I only dip a toe into the mayhem and death part of weapons design now and again, but when I do, it's usually something pretty nasty. The worst ones I dreamed up, I handed over to a friend, who's pretty much one link away from the belly of the beast. That was a few years ago, lately I heard the UN wants to ban my nasty little creations, or at least the proliferation of new ones.

So, those ones, I sat on the design for probably 2-3 years, while I was working on other stuff at a company that directly fed products to the military pipeline. In theory peaceful, until you use one to tune up your death machines for action. ;)

I think where I fell off the peace hippie wagon was when the head chopping in the middle east had picked up, and I just said "**** it, these people gotta die!" So, I got good and drunk, make a call to my friend, and laid out the basic theory of operation and design parameters. He's the software guy, so he knows how to make all the hardware work together, and a friend of ours is the ordinance expert.

After that, I washed my hands of it, and sort of pretended that, "Nah, he ain't gonna do shit with it". Yeah, that's it. But, lets say he ain't exactly short of money these days.

I talked with other engineers about the basic concepts of that sort of "smart weapons cluster" and multiple variations on it, but had to cool it once they tightened up ITAR in response to the printed guns thing. I also was in communication with people who knew the printed guns guy IRL, so, that was kinda weird.

Since then though, things only seem to have ramped up from bad to worse in the middle east. Not to mention the homegrown terror thing kicked up many notches. So, these days I don't worry about it so much as it looks like the world is hellbent on killing itself.

I've dreamed up a couple silly weapons ideas, like a self guiding frisbee golf sized disc carrying a variable yield claymore mine that can focus its explosion to better wipe out the target. I actually dreamed that one up, in my sleep, along with about half the bill of materials. That thing would make hand grenades pretty well obsolete. Get a skeet hurler, and saturate the battlefield with em. :D

I didn't pass that one on to anyone who was close to the R&D pipeline. Figured it was sort of practical, but still kinda too silly and outlandish for anyone to attempt making them. Yeah, it's off the shelf tech, yeah it would hunt down and kill people, and certainly no stretch of technology. But weapons design is kind of conservative, any degree of weirdness can be a deal killer.

Anyway, at some point, you just get over the fact that what you do best in the world is design new weapons of war. I've tried a bunch of other things, but they end up in the military pipeline one way or another.

I like to make the joke that ideologically, I'm a quaker, now all I gotta do is learn to get past the drinking, hell raising, swearing, and worst of all, designing weapons of war. But, I suppose it's the journey rather than just getting to the end when it comes to that.

Of course, lutheranism, the religion I guess I was sort of baptized/born into has no problems with war at all. Nor do most members of my family. They think my less violent tendencies are weird. After finding out about the defense work, they mellowed out considerably. I dunno, so I guess going with the natural flow, me and defense work are just kind of a natural fit. Too bad the industry goes from bat out of hell overtime to half decade long layoffs and downsizing. ;P