Posted on 08/07/2018 11:12:18 AM PDT by Eddie01
From further reading, it seems these might only penetrate about 10 feet, but this causes an enormous multiplication of the below ground impact.
Interesting. Penetrate with blast or physically before the blast?
It’s that come-hither look that does it for me...
Aw, this poor girl! What has she done to herself?! She is pretty. No food tastes that good! I feel bad for her.
Is that picture for real?
Before detonation.
“...Capable of being carried by an assortment of fighters?” [PAR35, post 25]
“I was going to ask what a gravity bomb was, …” [Karliner, post 51]
“It sounds rather like a GPS-kit attached to a pre-existing B-61 nuclear bomb. Not sure that qualifies as a “new” weapon …” [Tallguy, post 55]
“It seems that it has already been tested...” [Vlad the Inhaler, post 73]
“Gravity bomb” refers to an air-launched munition that has no powerplant of its own, nor airfoils that give it any gliding capability, to extend range. Also called a free-fall bomb. Goes back to the days when all air-delivered munitions simply fell away from the aircraft when released, pulled by gravity. The distinction had to be emphasized when some munitions began to be equipped rocket motors or jet engines, and wings. Also guidance equipment, to enable course changes during flight to reduce impact point errors.
Testing in this case has to do with the aerodynamic compatibility of the new munition with the launch platform. Any modification to any air-delivered device must be tested from any launch platform intended to use it, before the applicable DoD safety board will certify it for operational use. New items aren’t always trouble free nor initially compatible; sometimes, they fly back up and hit the launching aircraft. Then they must undergo re-design and more testing.
Most politicians and high civilian officals (almost everyone in the prior administration) have been vehemently against any modernization of the nuclear arsenal. Activists and moralists of all stripes have been working on officialdom since August 1945, citing as support their moral unhappiness with the use of atomic bombs by US forces against Japan. Much of the military establishment now agrees with them. Interservice rivalries are far from defunct, and can grow very ugly.
For reasons that have more to do with fighter pilot vanity than operational effectiveness, beginning in the 1950s the fighter community loudly demanded the capability to carry and launch such weapons. It’s difficult to understand how authorities can agree to it; handing such a munition over to the pilot of a single-seat aircraft violates one of the most basic, foundational concepts of security: that a lone individual must never be granted unsupervised access to such a weapon. The two-person policy.
What dat?
The shock wave from a device that is in the ground is much larger due to the device being "coupled" to the ground. Because of that it takes a much smaller yield to accomplish the same thing as a much larger yield device detonating on the surface.
TY!
Umm...no penetration, certainly no detonation. No take-off, even.
” ‘Ground coupling? What dat?’ [OKSooner, post 67]
The shock wave from a device that is in the ground is much larger due to the device being “coupled” to the ground... takes a much smaller yield to accomplish the same thing ...” [OldMissileer, post 91]
We must thank Old Missileer for unscrambling the confusion here. I beg him to step in with corrections if I get off track.
Any detonation (black powder, TNT, nuclear, you name it) does damage by transferring energy to the environment, and thence to the target. In any material medium (air, seawater, soil, rock), much of the energy causes a shock wave, which causes mechanical damage by blast. The more dense the medium, the greater the damage - in general terms.
Boundaries between one medium and the next are discontinuities; shock waves do not cross discontinuities very well and often reflect, much the same as a large flat surface will cause a sound wave to bounce back to the listener as an echo.
Therefore, any munition exploding in air above ground will not cause much damage to anything below ground, because a big share of the energy released will bounce, as a shock wave.
But any munition that penetrates the ground even a short distance before detonating will cause a much more intense shock wave; the more dense the medium, the more efficient the energy transfer into that medium - and the greater the damage to any object below the surface of the ground. This more-efficient transfer is coupling.
No medium, no shock wave, no blast damage.
All science fiction films you’ve seen that show nuclear weapons going off in outer space are wrong; so too are a surprising number of written works by many sci-fi authors who have excellent educations. And should know better.
In outer space, there is no medium. A large share of the initial energy from any nuclear device comes off as X-rays, because of the high-energy reactions occurring. In space, they’d simply keep traveling away from the detonation point. No fireball, no stupendous movie special effects.
The atmosphere of Earth doesn’t let X-rays through very well; thus, those leaving the gas bubble expanding from a warhead detonating in the air merely hit the air molecules nearby and heat them - violently. The surface of the gas bubble cools (a little) as it expands, radiating energy at lower and lower temperatures. Most higher-energy radiation (UV and the like) penetrates air poorly, so it keeps heating the adjacent air, reradiating at longer and longer wavelengths until visible light is produced. Only then can the detonating device be seen by human eyes as a fireball.
Infrared radiation can get through the atmosphere at some wavelengths, all of which are longer than that of visible light; thus flash fires and burns are caused.
All of this occurs in a very short space of time after a device is detonated: a few millionths of a second. That’s why the fireball appears instantaneous to human perception. And before any shock wave can form, which (somewhat later) leaves the fireball at many times the speed of sound.
Even weapons that are utilized in what is called the Laydown mode do not work as well. Laydown means the weapon is literally laying on the ground. Much of the blast and shock wave will follow the path of least resistance and head up or out. Thus, to even make a Functional Kill of a deeply buried target you must use a weapon with a very large yield.
It has been found that shock waves will concentrate at the boundary layer of materials (just like the electron flow through a wire, where the majority of electrons flow along the very outer layer of the wire), so if a shock wave is traveling through the ground or rock and hits a boundary layer or maybe the wall of a tunnel it will spread trough the very outer layer of that boundary material.
And before any shock wave can form, which (somewhat later) leaves the fireball at many times the speed of sound.
The initial shock wave is subsonic until the reflected wave catches up to it and combines, thus creating the Mach Front. To save time and space here you can just search for the term Mach Front and see exactly how it is formed.
Thanks for the info.
That picture has no place near an article that uses the term, “bunker buster.”
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