Has anyone heard about the Russians new toy? Here, if you havent, then read this link here . Anyone find it interesting?

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Wow. That's cool.

Hmm ... that Thermobaric (aka. Vacuum) warhead in that link only has a yield of 44 tonnes of TNT ...

That's like 500 times less than the 21 THOUSAND tonnes of TNT that "Fat Boy" dropped on Nagasaki ...

So what "power of a nuclear blast" is this ... 500 times smaller than one of the smallest nucelar bombs ever ... and 500,000 times smaller than the Tsar Bomba (the largest nuclear bomb ever, in fact the most powerful device that humanity has ever used ... it released about 1% of the power output of the sun Tsar Bomba (Wiki) (power is in W or Joules/second so it's only the energy output per second you see, NOT the total energy released since the beginning) ... and that was at half-strength (reducing the strength made it one of the "cleanest" nuclear bombs ever made, with 97% of its energy coming from fusion of the deuterium in the lithium deuteride) at 50 Mt TNT in strength. And that was a very "conservative" design!

"It is safe to assume that the 100 Mt bomb was a very conservative design - one that pushed no technical envelopes save for size. The two principal reasons for thinking this are the extremely compressed development schedule, and the very high profile of the test.

Taking the second of these first, the fact that Khrushchev made this shot a public-relations centerpiece of an overtly political test program, going so far as to begin boasting about it only weeks after planning began, meant that the developers had to follow a failure-proof design approach. The political capital invested in the test series, and one of the principal pay-offs expected from the huge expenditure on the dozens of tests, would be largely lost if this device fizzled, or fell substantially short of its design yield. The cost paid by the scientists and the lab would be heavy if Khrushchev felt that they had failed him. Whatever they developed would have to be a very reliable design."
Big Ivan, The Tsar Bomba ("King of Bombs")



But yes thermoberic warheads are one of THE MOST POWERFUL chemical explosives there is ... blowing up an apartment with a Thermobaric RPG ... it's pretty awesome Thermobaric Weapons: The Hot New Military Toy. I wouldn't want to be an armor designer to try to defend against that! The russian explosion was 3,000 degrees Celsius! Space shuttle thermal protection tiles are designed to take about HALF that! Tungsten (has the highest melting point of all of the elements) melts at 3422 degrees Celsius, and that's pretty close to 3000!

Hey, maybe that's why Miles and co. made the Agathon drop HITs (High-Impact Thermobaric) bombs!

__________________
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

- "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost

This post has been edited 7 time(s), it was last edited by Hari Seldon on 09-21-2007 at 06:35.

Well, as a nuclear device will cause harmful damage to the surrounding area, the FOAB (Russin nick for their new toy) doesnt... it just destroys everything else. And I doubt they would have made a bigger damage yeild, as it would destroy more then their little testing grounds. But I forgot that the Agathon drops HITS. Very cool.

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I swear some of u guys could b terrorists by ur extensive knowing of Nukes. For all I know one of u is Saddam.

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I disagree with you. I think their extensive knowledge shows interest in this field.


To me it seems like you are basing your statement on something of a stereotype.

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There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory - Sir Francis Drake

This post has been edited 2 time(s), it was last edited by Gneisenau on 09-21-2007 at 16:43.

High-ranking generals in the US Army are required to have an extensive knowledge of available armaments.

If they are terrorists, then the whole world's screwed.

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Inactive for 6 months, and still 5th by post count.

And those generals released this information to us because they felt we should know:

"There is a need for widespread public understanding of the best information available on the effects of nuclear weapons. The purpose of this book is to present as accurately as possible, within the limits of national security, a comprehensive summary of this information."
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm...nw/nuke_war.htm

Nuclear warfare is one of the worst ways to end our planet ... and ironically nuclear bombs (0.1-0.3 kT, so small as to not be practical weapons, I mean that Thermobaric bomb was 44 kT so we have better explosives and we don't want radiation) are the most powerful rocket engine we can envision with today's technology to let us practically leave Earth and send dozens of people per trip to tour the solar system (or try to colonize it) with hot showers, furniture, etc. (Project Orion) ... but an Orion spacecraft would kill 1-10 innocent people somewhere on Earth every launch (due to the radiation, but dang it that's so close to zero what if we just worked on it some more ...) ... neither problem has been solved. We still have nuclear weapons ready to blow the world up and we still can't have Project Orion without killing people. We are so close to solving both ... and yet so far away.

__________________
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

- "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost

This post has been edited 3 time(s), it was last edited by Hari Seldon on 09-21-2007 at 18:16.

ya those high ranking generals will be the end of us all^^.

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quote:

Originally posted by Crimson Guard I swear some of u guys could b terrorists by ur extensive knowing of Nukes. For all I know one of u is Saddam.

Hehehe

quote:

Originaly posted by Jabor If they are terrorists, then the whole world's screwed.

You have no idea...

But anyways 1-10 innocent deaths? Then why not launch it in an unpopulated area, such as Greenland? Anyone hear about the US Airforce Commander who put a half dozen Nuclear warheads on pileons, strapped to a b52 bomber, and flew it over 7 states?

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This post has been edited 1 time(s), it was last edited by Lord Drac on 09-22-2007 at 18:46.

They just happily carry nukes everywhere they go. And submarines are all filled with nukes so if people just carry them around like that its like waiting for a nucleur war.

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quote:

But anyways 1-10 innocent deaths? Then why not launch it in an unpopulated area, such as Greenland? Anyone hear about the US Airforce Commander who put a half dozen Nuclear warheads on pileons, strapped to a b52 bomber, and flew it over 7 states?

That's right! It was planned to be launched in an unpopulated area (near the North Pole).

"Unfortunately for Orion, a significant fraction of fission products released anywhere in Earth's magnetosphere - not just within Earth's atmosphere - will slowly spiral in along magnetic field lines and eventually reach the ground.
...
Very little (radioactive fallout) gets away, because as long as anything is ionized it will be trapped in the magnetic field and only the neutral atoms escape. Most of the time the sunlight ionizes it and eventually it slides down the field lines into the atmosphere and comes down to the ground. The only way you could avoid this would be to launch over the North Pole where the field lines go straight out, and use very unsymmetrical bombs so you can be sure the debris is going outwards and not inwards. In that way you might be able to cut contamination down to ten percent, but it was completely out of the question to get acceptably free from fallout this way. As far as the public is concerned ten percent is just as bad as a hundred percent.

The question for Orion, in 1959, was really two questions: how much fallout would be produced, and what would be its effects? "I remember working on the fallout problem as my main responsibility for some months," said Freeman, whose work is evidenced by at least one known (but still classified) report, Radioactive Fallout from Bomb-Propelled Spaceships, dated June 2, 1959. " We did very careful calculations, long before we had such good evidence as we have today. It's quite easy to do rough arithmatic. What you really need to know is in the case of very low doses how many rads you have to absorb on average to kill one person. That's the important number.

The official number at the time was 100,000. That was the official United Nations number, derived from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki statistics. It is now known that that was wrong, and in fact the correct number is more like 10,000.
...
(Google Books doesn't have P. 230 online, but I found this quote below, which is after the interesting stuff where they reduce the deaths as best they could, including with the Polar Launch and improving / "cleaning up" the small nukes as much as they thought was reasonable at the time ... I'll fill in the rest of it when I get access to the book hardcopy again)
...
That was a number that I took very seriously. You were condemning something like ten people to death if you didn't do something to reduce the fallout."
Project Orion: The True Story of the Ato...ceship (P. 229)

All I can hope is that we can do better 50 years later ... and reduce the death toll (of 10 people around the world per launch) by just over another factor of 10 ... at least then you could claim that it would take more than one launch to kill a person ... at that point I hope that the public will realize that there are a lot more things killing them that they should worry about, one example being secondhand smoke killing 38,400 nonsmokers in the US alone - Secondhand Smoke (American Cancer Society)




Launch Orion at the North Pole and any ionic radioactive fallout is pushed along the magnetic field lines one way or the other (if I remember that right, then that's depending on the charge of the ion). Here are the field lines:

Around a simple bar magnet (like the Earth's magnetic field with no solar wind pushing on it):

http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/academy/space/mag_field.html

This is more of a "contour map" of the field lines around Earth as they really are, due to constant solar wind pushing them.

http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/academy/space/mag_field.html

__________________
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

- "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost

This post has been edited 7 time(s), it was last edited by Hari Seldon on 09-23-2007 at 02:51.

CG:Actually, the fellow was courtmarshaled, as he was supposed to have them sent in a transport land vehicle, and instead endangered thousand of American lives. Anyways, its mainly the Americans strutting around with the Nukes. They've given them to countries such as Isreal and Taiwan, to be used a a last resort against the Arabs (Isreal) and Taiwan (China), but odd eh?

Hari: How odd, off buy 90 thousand... meh. But 10 lives in exchange for intergalactic travel in my opinion is just too much. And think about all those poor seals... they have a hard enough time with those Newfies beating them with clubs, now they've got to worry about radiation too...

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This post has been edited 1 time(s), it was last edited by Lord Drac on 09-23-2007 at 00:14.

Well, 100,000 was off by a factor of 10, the accurate estimated number of deaths started at 10,000 then by launch at the North Pole (90% of fallout goes straight out away from Earth, reduce deaths by a factor of 10, deaths = 100), thinking about how much we can "clean up" the nukes and reduce their fallout, etc.. (reduce deaths by another factor of 10, deaths = 10). So they did their best to reduce 10,000 to 10, but at that time they couldn't go any farther ... but it's been years since 1963 so I hope that we could do better ...

I agree that 10 deaths of innocent people for space exploration is too much for something as idealistic as that ... *grumble* not cigarette companies and their secondhand smoke killing tens of thousands of people in the US */grumble* ... and yeah the radiation wouldn't improve the seals' health, but ... heh ... ironically nuclear sites like Chernobyl(1,2) and Bikini Atoll have MORE wildlife than usual because people don't go there.

Of course that isn't such a big deal for the north pole (except for the fish) because people don't live there and only go up there to fish ... I guess ... I mean no one lives or goes to the Arcitc except on expeditions and living in that arctic multinational science research base.

But yeah the arctic has a pretty rough time, even though people don't go there as much as other places, Antarctica gets several "rainy days" of mercury and other toxic heavy metals (and I suppose other pollutants) at scattered times in its spring season - Mercurial storms rage in the Arctic - New Scientist

And don't forget about the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica ... it got some ozone hole over it (fortunately the ozone hole is currently shrinking or about stable):
BBC: Living under an invisible threat (Oct. 2000)


All I can say about Orion is that when Orion is launched very close to the north pole ... 90% of the fallout will go STRAIGHT UP ... away from EVERYBODY (seals included) ... but of course that doesn't mean that the first few bombs close to the ground won't still drop more than 10% of their radioactive particles. If this kills just 10 people (I hope in the future it could be reduced to less than one), when the radiation spreads not just to nearby arctic territories, but (just a little bit) all over the world, and ALL of that radioactivity is almost COMPLETELY decayed over hundreds of thousands of years ... what's the total human death toll? 10 people. So what's the worst we could expect in the Arctic? One member of any random arctic species dying every few decades? Another Chernobyl wildlife perserve (but not anywhere near as radioactive), since people don't like radioactivity and don't want to go to the North Pole to fish?

Not as politically corrupt as the long-time political football (for both Democrats and Republicans) of yes/no for oil drilling in the ANWR, eh? Nothing's really been accomplished there one way or the other ...



Oh, and it's EASY interplanetary travel (going "Even first-generation designs of Orion could, as aerospace historian Scott Lowther describes it, 'go from downtown Jackass Flats to Saturn orbit back to low Earth orbit in a single stage" with first-generation designs' " Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship (P. 4)
First-generation designs are 4,000 tons (Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship (P. 4))

With the possibility of interstellar travel - Orion's maximum velocity may be at most 8%-10% the speed of light, not FAST intergalactic travel ... but one star at a time ... sure, as a Generation ship, Cross-generation ship, or if technology advances a Sleeper ship or other designs

However, GETTING to 8-10% the speed of light is the hard part ... let's look at a design to get the ship to 2.7% the speed of light (at this point fission must be used, at pusher plate sizes LARGER than the "small" fission version of 150 km in diameter the heat can be spread out more from a bomb exploded farther away and thermonuclear bombs can be used, and if antimatter is hypothetically used (antimatter is VERY VERY impractical currently) yes you can get to 50-80% the speed of light, but the pusher plate must yet AGAIN be larger):

"The small-size 10,000 km/sec ship, with a pusher 150 km in diameter and a mass of 240 million tons, would take 30 years to accelerate to full speed, and 150 years to cover the four light years to Alpha and Proxima Centauri, our nearest neighboring stars. To reach 10,000 km/sec, 90 percent of the original mass has to be used as propellant, requiring either an extremely light structure, unfolded in space like a spinnaker or a parachute, or the jettisoning or consumption of part of the ship during the voyage ..."

10,000 km/sec is 2.7% the speed of light.
Project Orion: The True Story of the Ato...ceship (P. 107)

__________________
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

- "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost

This post has been edited 50 time(s), it was last edited by Hari Seldon on 12-06-2007 at 20:40.