X-29

seen from United States

seen from Poland
seen from Poland
seen from Poland
seen from China

seen from Türkiye

seen from United States

seen from Poland
seen from United States
seen from South Korea

seen from United States
seen from South Africa
seen from Yemen
seen from Czechia

seen from Kenya
seen from Türkiye
seen from Türkiye
seen from Türkiye

seen from Poland
seen from Türkiye
X-29
A couple of XM3 clones.
The XM3 was developed by DARPA in 2005 to solve some of the shortcomings of the M40A3 that was in service with the Marine Corp.
The XM3 is lighter, introduces a night vision dedicated rail and a muzzle device compatible with a suppressor. 52 rifles were made in this configuration and they had a short live in service, despite being well received by the end users, there was no support structure around the gun, there was no training or maintenance programs for a gun that sported a different reticule configuration than other rifles already in service, like the MK13.
After 2006, the guns were transferred stateside to a logistics base of the USMC, scheduled for a destruction that thankfully never took place, and ultimately ended up in possession of the US Army, that auctioned them through the CMP to civilians.
Parallels
adidas Nachbau darpa
DARPA document on how to use "Forest Fires as a Weapon". It's 170 pages long.
Hopefully this 👆 will take you to the PDF 🤔
thoughts on the X-37b?
love your blog btw!
Considering it's the only operational spaceplane at the moment, I think it's awesome! It is the only space plane design of the late 1990s and early 2000s to have survived (albeit being transferred from NASA to DoD) to this day.
But as to what it is actually doing in orbit for the DoD, it's hard to tell since it's mission is highly classified. It was designed by NASA to repair satellites in orbit and some have speculated about it might spy on other nations' satellites (possibly sabotage them) or deliver weapons to orbit.
But it's hard to know for sure since it doesn't operate at the same orbit as other satellites nor has it been observed by amateur astronomers tracking it.
I haven't done much speculation on it since I don't have enough info. But if I had to, I'd say it is some kind of spy sat that doubles as a test platform for different kinds of equipment and tech. The space shuttle did similar things and had launched a sat for testing the effects on materials and tech in the 80s and 90s. But I also wondered if it was used to give the USAF experience with a spaceplane since there was a program to build a reusable SSTO spaceplane (which was later cancelled).
Anyways, that's all for now. Thanks for the ask!
The ARPANET is an operational, resource sharing inter-computer network linking a wide variety of computers variety at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored research centers and other DoD and non-DoD activities in CONUS, Hawaii, Norway, and England. The ARPANET originated as a purely experimental network in late 1969 under a research and development program sponsored by DARPA to advance the state-of-the-art in computer internetting. The network was designated to provide efficient communications between heterogeneous computers so that hardware, software, and data resources could be conveniently and economically shared by a wide community of users. As the network successfully attained its initial design goals, additional users were authorized access to the network. Today, the ARPANET provides support for a large number of DoD projects and other non-DoD government projects with an operational network of many nodes and host computers.
ARPANET Information Brochure, Defense Communications Agency, May 1980