Sunday, January 15, 2006

I told you the Steelers would win!

Two Hundred Thirtieth Post: I told you the Steelers would win!

The Steelers won! However it was too close with the Colts coming within 3 points. We almost lost it on Bettis’s fumble. The Colts didn’t stop when we were on the 1 yard line. Then after Big Ben tackled the guy, the Colts drove up the field to what seemed like an easy field goal. Too close for a game the Steelers controlled up until the last 5 minutes.

Two design things that I have been thinking about. I saw a website on how to make a Nerf gun. (http://nerfhaven.com/homemade/boltsniper_far/ ) . Here the builder converted an actual weapons construction into PVC pipe equivalents. He made a Nerf shooter. Looks like it took some time. What caught my eye was the schematics. They were saved as an Excel file. I didn’t know you could use Excel that way. Also interesting was an animation of the Nerf shooter. I don’t know what program was used for that.

But as long as we are on the subject in the Army we used to use a weaponier. The were a couple of varieties of weaponiers. Some were mechanical and used marked the paper where you aimed. But there was a cool weaponier. This one used a decoy rifle with actual sights and used the Super Nintendo machine to act as a computer to control the targets on the screen. It sighted itself based on the target grouping and had a variety of different modes from far targets, moving targets, to the actual Army regulation qualification course. The thing was awesome and a whole lot of fun. It was also portable with the biggest thing to move being the monitor. The only special equipment was the game cartridge and the light gun.

But what if those same principles where modded to work on a PC. The physics would just be basic mechanics focusing on the bullets trajectory. So where the soldier aimed factored in with the parabolic path of the round rising or dropping would be the main calculations. Seems like something that could hook up to a laptop. Sounds like a great open source project. Just something I am thinking about when I am trying to learn basic C++ programming. The math is easy, but the light gun construction and graphics program would be difficult. So until I watch the advanced C++ VTMs.... May the Creative Force be with You

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