Rhinocrates
ACCESS: Top Secret
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- 26 September 2006
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Watching a documentary on QAnon recently, I thought that a thread on deliberately deceptive designs and disinformation might be interesting. This ranges from psyops to scams. I suppose a sort of taxonomy could be devised that would frame the content.
First, what I don't mean:
Genuinely misunderstood projects. E.g., the MiG-25. Thought by Western analysts to be an air-superiority fighter, it was actually a very specialised interceptor. The Soviets apparently thought that the shuttle could be used to bomb Moscow.
Black projects. Aurora et al. Highly secret with extensive mythologies around them that may or may not exist. Likewise Nazi wonderweapons. They're discussed elsewhere.
Pranks, April Fools' Day etc. They're meant to be unveilled as hoaxes and exist only to amuse.
Cranks and cults. UFOs, perpetual motion machines etc.
'Hmmm, that's funny...' Rather than 'Eureka!' most scientific discoveries start with intriguing discrepancies in the data - and so do many failures. Examples include cold fusion and the EM drive. Resources are devoted to investigating them, but if they're wrong, the mistake was sincere. No conspiracy theories about how they really worked and were covered up please.
Spherical cows. Mathematically perfect, but zero thought given to real world engineering. I remember coming across a 'Single-Stage-to-Saturn' spaceplane design somewhere. Apparently it was made of unobtainium and the fusion engine was perfectly efficient with no waste heat. Again, sincerely mistaken or simply thought experiments. I would include warp drives and wormholes in this category. Thought experiments have been great generators of ideas in science that have gone on to have more tangible applications, but these are distant from the thought experiment itself. For example, Albert Einstein imagining what it would be like to ride a beam of light led to special and then general relativity, which have had real applications.
Money pits and price gouging. There's an F-35 NEWS ONLY thread for a reason.
What I do mean:
Dr Strangelove, I presume? Actually these might have worked, but there was a lot of opportunism and skullduggery involved. Prime example: Gerald Bull. Now there's a story!
Acme Corporation. Starts off with probably sincere intentions, but when technical problems mount and the money runs out, rather than shutting up shop, people get desperate and start telling a few little fibs, then giant porkies or selling coke to keep the investors paying until all the bugs are ironed out. There are many, many examples of this. SPAC seems to be the latest means of grabbing quick money for troubled projects. There's a fuzzy boundary where this shades into outright fraud. In motor vehicles, Faraday Future and Nikola have been known to indulge in a few misrepresentations and are now chasing SPAC for funding. De Lorean and the cocaine dealing certainly counts. Mars One too, perhaps. Almost certainly a lot of eVTOL companies. The interesting narrative for me here is the transition from idealistic dreamer to crook.
Hold out your hats and let the money fall in. OK, I'm on thin ice here by implying fraudulent behaviour. Let's call it symbiosis. A department has to spend its budget or lose it, so certain opportunists circle about and give PowerPoints with a design that isn't even half-baked. They don't even have the ingredients, but they did get a retired and bored engineer to say it looks cool. Look! Here's the website! <Cough> Exosonic? <cough>
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. 'Whoopee! We've got this great source of intelligence! Oh shit...' In the early days of stealth, nobody knew what the 'stealth fighter' would look like, or the bomber. Curvaceous speculative designs started turning up. Some at least seem to have been deliberately promulgated to throw spies off the trail that led to the actual angular designs. Plenty of examples, since deception, concealment and diversion are key to the art of war.
Outright scams. Pretty obviously intended to separate fools from their money with no intention of producing anything. Compared to others, these are almost boring.
Red mercury. My favourite. A scam on the crooks. It seemed so attractive to illicit arms dealers and governments trying to get around embargoes on WMDs. It looks like someone was trying and perhaps succeeding in making a killing by selling them something that looked like it might give them an edge. Probably in the last days of the Soviet Union a few officers and soon-to-be oligarchs might have been offering the odd nuclear weapon for sale. Nukes however are real, while red mercury is the direct descendent of alchemical gold.
Please, please, pretty please with a cherry on top, do NOT allege criminal behaviour where no charges have been reasonably proven. We've all been told about copyright and intellectual property. Similar principles apply for libel and defamation. Don't be like Rudy.
First, what I don't mean:
Genuinely misunderstood projects. E.g., the MiG-25. Thought by Western analysts to be an air-superiority fighter, it was actually a very specialised interceptor. The Soviets apparently thought that the shuttle could be used to bomb Moscow.
Black projects. Aurora et al. Highly secret with extensive mythologies around them that may or may not exist. Likewise Nazi wonderweapons. They're discussed elsewhere.
Pranks, April Fools' Day etc. They're meant to be unveilled as hoaxes and exist only to amuse.
Cranks and cults. UFOs, perpetual motion machines etc.
'Hmmm, that's funny...' Rather than 'Eureka!' most scientific discoveries start with intriguing discrepancies in the data - and so do many failures. Examples include cold fusion and the EM drive. Resources are devoted to investigating them, but if they're wrong, the mistake was sincere. No conspiracy theories about how they really worked and were covered up please.
Spherical cows. Mathematically perfect, but zero thought given to real world engineering. I remember coming across a 'Single-Stage-to-Saturn' spaceplane design somewhere. Apparently it was made of unobtainium and the fusion engine was perfectly efficient with no waste heat. Again, sincerely mistaken or simply thought experiments. I would include warp drives and wormholes in this category. Thought experiments have been great generators of ideas in science that have gone on to have more tangible applications, but these are distant from the thought experiment itself. For example, Albert Einstein imagining what it would be like to ride a beam of light led to special and then general relativity, which have had real applications.
Money pits and price gouging. There's an F-35 NEWS ONLY thread for a reason.
What I do mean:
Dr Strangelove, I presume? Actually these might have worked, but there was a lot of opportunism and skullduggery involved. Prime example: Gerald Bull. Now there's a story!
Acme Corporation. Starts off with probably sincere intentions, but when technical problems mount and the money runs out, rather than shutting up shop, people get desperate and start telling a few little fibs, then giant porkies or selling coke to keep the investors paying until all the bugs are ironed out. There are many, many examples of this. SPAC seems to be the latest means of grabbing quick money for troubled projects. There's a fuzzy boundary where this shades into outright fraud. In motor vehicles, Faraday Future and Nikola have been known to indulge in a few misrepresentations and are now chasing SPAC for funding. De Lorean and the cocaine dealing certainly counts. Mars One too, perhaps. Almost certainly a lot of eVTOL companies. The interesting narrative for me here is the transition from idealistic dreamer to crook.
Hold out your hats and let the money fall in. OK, I'm on thin ice here by implying fraudulent behaviour. Let's call it symbiosis. A department has to spend its budget or lose it, so certain opportunists circle about and give PowerPoints with a design that isn't even half-baked. They don't even have the ingredients, but they did get a retired and bored engineer to say it looks cool. Look! Here's the website! <Cough> Exosonic? <cough>
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. 'Whoopee! We've got this great source of intelligence! Oh shit...' In the early days of stealth, nobody knew what the 'stealth fighter' would look like, or the bomber. Curvaceous speculative designs started turning up. Some at least seem to have been deliberately promulgated to throw spies off the trail that led to the actual angular designs. Plenty of examples, since deception, concealment and diversion are key to the art of war.
Outright scams. Pretty obviously intended to separate fools from their money with no intention of producing anything. Compared to others, these are almost boring.
Red mercury. My favourite. A scam on the crooks. It seemed so attractive to illicit arms dealers and governments trying to get around embargoes on WMDs. It looks like someone was trying and perhaps succeeding in making a killing by selling them something that looked like it might give them an edge. Probably in the last days of the Soviet Union a few officers and soon-to-be oligarchs might have been offering the odd nuclear weapon for sale. Nukes however are real, while red mercury is the direct descendent of alchemical gold.
Please, please, pretty please with a cherry on top, do NOT allege criminal behaviour where no charges have been reasonably proven. We've all been told about copyright and intellectual property. Similar principles apply for libel and defamation. Don't be like Rudy.
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