/sci/ - Science & Math

>>16202497
SpaceX was always about missile defense, the Mars And Beyond! stuff was for the stupes

>The most novel feature of Brilliant Pebbles is its optical sensor, which was recently explained in a Livermore publication, Energy and Technology Review. It has a spherical focal plane, fiber optics and multiple charge-coupled devices, giving the compact, wide-angle camera extremely high resolution.
>''Elimination of the flat focal plane enables us to design optical systems capable of generating between one billion and 10 billion resolvable spots, hundreds of times better than the current state-of-the-art photographic lenses,'' the Livermore report said. For example, it noted that from an altitude of about 600 miles ''such a wide-field-of-view camera could image a land area the size of Virginia and resolve individual buildings.''
>The sensor's data would be digested by a computer about the size of a cigarette package that would, according to Dr. Wood of Livermore, would have the processing power of a Cray-1 super computer.
>Compact and smart, each weapon would be three feet long and weigh about 100 pounds, with its ''brains'' in a silicon chip said to be as powerful as a super computer and its ''eyes'' in an innovative wide-angle optical sensor. These devices would track the fiery exhaust of missiles and pick targets, eliminating much of the need for outside guidance from sensor satellites and ground stations.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160522000645/http://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/25/science/what-s-next-for-star-wars-brilliant-pebbles.html?pagewanted=2