a bunch of passengers died after they panicked and refused to leave the plane after it had to ditch in the ocean ocean..

though i don't really see how safety training would have made much of a difference for that, as i don't recall it normally covering rough seas or sharks.

apparently the bigger threat to the A10 was flame-out of the engines due to the exhaust from the gun depriving them of oxygen. This had happened while in testing and so they had to add internal igniters to the engine that fire when the gun is fired to keep the engines burning.

so the idea is you send the platform towards the target from long distance to keep yourself safe. it is primarily un-powered and just coasting so the enemy can't detect additional heat or radiation from your thrusters to give away that the platform is coming. when it gets close it swivels with the gyros to correct any aim towards the target, which may have moved since you sent the platform, but hopefully now you are much closer to the target, and they have much less time to react. It then fires its gun. if the target is directly in front of you, then using your math you get a good about 1k shots off before you stop relative to the target. however even after that the velocity of your rounds are still sufficient to cause damage, and maybe you can fire an additional 500 rounds that are still lethal. the last of which would be traveling around 500m/s towards the target, of course this is all ignoring the loss of weight due to the ammo being fired

even if the target is directly to your side relative to your direction of movement you can probably get a good 500 shots off towards it at potentially lethal velocity. if on the other hand you have passed the target before you fire, then it is too late and there is possibly no point in firing as your rounds would not reach the target. so you just need to make sure you fire before this.

oops, i guess i missed this part "but the complete weapon, with feed system and drum, weighs 4,029 pounds (1,828 kg)"

so the platform would might have to be up to 5k to 6k kg, which is around the size of a geostationary communication satellite.
but would then allow us to fire off 7k to 9k rounds before we stop the platform. the GAU-8 fires at 3900rpm, so this is only a 2 to 3 second burst.

the GAU-8 fires a 0.69 kg round at a muzzle velocity of 990 m/s, the gun itself weighs 280kg we will use that as a starting point. according to a random website a "medium sized satellite" would be around 1000kg so lets use that for an estimate to the size of our entire thing to include electronics and such. so if my math is right each round fired would add about 0.683m/s of backwards velocity to the platform. say the platform was traveling towards the target at around 1000 m/s in the begining then you could fire off around 1500 rounds before the platform comes to a dead stop relative to the target. and the first rounds you fired would be traveling nearly 2k m/s towards the target.

Clearly the only way to resolve this argument would be for the USAF to let us borrow an A10 and fire the gun! not entirely sure what it would prove, but it would be fun.

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what is your point? if you have gyros to control orientation and aim you probably have computers and some sensors to aim. the gun platform is now much closer to the target than the original ship from where you had launched it, so it should also be much easier to hit the target now. the target will also have less time to react to the projectile and move out of the way now.

this is already a solved problem. we already do it on earth with patriot missile system. and some of the targets they take down are moving faster than they do.

umm...so you mean just like you see in the movies where the guy shooting the gun gets thrown across the room, just like the guy he shot at?

the gun platform will already have velocity towards the target. all it is doing is getting in closer to the intended target, correcting the aim, and then shooting a projectile smaller than itself. (bonus points if the platform itself also hits the target, but this isn't needed). yes there will be some kickback when you fire, but it doesn't necessarily matter since you don't care if the platform itself hits. you already have velocity towards the target any more you can add to the projectile is a bonus. in addition you could either add extra mass to the platform to help counteract this kick, or add rockets to it that fire off just before you fire the projectile so that you can impart the most velocity possible into the projectile towards the target.

and actually it might be good to calculate the charge so that once the projectile is fired, it takes all forward momentum away from the gun platform relative to the target and parks it right in front of the enemy, just being a nuisance in their way. though you would probably want to fry the electronics so they can't easily reload it and send it back.

i would imagine the "missile" would contain gyroscopes so it can change orientation without using thrusters. For bonus points you could even make it look like a natural meteoroid, then when it gets close to its target it, it uses the gyroscopes to aim towards the target and can fire off a bunch of smaller projectiles designed to pierce the target's hull.

the radiation from thrusters is what is most likely to give you away, so this eliminates them entirely.

oops nevermind, guess i need my eyes checked. thought you had said take away their slashdot accounts.

That is just harsh, they will be mocked mercilessly when they have an 8 digit slashdot ID because you didn't let them signup for slashdot.

Seems the better edict would have been to have everyone change the color of their shirt.

"Hey these red shirts seem to anger aliens and make people clumsy, so lets start wearing green shirts instead!"

I don't know.

many Access project start like yours but then the business outgrows it, but then by the time you realize that you are then stuck with Access and have nowhere to go as it is doing all of your business logic and has turned into a monster.

  we originally moved everything to PHP and MYSQL, but have since converted most things to Java and MSSQL, with a little bit of C# here or there.

Our path probably isn't too helpful to you. i work for a university primarily developing internal applications. The majority of our decisions on what platforms to use are made based on what our slave labor (students workers) are capable of doing, so this is probably not necessarily what would work best for most businesses. The students may be cheap but they have extremely high turnover, as we can't keep them after they graduate. To be fair we do pay them and this is one of the highest paid student jobs available on campus. we have a short time to train them and get them productive before they leave, we have to work around their class schedules during the school year so we only get them part time, and considering they are still taking their CS classes they often know little to nothing when we get them. considering those limitations, i think we do quite well and the students that work for us get some valuable work experience that has helped them start their career after graduation.

I used to do Foxpro, it at least paid for my education. i would still pick it over MS Access on most days. we long ago converted everything out of foxpro and had never allowed anything that uses Access.

my favorite little side project that i had worked on in my free time was a sort of foxpro VM written in foxpro...yeah everyone thought i was crazy.

There is nothing wrong with them charging worldwide for their content, but using geolocation as your only means of authenticating whether the user has already paid is rather braindead.

the point i am trying to make is that it takes more than one scientist to be "right". science is about repeatability. it takes multiple scientists repeating an experiment to advance our knowledge. if no one can repeat it, then that original scientist must have been wrong. When you have multiple scientist repeat an experiment and come to the same conclusion isn't that a consensus?

also there are any number of reasons that others may not be willing or able to repeat an experiment. if the subject matter is too controversial or had major hoaxes which dried up funding, such as maybe cold fusion for example, then even if someone does find something it is possible no one would be willing to verify those experiments as they may either view it as a waste of time or just bad for their reputation to be associated with looking into something that is so controversial and everyone "KNOWS" is wrong. it took a long time for the stigma around cold fusion to die down enough that scientists would begin looking at it again without fear of it being a black mark on their careers. now i am not saying i believe in cold fusion, just that it is an example where controversy can stop other scientists from conducting research into that subject.