U238 (depleted uranium) reactor

Depleted Uranium, its heavy, its hard to dispose of, it makes good armor piercing shells, and we have piles of it sitting around from nuclear reactors and mines waiting to be processed. Despite us having so much of the stuff, the fact that it is unsuitable for use as weapons grade fissile material resultes in research into its potential limited to it being incorperated into anti-tank rounds, and the fact that this stuff has the potential to power a reactor seems to have slipped the scientific community until now.
A reactor burning depleted uranium cannot produce any weapons grade material, we can just build one and shove it over to Iran and say "look, this stuff burns cheaper fuel, gives more power, has almost no risk of a catastropic meltdown no matter how incompetent your operators are, and is way better in every respect except that you cant make a bomb with it. If your nuclear intentions are peaceful, replace your reactors with this."
As for the reactor design itself, there is already one being looked into called a traveling wave reactor which will use enriched uranium to start a self sustaining reaction in a field of depleted uranium using neutrons released from the enriched reaction to enrich/destabalize the surrounding depleted uranium in order to keep the reaction going. Once fueled, such a reactor could run for decades before the entire field of depleted uranium is brunt, and its output will only increase unless checked for the "burning front" will increase in legnth as the reaction spreads. Despite the increased output, the fuel starts out unsutable for weapons and never actually gets close to a critical mass except when the reaction is first started, so although the risks of a meltdown are there if some idiot turned off the cooling system, the chances of the reactor turning into a bomb are slight.
Another design I was going to propose was slightly more complex and involves a series of faceleted and interconnected chamebers lined with depleted uranium, one central chanber will have a small neutron fuse like the ones used in bombs, but neutrons from the fuse will not be focused onto one point like in bombs but released to bounce along the chamber whose geometrical design allows the escape of neutrons into a similar neighboring chamber. The neutrons arnt actually "bouncing", rather, they are exciting and causing fissile reactions whenever they hit the sides of a chamber, causing more neutrons to be released.

Recoil Inhibitor

"If the first shot hits their feet, the second shot probably goes up to their chest, the third flys over their heads, and anything after that you are wielding an anti aircraft gun." Such were the words of a gunnery sergeant describing the effects of firing an automatic weapon from the hip without aiming.

Over the course of the evolution of the gun, primitive muskets were made more reliable, more powerful, more accurate, and easier to reload. But as weapons got more "automatic", I think one area of development was missing until lately, recoil reduction.

The power and firerate of small arms are still being upgraded, the US military for example has finally moved past the 5.66mm NATO rounds used by the M16 and its variants into the more powerful 7.56mm NATO rounds used by higher performance weapons such as the M4A1 and the SCAR heavy. All this advancement in reliability, weight, and firepower still resulted in the same primitive recoil reducer in the form of a rifle stock jarring the shoulder of the soldier firing said weapon, someone seems to have forgotten to tell the firearm developers that the amount of kinetic force the target receives is always less than the amount of recoil generated.

One exception to this trend however is the KRISS Super V, otherwise known as the Vector submachine gun. It has a recoil dampening device built into the receiver which makes the hammer that fires the gun move in a up and down motion countering the up and down of the recoil resulting in a fully automatic weapon of the .45 caliber with the recoil of a pistol.
What I propose is an add-on which will dampen the recoil of any weapon, recoil is a phenomenon which occurs in two stages, stage one where the hammer hits the pin firing the bullet, and stage two where the bullet leaves the barrel and the gasses behind the bullet escape, pushing the barrel upwards. While the KRISS solved the issue by reducing stage one recoil, I try to take on stage two. After the bullet leaves the gun, an attachment that screws onto the end of the barrel captures some of the gas and releases a spring loaded hammer downwards against the recoil. After the gasses leaves, the hammer resets itself and waits for the next shot.

Computer Optimization (AKA the reson I coudnt post for the last 5 days)

Personal computers have become so common nowadays that we don't really appreciate how complex they are until they break down and us dumb users are left with the daunting task of fixing them. My computer recently had a fit involving a corrupt windows folder on my backup portable hard-drive and the system trying to use the bad backup as its windows folder. Whats worse than the buggy performance was that one of the first things to go was the less-than-stable driver for my internet adapter, meaning I had no way of going online and just googleing whatever problem I had. Then came the chore of reinstalling windows on a computer that dosent recognize its own hard-drive (bad drivers) and reinstalling all the servicepacks, directx, adobe flash, java, etc., and at this point I wondered, shoudnt there be an easier way to do this?

Why dont somebody, like the manufactures who are trying to sell their computers, make a boot-able disc with all the registry, drivers, updates, extensions and all that crap pre-optimized and ship it with their products? Whenever dumb users decide to delete their drivers and system 32 folder and realize "oh crap, maybe that stuff was important" they just have to boot off the disk instead of bothering the manufacturer/retail store/tech support making life a little easier for everyone.

Addon Video Card?

Well I just got back from a trip to China and the electronics there are dirt cheap. Some nice friends of mine decided to endow me with a new laptop to replace the ancient IBM R50 I have been using for the past 7 years, but sadly said friends know very little about computers...

The computer I received has a decent dual core processor and an upgraded 3GB of RAM, no complaints there. Its small, light as a feather and has a great keyboard, again no complaints. Its got all the safety specs that comes with the thinkpad series, but the only thing which makes it a piece of junk to a gamer like me is the integrated graphics card...

My older computer is about seven years old, and this one is only 3, one would think that the new one would run some basic 3d fps games a little faster, but that is sadly not the case. Games that ran smoothly on my old computer were choppy and gay on my new one, and when I looked for a solution, I seemed to find only a sad reality, you cant really upgrade integrated graphics...

I really don't think its the CPU or motherboards inability to handle a full sized graphics card, its just that its become cheaper recently to just slap a really crappy card onto the motherboard. I think if some genius out there would make a PCI splitter, the problem would be solved. I split the PCI cable used for the internet adapter, slap on another video card, the system recognizes the VGA, install a few drivers and we are good to go, right?

If anyone knows another way to increase graphics performance on a computer with integrated graphics, please feel free to speak up...

Drone Carrier

This ideas seems to obvious and natural that I am amazed that i have found little mention of anything like it, either its being developed as some top secret project, or its being completely overlooked.

WWII has proved that aircraft rule the seas, period. The Iraq war has proved that drone aircraft are fully capable of delivering ordnance to a target and excel at reconnaissance and surveillance. These two instruments are virtually made for each other, lets put them to good use, together.

A naval vessel consisting of nothing but extensive machine shops and control centers for drone aircraft would be bulky, but smaller I'd think, than an actual aircraft carrier. Drones takeoff from vertical launch rails assisted by booster rockets, allowing for an extremely fast takeoff that would kill the pilot of a manned aircraft. Multiple such rails would take little deck space, and an entire wing of drones could be launched at once.

A drone is much lighter than an actual jet, so the landing strip could be shorter. Computerized landing and refitting allows a drone to quickly re-fuel and re-arm and get back in the sky. Drones once developed to be fast and maneuverable enough will serve as the carriers missile defense, specialized defense drones constantly surround the carrier and places themselves between any incoming projectiles and their host carrier.

At the current drone technology, the only fesitable combat role for a vessel "armed" with these drones would be similar to that of a missile cruiser, area defense and support. But once the next generation of possibly jet powered drones come operational, a large nuclear carrier refitted to carry hundreds of these drones could very well replace a super-carrier.

Infantry Mobility Suite

Despite modern combat becoming more and more mechanized, infantry is still a vital element in securing and fortifying a position taken by machines. The offensive potential of infantry has nevertheless decreased drastically. Personally I don't think this is due to a lack of infantry weaponry, as man portable weapons can still take down the most advanced war machines, and I also don't think the fragility of infantry has much to do with their demise. I believe the only reason that a man with a rifle is no longer an offensive battlefield threat is due to his lack of mobility, and as such he is usually transported by machines.

There are already several existing methods that seek to remedy this issue, the Armored Personnel Transport for one proves that infantry still has potential on the front lines, but the death of one loaded transport is the loss of quite an asset, and by itself the transport is of little use compared to other vehicles. I'd say that right now, the average marine needs a way to move himself from place to place fast and without the help of other machines.

The perfect solution would be a man portable jet pack or some jet powered device that will enable a man to fly, but I'd say that its painfully obvious that a jet used continuously would burn off a man's legs and most of the lower torso. At the time i don't believe there is any material that can dissipate the heat fast enough for such a device to be remotely possible.

But how much does it actually take to lift a man? Your average marine weighs about 200 pounds with all equipment attached, your average jet weighs a few tonnes with all its weapons and fuel. Why use something used to lift tonnes to lift 200 pounds? Using a jet to lift something as light as a single man seems like overkill.

My solution, a small but powerful air compressor, a propellent tank, an enhancement tank filled with water or loose dirt, and some very heavy protective pants. The amount of thrust generated is closely related to the amount of propellent expelled, and by adding water or dirt into the compressed air stream we increase the mass of the propellent and ensure that the temperature of said propellent dosent reach harmful levels. Such a device is not meant for sustained flight, but should hold enough charge for two bursts, one takeoff burst to blast the user into the air, and another landing burst to soften the impact of landing. In combat the device can be used to jump from cover to cover, making the user extremely hard to engage, and "parachuting" with this device would require no parachute.

Nanoscale Mold

Killing people and blowing stuff up has been losing appeal recently, and I suppose that that would be a sign of a sort of maturity. But other than weapons and means of war, there is still plenty to be contributed to the world, and the topic today is nanoscale materials.

Arranging all the atoms in a mass of material yields materials with properties nothing short of magical. A thread of light alkali metals linked together in a series of organized ionic bonds held in a precise triangular lattice strung across a road has the potential to cut a car in half. But the potential of such materials aside, how do we efficiently organize atoms on a large enough scale so that we can actually produce enough material to b of use?

The aforementioned NME (nano material engineered) thread/car cutter would consists of trillions of individual atoms per centimeters of thread, how can we then, rapidly arrange so many atoms? Well, isn't this a question asked by the earliest of industrialists? So much material has to be shaped to make a chunk of iron into a usable knife or pan, having individual blacksmiths pound away at the ingot is definitely not the way to go, instead, we make a mold that produces one shape over and over again.

When we feel or push something, like my fingers feeling and pushing the keys on my keyboard, the atoms in my finger are not actually touching the atoms in the plastic keyboards. I feel the keys under my fingers when the electron clouds of the two collide, the actual atomic nuclei never comes into contact. Even now, between your buttocks and your seat, there lies a few angstrom units of space dominated by the electron clouds of whatever you are wearing on your butt (I hope you are wearing something there) and whatever the materials of your seat.

The distance between atoms I mentioned is a nice little nonstick coating of you will, for the mold I now propose. To make the mold we use conventional means to aline a grid of nanoscale electrodes, each with its own electrical field. To shape the mold, we provide ore power to some electrodes while giving less to others, creating an uneven electron surface in order to acquire a desired shape, such as a nanoscale triangular lattice. Once the desired shape is set, the material that needs to be shaped is ground down to a fine nanoscale powder and heavily ionized negatively to maximize the distance between it and the mold, and to also prevent clumping of the substrate material before it takes the shape of the mold.

A few seconds later after the mold is filled, the substrate material is de-ionized and normal ionic and covalent bonding takes over, "solidifying" the material into its desired shape, and the mold is reset for another shape, another batch of material, and produces another NMEed batch of material.