Thursday, November 4, 2010

FULL MOON RISING N CRESCENT TOWER(AZERBAIJAN PROJECTS)

# Heerim Architects has attempted to reinvent the skyscraper beyond the traditional with two lunar inspired projects in the Republic of Azerbaijan.
# The Korean firm has dreamed up Full Moon Bay and Caspian Plus that includes Crescent Place on neighbouring peninsulas in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku that look on to the Caspian Sea - the two projects on opposite extremes of the same bay acting as gateway markers.
# Hotel Full Moon is essentially a disc with rounded edges and a hole in one of the top corners that appears radically different to the view depending on the angle it is seen from. The frontage thanks to the bulging centre makes it appear more like a glass death star whilst the side profile is more than a little gherkinesque.
# Changing appearance depending on the view is reinforced by the cladding treatment the architect has selected. The front will have a glass diagrid whilst the back will be covered with hexagonal honeycombs.
This main building will be a 35 storey luxury hotel with 104,182 square metres of space for only 382 rooms, a relatively small amount of rooms given the sheer size of the internal space on offer. It will reach a maximum height of 158.68 metres.

# The hotel is linked via a zoomorphically shaped podium that snakes curvaceously around the boundaries of the site to two residential apartment blocks entitled Palace of Wind 1 and 2.
# Acting as the counterpoint to Hotel Full Moon is Hotel Crescent, part of the Caspian Plus redevelopment that stands as a curving arch similar to a crescent moon. The arch-like nature of the building is revealed by the fact that the structure isn't a pure crescent on its inside relying on more regularly shaped columns to help provide it with support.
# At 32 floors tall it will also be a luxury hotel, this time with 221 rooms. There will also be 128 serviced apartments in the building. Floor space will 128,140 square metres.
# Behind it will stand a further four tall buildings, three of which will be residential with the tallest of the quartet being a 43 floor office building standing 203 metres tall.
# Heerim Architects have not long been established in Azerbaijan. They only opened their office in the country in July 2007 and yet have already secured these two major projects that face transforming the capital of one of the world's fastest growing economies.

CRYSTAL LAND RUSIA

# Standing at 450m (1,500ft) tall, the $4bn (£2bn) Crystal Tower, or 'Christmas tree', of Moscow will be one of the tallest buildings in the world. The structure will be located on the Nagatinskaya alluvial plain which sticks out into the south region of the Moscow river, near to Andropov Avenue, about 7.5km away from the Kremlin.
# Crystal Tower received planning permission from Moscow's public and architectural council in December 2007 and will be completed by 2012. It is London-based Foster + Partners' first large-scale project in Moscow and also Foster's third design in a tent, or tepee, shape, including a giant transparent tent in the Kazakhstan capital, Astana.

X-SEED 4000

# The X-Seed 4000 is the tallest building ever fully envisioned, meaning that the designs for construction have been completed. The idea was initially created and developed by Peter Neville. Its proposed 4 km (2.485 miles) height, 6 km (3.728 miles) wide sea-base, and 800 floor capacity could accommodate five hundred thousand to one million inhabitants.
# It was designed for Tokyo, Japan by the Taisei Corporation in 1995 as a futuristic environment combining ultra-modern living and interaction with nature. the proposed area is situated on The Pacific Ring of Fire, which is the most active volcano range in the world so X-Seed 4000 would be subject to tsunamis and earthquakes. The Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid (also planned for Tokyo, Japan) faces the same problems.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

DUBAI CITY TOWER

# also known as the Dubai Vertical City
# second tallest building ever fully envisioned after the X-Seed 4000
# The design has 400 floors with a 200 km/h (125 mph) vertical bullet train 
# As you already know, world’s tallest tower can be found in Dubai, it’s the Burj Dubai. Once again, you already know that the upcoming world’s tallest tower will also be found in Dubai, the Nakheel Tower. But what happens when these towers will be just too small? Well, I’m really tired about this but those guys in Dubai aren’t and they are planning to build even a bigger tower than Nakheel, the Dubai City Tower.
# The upcoming world’s tallest tower will measure 1.55-mile high and it will be build as a city within a city as the tower itself is a city which will be build in the Jumeirah City which will be build in Dubai
“The hardest part is the servicing of the height: the transportation, power, water and waste disposal,” said Alastair Colling, from the International Council on Tall Buildings.
# This vertical city will consist of six separate towers which will form together this marvelous structure. The transportation will be ensured by a 125mph bullet train which will send up&down passengers.
The Dubai City Tower is estimated to consume 37,000 MWh of electricity per year, with a 15 MW peak usage. The power will be mostly supplied by solar, thermal, and wind sources.

NAKHEEL TOWER

# Nakheel was in talks with several potential contractors which include South Korea's Samsung C&TJapaneseShimizu Corporation and Australian GroconWSP is Lead Consultant for the structure, heading a consortium that includes LERA of New York and VDM of Australia, and working with architects Woods Bagot. The proposed tower would have been 1,400 m (4,600 ft) tall.
# Projections of Nakheel Tower's final height varied widely. Nakheel was believed to be engaging in a strategy of secrecy similar to that employed by Emaar with Burj Khalifa. According to officials at Nakheel, the tower was originally designed to be at least 700 m (2,300 ft) tall and have more than 160 floors, although an early render showed the tower with more than 200 floors.
#  Companies involved in the project reported an initial height expectation of 1,600 m (5,200 ft) which was later reduced to 1,200 m (3,900 ft). In July, 2007, Nakheel CEO Chris O'Donnell was reported to have said that "height isn't everything" and suggested that Al Burj might not be any taller than the Burj Khalifa, which is 828 m (2,717 ft). Yet only a week later, Nakheel reaffirmed that the tower would be taller than 1 kilometre. A report on 20 June 2008 claimed that the tower was planned to be 1,400 metres (4,593 ft) tall.
# The tower was proposed in 2003 as the centrepiece of Palm Jumeirah, one of the world's largest man-made islands. It was to be named "The Pinnacle" and rise from the centre of a canal on the trunk of the island. 
# In January 2009, it was announced that the project was put on hold due to financial problems. As a result of the Dubai World 2009 debt standstill, Nakheel Group's financial problems increased considerably and the tower was consequently cancelled in December 2009.
# The tower was designed by Woods Bagot architects and it will be built by Nakheel, the same developer which has built those fancy state-of-the-art man-made islands in Dubai.
# The skyscraper will be called Nakheel Tower and as a bonus, there will also be built world’s first inner city harbor.
# The entire construction area will be of 270 hectares, and when the Nakheel Tower and Harbor will be finished, it will provide enough space for 55,00 inhabitants, workplaces for 45,000 people, and for millions of tourists every year.
# Although it will be one kilometer-high, the skyscraper will only feature 200 floors, but this could change as the developers don’t want to tell us more about the actual height as rivals could build taller towers.
# “With Islamic influences governing its design, Nakheel Tower has been able to reach its height of more than a kilometre. This inspired approach has enabled us to achieve a number of amazing feats of engineering, for example the Tower will be the world’s tallest concrete structure,” added Sultan bin Sulayem, also Chairman of Dubai World.

MUBARAK TOWER


CountryKuwait
Floors200
Height(m)1001
Height(ft)3283
BuilderTamdeen Real Estate Company
ArchitectEric Kuhne & Associates
DeveloperTamdeen Real Estate Company
Date Built
LinkBuilding Link
ConceptYes
CompleteNo
Description


# Kuwait is building the world's tallest tower at 1,001 meters in Madinat al Hareer, also known as the City of Silk.
# When completed, the Burj Mubarak al-Kabir will beat a residential tower undergoing construction in Dubai estimated to rise between 700 to 800 meters. # The Kuwait Municipal Council approved Wednesday the development plans of Madinat Al Hareer, a multi-purpose economic, commercial and residential development in Subiyah.
# It is owned by Madinat Al Hareer Corporation, a government firm. Covering 250 square kilometers, it will include the world tallest structure, a 2-sq. km. natural desert reservation, duty free area, a new airport, tourist-oriented establishments and business centers.
# It is estimated to cost $86.1 billion (25 billion dinar). The project aims to reduce Kuwait's dependence on revenues from oil. Half of Kuwait's gross domestic product, valued at $60.72 billion in 2006, came from petroleum. The country holds 10 percent of the world's oil reserves. Dubai's standing tallest structure is Burj Dubai at 422.5 meters with 120 storeys.
# It is one of five completed building in the world with more than 100 floors. Next to Burj Dubai are New York's Empire State building measuring 381 meters and Chicago's John Hancock Centre with 344 meters.

ITER-INTERNATIONAL THERMONUCLEAR EXPERIMENTAL REACTOR

# ITER (originally the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is an international research and engineering project which is currently building the world's largest and most advanced experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor, at CadaracheFrance.
# The ITER tokamak could help to make the long awaited transition from today's studies of plasma physics to full scale electricity-producing fusion power plants. The project's members are China, theEuropean UnionIndiaJapanKoreaRussia and the United States.
# The fusion reactor itself has been designed to produce 500 MW of output power for 50 MW of input power, or ten times the amount of energy put in. Hereby the machine is expected to demonstrate the principle of getting more energy out of the fusion process than is used to initiate it, something that has not been achieved with previous fusion reactors.
# Construction of the facility began in 2008 and first plasma is expected in 2018. When ITER becomes operational it will surpass the Joint European Torus which is the current largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment in use. The first commercial demonstration fusion power plant named DEMO is proposed to follow on the research of ITER to bring fusion energy to the commercial markets.

HADRON COLLIDER

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things.
# It will revolutionise our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.
# Two beams of subatomic particles called 'hadrons' – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy.
# Teams of physicists from around the world will analyse the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC.
There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions, but what's for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator, as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe.
# For decades, the Standard Model of particle physics has served physicists well as a means of understanding the fundamental laws of Nature, but it does not tell the whole story. Only experimental data using the higher energies reached by the LHC can push knowledge forward, challenging those who seek confirmation of established knowledge, and those who dare to dream beyond the paradigm.

BIG DOG

# BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics robots. It is a rough-terrain robot that walks, runs, climbs and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by an engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system.
# BigDog has four legs that are articulated like an animal’s, with compliant elements to absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule; about 3 feet long, 2.5 feet tall and weighs 240 lbs.
# BigDog's on-board computer controls locomotion, servos the legs and handles a variety of sensors. BigDog’s control system keeps it balanced, navigates, and regulates its energetics as conditions vary.
# Sensors for locomotion include joint position, joint force, ground contact, ground load, a gyroscope, LIDAR and a stereo vision system. Other sensors focus on the internal state of BigDog, monitoring the hydraulic pressure, oil temperature, engine functions, battery charge and others.
# In separate tests BigDog runs at 4 mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rubble, climbs a muddy hiking trail, walks in snow and water, and carries a 340 lb load. BigDog set a world's record for legged vehicles by traveling 12.8 miles without stopping or refueling.
# The ultimate goal for BigDog is to develop a robot that can go anywhere people and animals can go. The program is funded by the Tactical Technology Office at DARPA.

FLYING AIRCRAFT CARRIER

Airborne aircraft carriers are aircraft which can launch other aircraft. These typically are large aircraft that launch fighter-interceptor planes.USS Macon (ZRS-5) was a rigid airship built and operated by the United States Navy for scouting. She served as a flying aircraft carrier, launching Sparrowhawk biplanes. In service for less than two years, in 1935 Macon was damaged in a storm and lost offCalifornia's Big Sur coast, though most of her crew were saved. The wreckage is listed as USS Macon Airship Remains on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

# Less than 20 ft (6.1 m) shorter than Hindenburg, she and her sister, Akron, were among the largest flying objects in the world in terms of length and volume. Although the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg was longer, the two sisters still hold the world record forhelium-filled airships.

NEXT GENERATION BUNKER BUSTER

The Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOPGBU-57A/B is a project by the U.S. Air Force to develop a massive, precision-guided, 30,000-pound (13,608 kg) "bunker busterbomb. This is substantially larger than the deepest penetrating bunker buster presently available, the 5,000-pound (2,268 kg) GBU-28.
# In 2002, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin were working on the development of a 30,000-lb (13,600 kg) earth-penetrating weapon, said to be known as "Big BLU", although funding and technical difficulties resulted in the development work being abandoned.
# Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, analysis of sites that had been targeted with bunker-buster bombs revealed poor penetration and inadequate levels of destruction. This renewed interest in the development of a super-large bunker-buster, and the MOP project was initiated.

# The U.S. Air Force has no specific military requirement for an ultra-large bomb, but it does have a concept for a collection of massively sized penetrator and blast weapons, the so-called "Big BLU" collection, which includes the MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Burst) bomb. Development of the MOP is now underway at the Air Force Research Laboratory, Munitions Directorate, Eglin Air Force BaseFlorida. Design and testing work is also being performed by Boeing. It is intended that the bomb will be deployed on the B-2 bomber or B-1 bombers, and will be guided by the use of GPS.
# Northrop Grumman announced a $2.5-million stealth-bomber refit contract on July 19, 2007. An undisclosed number of the U.S. Air Force's 20 B-2s will be able to carry two 15-metric-ton MOPs.

ROCKETS BALLS(SECRET WEAPON)


# Rocket Balls are the latest Pentagon secret weapon to be splashed over the Internet. The idea is that you take a hollow sphere with a hole in it, made of rubberized rocket fuel. When lit, the rocket balls get very hot inside, and eject a high temperature exhaust through the hole.
#  Then, they propel themselves every which way, bouncing off hardened walls and breaking through doors into whatever they can get into.
# The key element is that they are not intended as explosives; it's the "rocket exhaust" that matters. The burning gas that propels the rocket balls will quickly heat the interior of a building or a bunker to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, destroying the contents.
# The inventor, Kevin Mahaffy, worked as an engineer at Air Force Research Laboratory's Rocket Propulsion Division, and then spent three years as the Chief of the Motor Branch overseeing solid and hybrid rocket propulsion.
# The random nature of the motion makes rocket balls ideal for destroying the interior of a structure. This might be your preference when taking out a chemical or biological warfare facility. Rather than blowing it up, and spreading deadly agents over the countryside, the building interior could be destroyed.

THE MOLE PEOPLE

Life on the street is tough, but what options does a homeless person have when the busy, unforgiving city is becoming too much for them to handle? Why, they just go underground! Underground: Where no cops or street-punks will hassle you. Just mole rats and the lava people...
# Beneath the casinos and the flashing neon lights of the Las Vegas strip lies a labyrinth of tunnels that were initially built to protect the city from flash floods. But now they've become a place where the homeless live sheltered from the weather, rent free.
# There are over 200 miles of tunnels under the city and any trip down into them reveals a vast network of homeless shelters. We aren't talking cardboard boxes here, either: They have some pretty sophisticated homes.


# New York City also has abandoned tunnel systems that the homeless have found shelter in. The AmTrak Freedom Tunnel was built in the 1930s but, as it served no real purpose, it was quickly abandoned. For over 30 years, it acted as a shelter for huge tribes (that's what you call groups of hobos, right? Or is it a gaggle?) of homeless people. But it wasn't just sleeping in the dirt: They formed complex societies complete with mayors and elaborate social structures. They were so resourceful that many of them even siphoned water and electricity from the city and built ad-hoc underground, multi-story homes out of whatever was available.

MISSILE SILO SECRET PROJECT

An ICBM launch facility (LF) is an underground vertical cylindrical container for the storage and launching of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). They typically have the missile some distance under the surface, protected by a large "blast door" on top. They are usually connected, either physically or electrically to launch control center. ICBM Launch facilities are synonymous with the term missile silo, used in common nomenclature.

# The silo has remained the primary basing system for land based missiles since that time. However, the increased accuracy of inertial guidance systems has since rendered them somewhat less protected than they were in the 1960s. The U.S. spent considerable effort in the 1970s and 1980s designing a replacement, but none of the complex systems were ever produced. China, the USSR and the U.S. all developed mobile ICBMs:
  • DF-31 (CSS-9): a Chinese road mobile ICBM (China also two older mobile IRBMs)
  • Mobile Protective Shelters (MPS) plan, in which 200 Peacekeeper missiles would be shuttled around between 4 600 soft shelters.
  • Midgetman missile
  • One version of Topol-M
  • Launch Facility (LF) configuration varied by missile system. Titan II (deactivated) ICBMs were in a one launch control center (LCC) with one LF configuration (1 X 1). Titan missiles (both I and II) were located near their command and control operations personnel; access to the missile was through tunnels connecting the Launch Control Center and Launch Facility
  • The LGM-30 series Minuteman I,II, III and Peacekeeper ICBM configurations are one LCC to that controls ten LFs (1 X 10). 5 of LCCs and their 50 associated LFs make up a Squadron. 3 of the Squadrons make up a Wing. Measures were taken such that if any one LCC was disabled, a separate LCC within the squadron would take control of its 10 ICBMs.
    # The LGM-30 LFs and LCCs would be separated by several miles, connected only electronically. This distance insures that a nuclear attack could only disable a very small number of ICBMs, leaving the rest capable of being launched immediately.