Free Republic

After the Alameda County Board of Supervisors stonewalled then-Sheriff Gregory Ahern’s requests to acquire two unmanned drones for his agency amid public outrage, the county’s top cop quietly dipped into his own $236 million annual budget and purchased them anyway. Ahern scooped up a pair of AirCover Integrated Solutions’ QuadRotor QR425s for $97,000, using a federal Homeland Security grant and county taxpayer money — almost two years after community members testified for hours against the acquisition. In the process, his office in 2014 became the first California law enforcement agency to publicly acquire a sophisticated surveillance drone. “There’s nothing secret...

Navy scientists with the Office of Naval Research (ONR) hit a new milestone, succesfully firing their electromagnetic railgun for the 1,000th time as the state-of-the-art weapon edges closer to real world deployment. A theoretical dream for decades, the railgun is unlike any other weapon used in warfare. And though still in testing, it's quite real, as the U.S. Navy proved in a record-setting test Monday, Oct. 31, in Dahlgren, Va. Rather than relying on a explosion to fire a projectile, it uses an electomagnetic current to accelerate a non-explosive bullet at several times the speed of sound. The conductive projectile...