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McDowell posted:Hypothetical asteroid mining would mean moving a large object into a near-Earth orbit and then you carve valuable chunks off and drop them down the gravity well. It would become a weapon if you choose to aim those pieces at populated areas instead of the collection/refinement area. You're correct about existing weapons being quite adequate. For comparison, objects we could feasibly move to Earth orbit would be moving at 8 km/s and be very much smaller. Their entry angle would be very shallow, which means the atmosphere would absorb most of the energy. They may not make it to the ground. They would be limited as to where they could strike by their orbital track (there is no easy way to change inclination) and the ground track and thus possible target locations would be public knowledge. Anyone could detect it deorbiting. Compared to Chelyabinsk, I think you could reasonably expect their impact energy to be orders of magnitude less than a strategic nuke. I just don't see it being militarily significant. A B-2 with conventional bombs is a more potent weapon because at least it can strike anywhere and its location and destination aren't loudly announced to the entire world.
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Dec 5, 2015 17:06
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A Winner is Jew posted:They have ICBM's pointed at us ready to launch in minutes. I should have asked this question better, my bad. I should have asked why both Russia and the US still have missiles pointed at each other and also ready to launch in minutes. What reasons are there to have that much destruction on tap in 2015? I get worried because the hardware is getting a little long in the tooth no? What freaked us out on top of all the existing Logical Insanity of this crap was that there were no diplomatic relations between our countries in the early eighties (this is how I remember it, could be wrong). What a recipe for total disaster and I am amazed we never had a launch/detonation throughout this mess. I would hope that we can slow the process down a bit from say 15 minutes to decide the fate of 50 million folks to... how about a week? Putin: gently caress you obummer. Obama: gently caress me? No gently caress you shortie, and your country is gimpy! Putin: Whatchu call me you fat eared kenyan?? Obama: gently caress this, we're putting the 'spark plugs' back in our minutemen!! Putin: Fine gently caress you too, I'm sanding the rust off my boomer, goin for a swim. Obama: Whatever, I'm grabbin dinner bbiab human being. That seems a bit better than 'Sir this could be it, whattya think? Oh we have 10 mins'.
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Dec 5, 2015 18:55
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Thanks for including us in your stream of consciousness-posting experiment, I guess.
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Dec 5, 2015 19:09
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Dead Reckoning posted:A common misconception. War Plan Crimson, anyone? We've got people whose literal full-time job is to make war plans, it's not hard for them to find some extra time and manpower to spend on planning for unlikely odd scenarios, if only so we do have an actual plan sitting around in the case that something like that actually does happen. I'm surprised you don't see the military value in planning for war with one of the US's two direct land neighbors - even if it's politically absurd, there needs to be some kind of basic plan written down for homeland defense. Herv posted:I should have asked this question better, my bad. ICBMs aren't "pointed" anywhere. They don't need to be targeted till they're launched.
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Dec 5, 2015 19:22
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Main Paineframe posted:War Plan Crimson, anyone? We've got people whose literal full-time job is to make war plans, it's not hard for them to find some extra time and manpower to spend on planning for unlikely odd scenarios, if only so we do have an actual plan sitting around in the case that something like that actually does happen. I'm surprised you don't see the military value in planning for war with one of the US's two direct land neighbors - even if it's politically absurd, there needs to be some kind of basic plan written down for homeland defense.
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Dec 5, 2015 19:28
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Fojar38 posted:Mostly I want to know why everyone seems so sure that they're aimed at Russia and ready to fire at a moment's notice. Because the targeting systems are ancient and take a long time to reprogram and nobody has time for that.
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Dec 5, 2015 19:30
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Dead Reckoning posted:A common misconception. Maybe not full on plans but somebody is thinking about the question "What if Greece goes fascist and pulls a Nazi Germany?" or "what if China decides to pick a fight?"
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Dec 5, 2015 19:53
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Arglebargle III posted:Because the targeting systems are ancient and take a long time to reprogram and nobody has time for that. Still no OPSEC knowledge but I imagine this is incorrect now.
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Dec 5, 2015 23:21
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Main Paineframe posted:War Plan Crimson, anyone? We've got people whose literal full-time job is to make war plans, it's not hard for them to find some extra time and manpower to spend on planning for unlikely odd scenarios, if only so we do have an actual plan sitting around in the case that something like that actually does happen. I'm surprised you don't see the military value in planning for war with one of the US's two direct land neighbors - even if it's politically absurd, there needs to be some kind of basic plan written down for homeland defense. War Plan Red and its sub-plans made perfect sense at the time. The United Kingdom was not a close ally, and their naval power and global interests made planning for the possibility of military conflict entirely prudent. The current military operational planning process is covered in Joint Pub 5-0 JP 5-0 posted:Level 1 Planning Detail—Commander’s Estimate. If I recall correctly, the planning staff for some MAJCOMs is less than a dozen people. (The planning staff for the entire Unified Combatant Command will be larger, but we really aren't talking about a lot of people.) The vast majority of their time is going to be spent keeping their existing OPLANs and TPFDDs up to date, because OPLANs are incredibly detailed pull-it-off-the-shelf-and-go products for likely theater scenarios. In between that, they're going to be helping plan exercises and lower level real world operations, doing analysis, and taking care of whatever ancillary duties they have. Spending time spitballing about random Tom Clancy scenarios isn't a good use of their time. Even doing Level 1 planning for something like a war against Canada is pointless, because the objectives and COAs are going to depend entirely on how Canada goes from an ally so close that we, again, literally share our air and missile defense command with them, to a nation so hostile to U.S. interests that they represent a threat to national security. (Planning for war with Mexico is equally pointless for similar reasons, and also because the California Air National Guard alone has more fighter jets than the entire Fuerza Aérea Mexicana.) It's like asking for a plan in the event that space aliens invade. Real life isn't Risk or Civilization, other nations don't go from friendly to massing tanks on your border overnight. Dead Reckoning fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Dec 6, 2015 |
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Dec 6, 2015 00:08
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ToxicSlurpee posted:"What if Greece goes fascist and pulls a Nazi Germany?" Everyone points and laughs at them
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Dec 6, 2015 09:50
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Fojar38 posted:Everyone FTFY.
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Dec 6, 2015 16:08
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Canadian Surf Club posted:With that in mind, it would be good to hear what people think about limited-scale engagements where nukes would be most useful. I mean there's obvious stuff like punching a small hole in an enemy's front-lines, or knocking out airports or other supply lines. A country like Russia using a small yield tactical weapon isn't going to prompt the total MAD response, and I think that opens a whole new universe of serious possibility. It simply doesn't work that way- your scenario breaks right down because you miss all the intermediate stages. You are quite right- a Russian nuclear tactical strike would probably not provoke an all-out strike in response. Invent your own clancyism for what causes the conventional war, but Russia gets faced with a really lovely tactical situation and risks losing a significant force in an envelopment. They (for whatever, insane reason) use a handful of low-yield tactical nukes (3 or 4) to hit staging areas/airbases/command areas/whatever and a strongpoint/key feature or two to turn the tactical situation around. What are the potential responses? Essentially it boils down to surrender or keep fighting. Surrender? Well the game ended someone won. So, it's a fight. The response by NATO/America wouldn't be to glass Moscow yet, but it would probably involve a retaliatory strike to remove the immediate risk (i.e. the divisions the Russians were trying to save, and the bases the nuclear strike came from), because they will have no idea if this is a one-off blow or the start of a series of strikes, and they probably already lost a lot of ability to respond. This strike doesn't happen instantaneously, and Russian commanders are now looking at incoming bombers and missiles, not knowing with any certainty what targets they are aimed at- how much they stand to lose. They then have the option of sitting in bunkers and hoping for the best, or launching more missiles/bombers they are about to lose anyway to try and soften the counterstrike. Already, within the first few hours at most, the response to the strike probably turned a tactical use into theatre-wide use, and if it keeps escalating as is likely, within hours to a day or two someone will soon start fearing for strategic weapons like ICBM's and the major exchange begins. MAD doesn't care if you start big or small, the burning focus of so many billions spent is to make sure that the weapons get delivered and go off. I would be surprised if even a ten-thousandth as much gets spent on efforts to research defusing a nuclear war once it has gotten started, or even if it's deemed a likely avenue of effort at all.
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Dec 6, 2015 18:22
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Another excerpt from Ed Zuckerman's book if anyone cares. (Well more or less an excerpt, it's heavily abridged from the chapter) I wonder how an oil focused company like Exxon expected to function after a nuclear war, sure they can have a few board members survive in a bunker somewhere but that's not much help if there's no one to drill for them. http://aliciapatterson.org/stories/corporate-civil-defense quote:HUTCHINSON, Kan. -Six hundred and fifty feet beneath the Kansas prairie, in a mined-out section of a working salt mine, a man in a gray plaid suit sits at a telex machine typing out and receiving messages. This is only a test-the man comes to the salt mine two times a year for a communications drill. But if a nuclear attack had been launched against the United States, the messages he is sending and receiving would be devoted to re-establishing the services of the Federal Reserve Bank in the devastated country.  
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Dec 23, 2015 06:49
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Maybe I don't know the whole story but I would imagine that in any war where you need a deep underground bunker to survive, money won't have much value in the subsequent years.
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Dec 26, 2015 03:18
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BattleMaster posted:Maybe I don't know the whole story but I would imagine that in any war where you need a deep underground bunker to survive, money won't have much value in the subsequent years. Depends. In the worst case full on exchange scenario everyone dies within a month. But there is a lot of wiggle room between total annihilation, and say an american first or counter-strike that ensures no more then say 100 russian nukes detonate successfully. Still devastating, but with only 100 lots of people will survive, and at that point ANY preparation is better then none.
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Dec 26, 2015 06:37
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Powercrazy posted:Depends. In the worst case full on exchange scenario everyone dies within a month. But there is a lot of wiggle room between total annihilation, and say an american first or counter-strike that ensures no more then say 100 russian nukes detonate successfully. Still devastating, but with only 100 lots of people will survive, and at that point ANY preparation is better then none. What if your neighbors realize you're the prepared one on the block, and steal all your stuff and eat you when your supplies run out? What then? I bet you would have wished you were never prepared!
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Dec 26, 2015 14:52
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loving lol good to know capitalism will survive a nuclear holocaust Put a bullet in the head of the beast already jfc
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Dec 26, 2015 22:05
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BattleMaster posted:Maybe I don't know the whole story but I would imagine that in any war where you need a deep underground bunker to survive, money won't have much value in the subsequent years. Put enough gold coins in a sock and you can take your neighbor's can of beans. E: Powercrazy posted:Depends. In the worst case full on exchange scenario everyone dies within a month. But there is a lot of wiggle room between total annihilation, and say an american first or counter-strike that ensures no more then say 100 russian nukes detonate successfully. Still devastating, but with only 100 lots of people will survive, and at that point ANY preparation is better then none. Time to talk about counter-force versus counter-value. A counter-force strike means it's a bad day to be in the Midwest or anywhere near a military base, but most people survive. Counter-value is the doomsday scenario. goatsestretchgoals fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Dec 27, 2015 |
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Dec 27, 2015 00:14
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buttcoinbrony posted:Time to talk about counter-force versus counter-value. A counter-force strike means it's a bad day to be in the Midwest or anywhere near a military base, but most people survive. Counter-value is the doomsday scenario. Obviously both cases are dependent on the exact nature of a strike, I just wanted to point out that it might not be as straight forward as "nuking people = more deaths".
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Dec 27, 2015 18:31
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Arglebargle III posted:Because the targeting systems are ancient and take a long time to reprogram and nobody has time for that. I don't know about targeting systems specifically but Minuteman missiles have gone through tech refresh programs since the 60s.
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Dec 28, 2015 01:22
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TheWhiteNightmare posted:I don't know about targeting systems specifically but Minuteman missiles have gone through tech refresh programs since the 60s. A tech refresh in the USAF means upgrading to something that is still a decade behind. So, they went from 5 1/2 inch floppy disks to 3 1/4 floppy disks.
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Dec 28, 2015 02:40
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CommieGIR posted:A tech refresh in the USAF means upgrading to something that is still a decade behind. Nuclear launch security code increased from 8 zeroes to 16 zeroes.
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Dec 28, 2015 02:46
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C.M. Kruger posted:Nuclear launch security code increased from 8 zeroes to 16 zeroes. Finally made it to the 286.
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Dec 28, 2015 02:49
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Powercrazy posted:Depends. In the worst case full on exchange scenario everyone dies within a month. But there is a lot of wiggle room between total annihilation, and say an american first or counter-strike that ensures no more then say 100 russian nukes detonate successfully. Still devastating, but with only 100 lots of people will survive, and at that point ANY preparation is better then none. True; some semblance of a national banking and accounting system should exist, even if it's just to receive and disburse all the yen we'd get from selling Hawaii and Alaska to the Japanese. ohgodwhat posted:What if your neighbors realize you're the prepared one on the block, and steal all your stuff and eat you when your supplies run out? What then? I bet you would have wished you were never prepared! I think, after a nuclear war, that the US would be the geopolitical equivalent of the unhinged veteran that levels his hidden grenade launcher at every car that drives past his house.
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Dec 28, 2015 04:58
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BattleMaster posted:Maybe I don't know the whole story but I would imagine that in any war where you need a deep underground bunker to survive, money won't have much value in the subsequent years. A very good point. That leads to all sorts of interesting questions on income taxes post-attack. On the bright(?) side no more tobacco. (I think it's still alright to scan these seeing as the book's been of print for 30+ years. If not, let me know and I'll take them down)           
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Dec 28, 2015 21:28
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I've seen the opposite conclusion drawn, where the counter-force strike's secondary effects (fallout from ground bursts) ends up being deadlier, in the long term. A counter-value strike basically concentrates the effects of a strike on specific people at a specific time, resulting in a "clean break" which makes it easier to bounce back. A counter-force strike on the other hand means you have a lot of weakened survivors, who will over time be joined by people suffering varying degrees of radiation poisoning. You're basically talking entire communities who all suffer from weakened immune systems, at a time when hygiene is harder to maintain, and resources are scarce. That's a perfect breeding ground for epidemics, which if they aren't dealt with properly early on could result in a feedback loop which makes it harder and harder to deal with them until you maybe reach a new equilibrium at a much lower population. The underlying issue here is that if strategic planners have two hypothetical options, one which is counter-force and the other counter-value and the counter-force option is better at achieving the counter-value option's goals, there's no reason to have both. If there's a reason that one is more effective, then in all likelihood this has affected the other option as well. The distinction between targeting people and targeting things near a lot of people is quite fuzzy with nuclear weaponry. Nothing really says that a planner can't just print out a list of census tracts, sort by population and then assign warheads down the line air burst to get the most people, but it's unlikely anybody would. It's the most obvious deterrent to anybody who's not a blood-gargling psychopath but it's pretty safe to assume that someone launching a first strike probably is. Such a person is already killing untold millions of people in the pursuit of their geopolitical objectives, so why would they care about more deaths if they still "win" in the end? Meanwhile someone that isn't will find the human cost of any counterattack unbearable even if it's "only" a few dozen megadeaths1. This means that the safe bet is to assume the other side is literally Worse Than Hitler and the historic record makes it amply clear both sides in fact did so. If the other side can't "win" then they won't attack no matter how callous they are to human life, and the most obvious target is their senior leadership directly. Weapons like the unitary warhead R36M2 (20 megatons) and the B61 mod 11 (340 kiloton2 bunker buster) are pretty much only useful for blowing up ultra-hardened targets like continuity of government bunkers. Unfortunately those bunkers tend to be near major population centers so there's going to be nasty fallout regardless. After that the priority would be targets that would prevent the opponent from continuing to wage war even after the nuclear silos are empty, like their conventional or tactical nuclear forces. Destroying infrastructure can bring the opponent's nation to a halt. Oil refineries, pipelines, rail yards, bridges, dams and power plants are necessary for a modern economy or military to function. Factories for munitions and other military equipment mean that when their stockpiles run out or are destroyed, they have no way to manufacture more. Many of these targets could be severely damaged by air bursts, but ground bursts would be more reliable at taking them out permanently. Even bombing raids during WWII that targeted residential areas took otherwise unnecessary steps to at least offer the pretense that they weren't about just killing civilians. Leaflet drops over potential target cities encouraged residents to evacuate so that they wouldn't be killed if their homes were bombed. At some level the Allied leadership really wanted fewer civilian casualties because they thought that it would be more damaging to the Axis war effort. Feeding, clothing and sheltering tens of thousands of people takes resources that could otherwise be used to keep soldiers in the field and the Nazis were nothing if not accomplished at cheaply disposing of bodies. 1 Yes, that's a unit of measurement. 2 The B61 supports dial-a-yield so there's little reason not to have the option available.
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Dec 29, 2015 03:31
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Physically/mechanically speaking, how does "dial-a-yield" work?
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Dec 29, 2015 04:43
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gradenko_2000 posted:Physically/mechanically speaking, how does "dial-a-yield" work? I'm not a nuclear bomb designer so take this with a huge grain of salt, but to my understanding nuclear bombs work in terms of stages. The first stage is a fission stage, like the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These give off excess neutrons which can be used to initiate a much bigger fusion reaction under the right circumstances and with the right fuel. The fuel is tritium and the right circumstances are a specially designed cavity within the bomb. Change the amount of tritium in that cavity, and you change the size of the resulting explosion. So I believe that it's a tank of tritium that pumps the selected amount into the cavity. It's also possible to trigger a third fission stage off the fusion stage and I believe that's what weapons in the 1+ megaton range do. I don't know whether it's possible to change the yield of those, but at that point I'm not sure the recipient would appreciate the distinction.
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Dec 29, 2015 05:25
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1337JiveTurkey posted:I'm not a nuclear bomb designer so take this with a huge grain of salt, but to my understanding nuclear bombs work in terms of stages. The first stage is a fission stage, like the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These give off excess neutrons which can be used to initiate a much bigger fusion reaction under the right circumstances and with the right fuel. The fuel is tritium and the right circumstances are a specially designed cavity within the bomb. Change the amount of tritium in that cavity, and you change the size of the resulting explosion. So I believe that it's a tank of tritium that pumps the selected amount into the cavity. This is pretty correct. On most bombs the tritium tank just replenishes the store of tritium in the warhead, but in variable bombs it can be used to determine the yield.
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Dec 29, 2015 06:20
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1337JiveTurkey posted:The underlying issue here is that if strategic planners have two hypothetical options, one which is counter-force and the other counter-value and the counter-force option is better at achieving the counter-value option's goals, there's no reason to have both. If there's a reason that one is more effective, then in all likelihood this has affected the other option as well. But yeah, I agree with you about the whole priority list of targets.
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Dec 29, 2015 08:42
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1337JiveTurkey posted:I'm not a nuclear bomb designer so take this with a huge grain of salt, but to my understanding nuclear bombs work in terms of stages. The first stage is a fission stage, like the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These give off excess neutrons which can be used to initiate a much bigger fusion reaction under the right circumstances and with the right fuel. The fuel is tritium and the right circumstances are a specially designed cavity within the bomb. Change the amount of tritium in that cavity, and you change the size of the resulting explosion. So I believe that it's a tank of tritium that pumps the selected amount into the cavity. You're nearly there, but the boosting/thermonuclear-development thing is a bit more complex, as are the places where tritium (hydrogen-3/3H) can come into play. During development of Fat Man, Los Alamos was already looking at hollow cores to improve weapon efficiency. Stuff smashes into each other harder during an implosion when there's an air gap in the center, and you can get away with using much less prime-grade nuclear material this way too. The reason why the first implosion bomb didn't use this technique, and was such a terribly inefficient device as a consequence, was that the US wanted to be sure it'd go off the first time(s). The Soviets' first bomb was a direct copy of Fat Man because they (Stalin) too wanted to be sure it'd go off, even though their scientists were already looking at the better 'hollow pit' solution. Soon after detonating their first ones, both sides' second generation weapons benefitted greatly from the idea of these hollow cores, at least doubling efficiency (i.e. increasing the amount of material that undergoes fission). You're totally right in that the next step was injecting tritium gas into the cavity to release more neutrons during implosion, and further increase the amount of material undergoing fission. This hasn't got anything to do with having a 'true' thermonuclear weapon - with a discrete second stage which can increase weapon power by an order of magnitute - in concept though. True, it provides for a really powerful fission 'primary' bomb that can light a fusion secondary more easily, but the idea of 'boosting' a weapon through tritium gas came some time before the one weird trick for a true thermonuclear device was even figured out! Further development of boosting did kinda end up in a thermonuclear dead end though, and again tritium plays a large part. The original 'superbomb' idea was to build a layered bomb which in itself could produce tritium by lighting up a shell of lithium-6 deuteride (which'd undergo a bit of deuterium-tritium fusion), in turn igniting fission in a 'natural' (non-enriched) uranium-238 outer casing. Unfortunately this design (Sloika/Layer Cake in the USSR, Alarm Clock in the US, some UK piece of poo poo that wasn't even tested) brought pit design right back towards the path of inefficiency: li6 deuteride 'fusion' provided only a fraction extra weapon yield, and the amount of U238 needed made it big and heavy for little extra effect compared to the technologically 'sweet' basic boosted weapon. Anyway, true fusion indeed requires a fission bomb (primary) as a trigger for a radiation implosion (or ablation, rather) of the fusion fuel secondary. X-rays from the primary bounce around in a radiation-opaque casing surrounding both stages, and 'heat up' both the outside of a hollow cylinder of fusion fuel, and a U238 'sparkplug' inside. Since this secondary stands off a bit from the fission primary, and because the fusion part doesn't get blown outward like in the layered design, it's got enough time to fully ignite and hella increase weapon yield through full thermonuclear effects rather. So the tritium-boosted fission primary (first useful 3H usecase) provides enough excess neutrons in X-rays to compress the fusion secondary, but AFAIK with a powerful enough non-boosted primary you'd get there too. Not that there's any reason to use a shitton more fissile materials though  With the second useful 3H usecase, the production of tritium during LiD fusion, an unexpected boon came to light when the US detonated the Shrimp device in the Castle Bravo test, which used both lithium-6 and -7 as its partially enriched LiD fuel. Ivy Mike, the first hydrogen bomb test, had used a fuckoff huge tank of liquid deuterium for a D-D fusion secondary. In the follow-up Castle series, newer, deliverable weapons with solid fuel secondaries were tested. Using the same 'self-producing' Deuterium-Tritium fusion from Lithium Deuteride as the Alarm Clock design, but now in a true, staged thermonuclear device. Li6 was expensive though so it was diluted with common li7 which wasn't expected to break down as rapidly and not add any energy to the fusion process like li6 woulkd. Turns out they were wrong! In the sunny insides of a thermonuclear reaction, instead of absorbing a neutron and producing Li8, Li7 captures the neutron, and instantly decays into an alpha particle, another neutron, and a tritium nucleus! Bog-standard Li7 upped the yield of this early two- (not three!) staged device a whopping two and a half times, from an expected average of 6 megatons, to 15Mt. So there you have it, free tritium from cheap lithium, entirely different from using it as a separate booster in a fission device, and in a basic two-stage package. e: cleaning up phoneposting Koesj fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Dec 29, 2015 |
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Dec 29, 2015 16:22
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1337JiveTurkey posted:It's also possible to trigger a third fission stage off the fusion stage and I believe that's what weapons in the 1+ megaton range do. I don't know whether it's possible to change the yield of those, but at that point I'm not sure the recipient would appreciate the distinction. You can also have 3 stage weapons where there is a fission primary (trigger), a fusion second stage, and an even bigger third fusion stage on top of that. Then you can add a uranium tamper on top of that for even more yield. The USAF B41 nuclear bomb apparently worked that way and yielded 25 megatons in the dirtier fission-fusion-fusion-fission variant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B41_nuclear_bomb
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Dec 29, 2015 20:37
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So why didn't everyone mass deploy Tsar Bomba size bombs? If you gotta MAD, MAD properly 
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Dec 29, 2015 20:37
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:So why didn't everyone mass deploy Tsar Bomba size bombs? Tsar Bomba wasn't really a usable weapon. It was 26 feet long and weighed 60,000 pounds. They also had to dial it back from 100 MT to 50 so it wouldn't knock the plane that dropped it out of the sky. By comparison the 25 MT B41 was half as long and 1/6th the weight. e: Once ballistic missiles became the main delivery system gigantic bombs were pretty much obsolete. Better to stick 8+ 300-500 MT warheads on one missile.
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Dec 29, 2015 20:44
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Koesj posted:... It's darkly amusing that men designing the most destructive weapons ever made them even more powerful basically by accident. Reminds me of how a big metal disk unintentionally became the fastest man-made object ever. quote:At 10:35pm on August 27, 1957 in Area U3d of the New Mexico Nuclear Test Site, the bomb was detonated. But instead of the expected small yield the bomb detonated with a yield approximately five orders of magnitude greater than expected...The blast instantly vaporized the entire multi-ton concrete collimator and shot it up the tube as a multi-ton wave of vaporized matter at extremely high temperature, pressure, and velocity. The shaft had, in effect, become a enormous 500-foot long, four-foot wide gun barrel with the energy of billions of pounds of TNT released at one end and, at the other end, the now insignificantly small metal cap, about the equivalent of a bottle cap on the end of a naval gun. Edit: this might have been posted before but it's so cool I can't help myself.
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Dec 29, 2015 20:47
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blowfish posted:So why didn't everyone mass deploy Tsar Bomba size bombs? Because a lot of small nukes are far more effective than a few big ones for everything that isn't literally vaporizing a mountain.
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Dec 29, 2015 20:47
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Didn't New Horizons set a record for fastest object? According to the nuclear simulator I linked before the largest warheads in the US arsenal are ~1 MT. With multiple warhead ICBMs and all that stuff anything more per warhead is overkill.
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Dec 29, 2015 21:06
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McDowell posted:Didn't New Horizons set a record for fastest object? New Horizons got up to 36,373 mph. Faster than voyager, but still slower than the big metal disk. It's just that these stats typically only count things that are fast-moving on purpose.
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Dec 29, 2015 21:16
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It would be stupid to not have missiles aimed at every other nuclear-capable nation somewhere. International relations can sour real drat fast. You'd be stupid to assume we don't have a plan to take down even our closest allies if they turn belligerent for whatever reason. You have no idea how international politics work do you
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Dec 31, 2015 00:09
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| # ? May 5, 2024 02:34 |
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sean10mm posted:Tsar Bomba wasn't really a usable weapon. It was 26 feet long and weighed 60,000 pounds. They also had to dial it back from 100 MT to 50 so it wouldn't knock the plane that dropped it out of the sky. By comparison the 25 MT B41 was half as long and 1/6th the weight. Also they had to attach a parachute to the bomb so the plane could get clear, even with the 50MT dial down.
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Dec 31, 2015 00:18
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