Posted on 12/15/2016 11:08:50 AM PST by billorites
There are shaped charge designs for nukes.
I LOVE that book! Read it when it first came out, and still have an extremely battered copy. I take it out every once in awhile and re-read it.
Regards,
Might improve efficiency, but wouldn't change the fundamental plan. The idea is to push it, not smash it.
10 over 100 kilometers in altitude, highest was 540...
That book rocked. Impactor was a comet though.
If you can destroy or deflect a killer asteroid, maybe you can capture and rehabilitate it.
meh
asteroid comet, comet asteroid....either way it's gonna be a big hit when the hammer comes down.....
Our national computational capability when Niven and Pournelle wrote that was probably equivalent to a few of today’s hot desktop machines.
Even reducing (speculatively ) a mile rock to 4 quarters would be significant. One of your primary objectives will be to prevent impact of an object capable of punching through the lithosphere into the asthenosphere. Punching through to that will be bad. The size threshold for that currently is probably about 6-10 miles depending on composition and velocity.
Are you sure that an item 8 miles wide would burn up on entry?
Even the failed shuttle didn’t burn up totally on re-entry.
Small parts of it were found over a broad area.
Not trying to be argumentative, but this goes against my perceptions. I could have been wrong all along, but 8 miles is massive.
It’s not a matter of computational capability. There is a thing called the butterfly effect when you have exponentially increasing variables over time. At some point they go through the roof at a very quick pace, no matter how high you build that roof. The fact is that we still can’t exactly predict the course of a comet or asteroid, and the degree of unpredictability increases rapidly over time.
If we could capture the small, ‘slow’-moving ones now, we could jet-gear and weaponize them and drone them to run at and blast off-course the bigger ones. 10 50-ft rocks swarming a 300’ rock could send it away from us. Or send a massive spot-welder up to collect geostationary junk and weaponize that.
Slow-moving means they would be far from the sun in the outer reaches of the solar system, and not in range to deflect a comet inbound for Earth. Besides, it would take just as much energy to cause a small comet to collide with a big one as it would take to deflect a big one. Nothing would be saved.
Okay, forgive me, just a midwesterner here, but wouldn’t the nuke need a medium, like air, to create the necessary sock wave to ‘nudge’ the beast?
Yes, but it’s manageable for single body problems within an AU if they’re decent size.
BTW, bitchin’ handle dude!
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