Orbital Power Grid

Ever since the advent of communications and navigation via satellite, there was always a demand for more and higher quality satellites to service the new systems. Thanks to the large bulk of most commercial satellites and the high cost of launching payload into orbit, currently around 3,000 USD per pound for a small rocket, the satellite industry in general has barely grown since its inception. In an economy plagued by speculation and lack of consumer demand, there are always telecommunications companies, oil and mineral companies, military organizations, and even third-world countries seeking a chance to put their own platform into space, and the industry of making that task easier could be quite a lucrative one indeed.

If we take a closer look at today's satellite systems, every continuously functioning satellite in orbit uses large solar power cells that can sometimes account for up to half of the mass and/or volume of the satellite which they power, if only there was a readily available power source out there in orbit, then future launches will only have to send up the core components absolutely critical to a satellites function, reducing the bulk and weight of the launch payload and making the process a simple matter of designing the most compact and efficient transmitter/receivers, taking the concern of power generation and management off the list of engineering worries.

Although setting up a commercially viable power grid in space seems a daunting task of astronomical proportions, I believe it is quite possible given that the earth acts like a giant magnet in space. Given this fact, our orbital power grid does not even need generators, all it really needs is a large web of conducting cables connected by transformer pylons. Cables of a strong and conductive metal alloy stretched over a long distance and quickly rotating around a magnet that is our earth effectively acts as a huge DC current generator, and the resulting power is then converted and redirected to functioning satellites at key pylon satellites which by their paths of orbit keep the cables taunt.

An advantage of this system is that all an incoming satellite needs to do is to reach very low earth orbit, connect itself to a pylon via cable, and then drag itself along the cable to a higher orbit. With this in mind, not only now would we need to send up less material, we also don't have to send it up as high. These factors working together should make it possible for even small companies to send up their own private communications satellites.

Golden Rain

Mankind's military forces have grown better and better at delivering objects to distant destinations with extreme force. Ever since the first stone age man figured out how to make a sling, we have been trying to find better ways of throwing stuff with greater speed, precision, and range. However while we moved from bows to guns to rockets, there has only been one significant change in the payload which we deliver, and that is we switched from sharp/heavy objects to explosives. One could argue that a warhead could be engineered to perform just about any task, but I would counter by saying that once it is engineered, its purpose does not change. An armor piercing tank shell will do little agianst a squad of infantry, while an incendiary antipersonnel bomb will do little against a tank. Explosive weapons are inherently inflexible, and I would like to propose a possible solution.

A warhead is created composed mainly of individual rods of thermite, each with an individual fuse and spaced out by a thin layer of explosives. Depending on the target, this warhead will behave in very different manners.

If one hard target is to be struck, then the missile delivering the payload will follow its normal path. The thermite primer goes off seconds before impact, and the explosive spacers are not detonated. The result is one dense glob of burning metal boring a hole straight through a ship or a bunker.

If multiple soft targets are chosen, then the missile will follow a slightly altered course taking it over the target, at which point part of the explosive spacer is detonated, and then the thermite is lit, resulting in several smaller meteors of pseudo-plasma material, each of which will heavily damage vehicles and kill infantry.

Finally for area denial against infantry/light vehicles, the same high course is chosen, and all of the explosive spacers detonate before primer ignition. This will seed the air in the area with thermite fuel, and act much like a fuel-air explosive when the primers ignite the cloud of volatile powder, cooking all caught in the blast radius.

High Efficiency Launch Unit

There has been a lot of recent talk in regards to the development of space beyond earth's mesosphere, several plans have been proposed by the scientific community and the most popular, or rather, the most debated plans are the deployment of a system of space based solar power plants, a plan to send mining missions to the moon for Helium-3 ore, and the time tested space based ballistic missile defense plan.

As absurd as some of these plans sound, there is merit, or the public believes there to be merit in all of them. We've all seen the James Bond movie where the bad guy puts a giant mirror into space and beams down the suns energy by reflecting and concentrating it. NASA has recently smashed a probe into the moon to create a cloud of lunar dust for analysts, a stunt which revealed that the moon does indeed have deposits of potentially valuable Helium 3 ore, and the United States have been dreaming of a "Star Wars" orbital missile defense system since the cold war.

The reason that these plans are not already becoming reality is not that they will bring no benefit, but the sheer economical cost alone to implement them far outweighs the results. All 3 plans call for large amounts of material to be launched into space, and the most efficent launch rockets we have right now costs about $5,000 per POUND of payload. This means that a mining probe, a solar panel, or a laser would cost millions to launch apiece, and even if we get a significant amount of these things into orbit, we still need to send stuff up, most likely human astronauts (which are very prone to dying), to repair and resupply them.

The scientific community has some good stuff going with the whole development of space thing, but what it needs to do is to take a step back and realize that before we can build castles in the sky, we have to get our feet off the ground. The absurd amounts of funding going towards prototype defense satellites and mining probes are much better used to develop new launch vehicles, some of which I hope to propose in later articles.

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.

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.

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.

Proposed Muscular Growth Therapy

Body builders and athletes have already demonstrated to the world that with enough time and dedication, along with the proper resources, the average human being can develop into a very physically strong organism on whose strength is on par with many other "lower" creatures of the same size.

Humans are not readily born with such strength and yet human society value this strength for rather obvious reasons, I think it is time that a reliable and safe method of rapidly developing physical strength to be developed and that the field of modern medicine is well enough developed to make this possible.

Stem cell therapy has already been proven to repair muscles, and there are already several cases where regenerative stem cell therapy has repaired large (40 ish) percents of the heart muscles of heart disease patients.

The reason that injured muscles and healthy ones grow so slowly, and that is because the human body ceases to create new muscle cells once the infant is born. You most likely have now, the same or less number of muscle cells you had since you were born, you are stronger because those cells have grown individually stronger.

But what if we can generate more muscle cells and control them? Not only would that result in an immediate increase in strength, the gains from working out would also increase, allowing for faster muscular training and recovery, only problem now is how.

Well, most of the pieces are in place, we simply need a drug which temporarily severs a small percentage of muscle cells from the nervous system. The cells affected are still there, but as far as the body is concerned, there is nothing there. Because only a small percentage of cells are deactivated, the body can still function.

At this point, we introduce the same regenerative stem cell therapy which has benefited heart disease patients. The body will regenerate new cells, wired into the same nerves, to replace the cells "lost" due to the drug. Once the new cells are matured, an antidote is given to flush out any remaining drugs and the old inactivated cells are reintegrated into the nervous system, basically cloning themselves as far as muscle mass is concerned.

Assuming the body fully integrates all the new muscle fibers, rejection is not an issue because stem cells are grown from your own cells, repeated sessions of the described procedure will rapidly strengthen any fit human being past human limits on physical strength.

Nuclear Powered Flight and its Practicality

Ever since the world entered the atomic age predictions were made that one day just about everything would become nuclear powered. Today, the world sees wonders such as nuclear powered aircraft carriers and many other naval engineering marvels.

Despite all that, there has yet to be any sort of nuclear powered devices on land, and for good reasons. Any military vehicle to be powered by nuclear power will require huge amounts of shielding and armor around the reactor to make a possible tank capable to withstanding damage. The raw power of a nuclear reactor could not be directed for offensive purposes unless such a vehicle carries a large arsenal of conventional or a very bulky directed energy weapon. And at the end of all this, the speed of such a thing is limited due to the huge amount of weight it has to carry, making it out of place in a modern battlefield where speed is key. For civilian uses, conventional power is simply much cheaper and much more reliable, not to mention much more safe. The thought of a literal thermonuclear train wreck alone should discourage the use of nuclear power on land for transport.

But in the skies, I believe, lies a different future for the fruits of the Manhattan Project.

Say we built the smallest safe reactor the modern world could build, and around it built a engine which takes magnetized or electrically charged conventional fuel pellets, accelerated them into the combustion chamber of a normal ramjet engine, and pressurized even further the combustion chamber itself with intense magnetic fields powered by a small nuclear reactor. Such a hybrid jet engine, even if it can only provide the thrust of a normal rocket motor, would use up much less fuel compared to a liquid fueled rocket and would be able to lift a relatively large fixed wing aircraft and accelerate it to immense speed.

At this point, assuming such a device is capable of flight, one could argue that all we have created is a very large and bulky target practice drone which can be seen by even the most primitive of radar, and shot down by even more primitive weapons. Even if we stealth-coated such a beast, which would no doubt be several times larger than most aircraft due to the sheer bulk of a nuclear reactor, this aircraft would not be maneuverable enough even for commercial use as a cargo plane, assuming it is even capable of taking on cargo.

Well, once such an aircraft gets off the ground, I would like to remind everyone that there is no speed limit in the skies. Using the same electromagnet-boosted engines we continue to accelerate the aircraft past the efficient speeds of conventional aircraft, and eventually reach a speed where the plane is constantly falling towards the horizon, or extreme low earth orbit. At this point, the engines can be shut off, and the plane is essentially invulnerable from surface threats as it would be moving so fast relative to the ground that no weapons system could react to it. From this immense speed, one could observe, command, and even fire ordnance onto virtually the entire globe without fear of retaliation.

Railway Launcher

11.3 kilometers per second, that is the velocity a ballistic projectile must attain to leave the gravity of the Earth. That's about three times the speed of a rifle bullet, thirty times the speed of sound.

So far the only method of leaving earth comes from large rocket engines which burn fuel by the tones and could only lift a few tonnes of weight into orbit, hardly efficient if you ask me.

Then there is the proposed launch method of basically firing a payload into orbit by an explosion/jet-assisted rail/coil gun. This method, if ever a practical example of it was built, would be only able to send a solid projectile into space due to the fact that the immense acceleration that takes the projectile from 0km/s to over 11km/sec will destroy any electronics, not to mention anything alive on board the payload. Perhaps this will be useful for launching explosives into some part of the planet, but I doubt that even something as simple as a nuclear warhead will survive the acceleration.

Instead, what I suggest is a very long piece of magnetic levitation track about 300 or so kilometers long. Multiple conducting rails below, on top, and to the sides of a "train car" will serve as rails to both levitate the vehicle, reducing friction, and accelerate it in a rail gun like manner. For those who do not know how a rail gun functions, two or more conducting rails complete a circuit with the projectile in between them. The opposite magnetic fields on the rails and in the projectile send the projectile speeding down the track.

To further accelerate the "train car", a tunnel of coils that are magnetized will pull on the train as it approaches, and push the train away as it passes through the tunnel, much like a coil gun. The final sections of the rail will gradually curve skywards, and rockets on board the train will only have to maintain a velocity that is already close to escape to reach orbit.

This device will be much more gentile with its payload, as it has 300 km in which to accelerate to the highest attainable speed, meaning the acceleration is gradual, and no unlucky astronauts are flattened to a pulp.

Tag & Bag

After coming up with several lethal and mass effect weapons (I have only posted descriptions of some) over the last few years, I have seen a rather futile folly in designing instruments for simple senseless killing. But as long as there is man, there will be a need for weapons, which is why I am lately turning my interests to non-lethal weapons.
We already have several different brands of less than lethal rifles which can handle large caliber subsonic ammunition used for crowd control (simply put, rubber bullets in a 12-gauge shotgun). The trouble with these weapons is that at close range, a subsonic rubber bullet will seriously injure/kill someone, but at long enough range its barely enough to bruise.
I simply propose a new type of ammunition, one which simply consists of a tightly packed powder comparable to chalk, except it would be engineered as a skin irritant. Once the bullet impacts, the bullet explodes in a puff if irritating chemicals transferring kinetic energy fit to bruise a little and spreading a little puff of "pacifying" chemicals.
Sadly, this type of ammunition could easily have the irritant replaced with a fuel-air explosive, a small taser under-slung below the rifle, and this would turn into an anti-infantry weapon much more lethal than conventional rifles.

Clean Bomb

The nuclear bomb, although a powerful weapon, is frowned upon both by tacticians and politicians for its unwanted side effects. From a completely strategic point of view, a nuke makes for a poor offensive weapon. While its primary can and will flatten any man-made target, the affected area is unsuitable for occupation. The only good strategic use of a nuke is to use it as a fail-safe. Say that your forces defending a key position such as a bridge or port is hopelessly outnumbered and enemy troops are already moving in to occupy the position, your best choice of options includes a unscheduled sunrise a few kilometers over that port, flattening out the remaniants of your forces and the bulk of the enemy, while making the key position unusable.

But to make such a dirty device something suitable for offensive operations is rather easy. Most of the radioactive fallout comes from unreacted primary stage fissile material (uranium or plutonium). Most fission bombs (a-bombs) only have one stage where the conventional explosives crush a fissile stage, and much of the fissile fuel is unreacted and created fallout. In fusion bombs (h-bombs), the energy from a fission bomb is harvested to crush and heat hydrogen to the fusion temperature, which in turn reacts more of the fissile material, creating less fallout.

What I propose is to create a three stage fission bomb using four layers of conventional explosives and three layers of fission fuel. Stage one is located at the center of the bomb and consists of a thin shell of fission material sandwiched by a conventional core and outer shell, its detonation occurs first.The second stage is located at the outside of the device, and the layout is similar to the first stage, consisting of a thin shell of fissile fuel sandwiched between two shells of conventional explosives. The final stage is simply a thick shell of fissile fuel.

What happens when the timer goes off is the first and second stage detonates, creating two nuclear scale explosions to either side of the final stage, crushing it with more force and duration than any conventional explosive, reducing fallout without reducing yield. The leftover fissile material from the first stage also has no where else to go other than to the hot little reaction occurring at its neighboring third stage, and the crumbs leftover are given a second chance to fizz, reducing fallout yet again while probably increasing the yield.

Overclocking =! Overheating

Overclock != Overheat

Most gamers and programmers know the benefits of overclocking their CPUs for a higher clock speed and performance, but all too often they also know the misery of a catastrophic CPU overheat destroying their $500+ CPU/Motherboard setups. The most irritating thing about this particular issue is that while the CPU ends up being a steaming pile of slag, everything else under the hood is perfectly fine.

The fact that CPUs can be overclocked means that they are capable of higher performances, the only limiting factor is the heat issue, and I really don't think that that should be a problem

Most CPUs nowadays are multi-core, and while this means better parallel computing, it also means a higher energy consumption and more heat generated overall. To cut straight to the bone, I think that we should make the system "roulette" out the individual cores. Overheating wasn't such an issue when there was only one core, but with two or more cores, what you essentially have is a heat source heating another heat source. But if we let two cores run and two cores rest in such a way that a resting core is always between the two running cores, the heating should behave more like a single core than a dual core.

Why buy a quad core processor and only use two cores at a time? Simple, some programs like most games and some calculations are not meant to be ran in parallel. Having four cores for a program written for two just means that two cores do most of the work (in most cases). And I don't know if anyone's realized this but as the number of cores goes up, the clock speed on each individual core tends to go down. A shitty Intel Atom could be clocked at over 3Ghz, but the Intel quad core only has a clock speed of about 2Ghz. If we can double the clock speed on two cores while resting the other two, programs written for a fewer number of cores will run a lot faster, and when the programs call for multicore parallel processing, we just turn the clock down and turn on the other two cores.

The Pacifier

We already have devices, hear beat sensors, that can triangulate the approximate location of a human being by monitoring the weak but distinct EM field of the human heart. This is used mainly by rescue workers trying to locate a live human inside a field of debris, and it is not exactly science fiction. But whats different from the real thing and the one on call of duty modern warfare is that the real thing cannot pinpoint the 2D location of a human on a grid, unless you have at least three sensors set up over an area and all three are linked to a computer, because the real thing will only tell you in which direction and a very approximate distance the signal is.
But if we know so much about the EM field generated by the heart, why cant we remotely affect this field? Offensively, we can remotely create a field that will give everyone within it a massive heart attack, not always lethal, and medically, it can remotely jump start a persons heart. Also, used in surgery rooms, an artificial field stronger than the signals received by the heart will make sure the patient on the table does not go into cardiac arrest as long as the heart is intact.

Sky Liners

We know we can float a really heavy cabin and engines with nothing but a sack of helium or hydrogen gas, but sadly, we also know that doing so is very impractical when you want to go somewhere. But it seems to me that, floating around on a cruise liner for months just to get across the ocean is still pretty inefficient, and yet people still do it just for the heck of it. What if airship travel could be made simple and efficient again? How much would people pay to be aboard a floating piece of heaven?
Instead of a cigar shaped blimp, we make a balloon with dynamic shape so that it can both round out into your standard "cigar" shape or flat out into a massive sail, which would "sail" itself. Attached to the contraption would be a medium barge sized passenger cabin that can be made totally out of a fiberglass outer hull and a not so opaque inner hull which can be pulled back to give riders a magnificent view. Such a device will sail in the jet streams, probably going faster that it would on engines, and its own motors will only be used during takeoffs and landings.

Water Based Excecise Machine

People always seem to complain that the motions of a weight exercise machine made compact is not as "smooth" as a giant tower with actual weights that move up and down. Several ingenius designs such as the Bowflex have already been devised for this problem, and I think I may have another.
Center the whole machine around a giant tube of a high viscosity liquid like one would center a traditional machine around a tower of weights. The resistance is generated by trying to move a porous plate up and down the fluid filled tube by pulleys at the top and bottom of the tube which attach to the plate through the liquid. The first plate would have very big holes in it, giving little resistance, the second would have smaller holes and so on. Without the 300 pounds of iron bars to lug around and using water as the fluid, this device could be emptied and carried around quite easily and provide very literally "fluid" motions and feel to the user.