Word: droning
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...ballistic missiles. Instead, the insurmountable final obstacle to an agreement for next week proved to be the dilemma of how a START treaty should deal with a low-flying, slow-flying weapon that barely qualified as strategic. This is the nuclear-armed sea- launched cruise missile, a jet-powered drone that can be fired from a submarine or surface ship at targets on land...
...showpiece of the operation was the Navy's Deep Drone, a sophisticated undersea robot. The drone was connected to the U.S. Navy tug Apache by an umbilical cord that transmitted commands and returned data from an array of cameras and sensors to shipboard computers and monitors. An acoustical locating system, accurate to within 20 in., will guide scientists in assembling a photomosaic of the more than 2,000 high-resolution still photographs the drone has taken of the ship's hull. In addition, a sonar scan will be used to make a false-color three-dimensional computer...
...learn how fast sections of the hull are corroding, the drone poked "stab sensors" through encrusted sea life and rust and measured the electromagnetic field at the ship's surface. Reason: the Monitor's iron and steel combine with salt water to form a weak natural battery. The resulting electric current peels electrons from the hull, making it easier for oxygen atoms to attach themselves; oxidation, or rusting, ensues. To protect the Monitor while officials decide what to do, scientists may attach "sacrificial anodes" of zinc to the hull to divert the corrosion process away from the aging metal...
...final decision on the Monitor will have to await complete analysis of the drone's findings, but there may not be much time. Says Project Archaeologist Barto Arnold: "The wreck is in very bad shape; artifacts are spilling out and being washed away by the current." No more artifacts of the ship will be raised until tricky questions of recovery, restoration and eventual display are worked out. Says Miller: "We have learned with other shipwrecks that premature recovery leads to certain destruction...
...another obvious class of recruits, take a look at the various vicious species of ants. Careful negotiations with the appropriate power-brokers in royal ant courts will yield HIACAs (Hordes of Insect Anti-Commissary Agents. The little red merchants of spoliation, dropped over Soviet supply depots from tiny drone planes, could chomp their way toward a Warsaw Pact surrender...