Posted on 03/21/2009 7:52:51 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Mass of the reactive material, plus the charge. I’m not a nuclear engineer so if you are you’ll probably get me on specifics. I’m also not here to get into a pissing match about specifics. My description is good enough for the layman. I’m an aerodynamics guy not a nuclear guy.
I’d much rather these “science” reporters not report the news than try and dumb it down for the lowest common denominator. In order to do that you need to actually know something about the subject.
Fascinating stuff, that.
Not out to get you, and I am not an engineer either. Not sure I can even spell it.
What I was goofing around at getting at, is WHICH reactive materiel, and in what configuration.
Adding a straw, a reflector, or even a composite foam can change yiel significantly - so mass is just one variable, and the easy one, at that.
But nobody builds shotgun nukes anymore - too time-consuming and resource intensive.
And your comment about “science” reporters is exactly correct.
Got a grandson that think I could get interested in this stuff.
I was at Borders last night....
AND
....that I think could get...
You spent money in this economy? Oh, the HORRORS!
You are not of the body. Landrew, guide us!
(Sorry, really old star treck allegory)
Nuke missile silo fire went undetected
and I don't find any posting on FR..either....not sure what the exact date was...here is the article date....October 31, 2008.
And there's the rub. If every inch were a different length, we'd probably have to find a different unit of measure.
Cheers!
LOL - a shotgun nuke is a sub-critical mass nuke, where the bit needed to make it bigger than critical mass is blown in by explosives. Effectively, you have a mass of uranium that is too small to go off, and you shoot enough extra at it with a shotgun, to make it go off.
Hence, shotgun nuke.
That is how the did it in WWII. And the yeild was entirely dependent on the mass of stuff involved.
More commonly today, they just tickle it in the right place, and interesting things happen.
Steven Hawking books are pathetic.
There are many other physics books that explain the origins of the univers much more plainly and coherently. Fancy graphics aside.
Refering to A Briefer History of Time, Stephen Hawking said he wanted to write a book that was understandable wherever you started reading it. You didn’t have to start at the beginning. Think about that for awile. What kind of book is that? A crappy one.
What is your thought on the new flying car?
In the test, it seemed they never got it out of ground effect. Still, it is darn cool.
On the other hand, at $200k, I can’t afford one.
Also, as a 2-seater, it is a dog at that price.
A five, seater, yeah, that I could use.
And somebody mentioned insurance - shudder - a GA aircraft on the highway? Who will insure that?
You mean "gun-assembled." The only gun assembled device ever used was Little Boy on Hiroshima. Fat Man was an implosion type device and the trinity device was also implosion.
Our first use was Gun assembled because the men who designed it knew it would work and thus wanted to make sure the first "demonstration" worked. Nagasaki was to make sure the Trinity type device worked in a operational environment and since Hiroshima was already leveled a fizzle would not have been quite as embarrassing.
100 Billion Suns: The Birth, Life, and Death of the Stars
is very readable but you gotta start at the beginning....and ignore the end where he goes off the rails...
That is exactly what I meant - I was obfuscating, you know?
Oh, crap! I got it immediately.
Age is just a number, age is just a number...
;)
That was some good stuff....missed a lot of them though....
I always use the estimate that a kiloton of TNT ~= 10^12 Joules. Close enough for atom bombs, I always felt.
The actual number is about 4.2 x 10^12 Joules. You can take it from there for conversions.
I read that article. I was surprised that the Alfven wave propagation speed was so slow. I’ll have to look into that more sometime.
By the way, I am very comfortable with journalists talking about these energies in terms of A-Bombs. I just wish that they would say something like “10kt”, or “Hiroshima” or “5 Megaton” when they use use it. Used as in this article, there is a 4-orders-of-magnitude range possible - a bit too big for useful information even in most non-technical articles.
I don’t trust the majority of other pilots I share the sky with, I’d give it up forever if they let the general public take to the skies with little or no training.
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