|
stealie72 posted:Am I looking at this wrong, or are you supposed to taxi through the Bugs Bunny cartoon shaped hole in the back wall, then stick the nose through the hole in the front wall? That's. . . something. Finally someone is acknowledging how loving bonkers hat hangar is.
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2016 20:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 05:50 |
|
|
quote:The whole airplane has to be dragged into a specially constructed hanger/hot room, where the reactor has to be removed by remote control, and placed in a pool. Meanwhile, the nose is on the other side of several feet of lead and concrete, and the squidgy organic bits can deplane in relative safety. The actual plane itself would have to have a 'massive' amount of shielding, which is just the thing aeronautical engineers like to hear. The people who made this design study still figured this would not be enough to protect the crew against significant radiation exposure, and figured that training flights would be kept to a minimum, and restricted to low power at that. The crew would undertake one actual mission on a full power profile - and then they would have received the maximum safe lifetime exposure to radiation, and would never fly the atomic hate needle ever again. quote:The idea persavered [sic] for a time, despite the fact it was obviously bonkers.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2016 20:07
|
|
|
Combining Bugs Bunny and the Chernobyl sarcophagus is a bit out there even by the standards of the time, yeah.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2016 20:09
|
|
|
Why is that nuke plane so long and thin? Is that just artistic license or is there an engineering reason for it?
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2016 20:11
|
|
|
bewbies posted:Why is that nuke plane so long and thin? Is that just artistic license or is there an engineering reason for it? There's a god drat nuclear reactor in the rear end end and the crew want to be as far away from it as possible.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2016 20:17
|
|
|
bewbies posted:Why is that nuke plane so long and thin? Is that just artistic license or is there an engineering reason for it? Inverse square law. The farther the cockpit is from the glowy bits, the less radiation it receives, and you need a smaller volume of shielding material.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2016 20:17
|
|
|
bewbies posted:Why is that nuke plane so long and thin? Is that just artistic license or is there an engineering reason for it? Longer answer: the shielding is so heavy it's easier to make the plane really long and use distance. You can't use too much shielding because the reactor is already really heavy and it's in the back of the plane and you can't have your center of mass behind the wings.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2016 20:20
|
|
|
Now I'm thinking of like a pod racer setup. Have your giant fuckoff nuke death engine/bomb ship in like a flying wing setup way out in front, then attach a glider to the back with tow ropes. Glider is far away from the radiation, and no engine means more weight to spend in shielding. Crews man the glider, and then when it's time to go home, put Ol' Glowy into autopilot over the ocean, detach and glide home. New crews get ferried up and linked to the engine air-refueling style.
Suspect Bucket fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Jun 15, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2016 20:30
|
|
|
Throatwarbler posted:There's a god drat nuclear reactor in the rear end end and the crew want to be as far away from it as possible. Yeah, Platystemon quoted my original post in the AI thread about these images. For the confused, I have a blog post. The TL;DR version is that the atomic hate needle is unshielded or maybe has limited shielding way, way out front. The multi-part hanger was a pretty desperate ploy to imagine how the reactor could be handled. The central chamber is so hot when the plane's reactor core is being moved from the plane to the pool of water everything has to be remote control. While there were many ideas for nuclear powered aircraft in the 1950s, both the Soviets and the Americans learned the essential lesson "for God's sake don't do this" pretty quickly. The nuclear train is a neat idea, abet one that would probably need uranium enriched past 20%. Unless you started looking at building an atomic powered Ratte*, though, it's pretty much trains and ships using atomic power. *  But what if you used one of those reactors smaller and less complex than a LWR? A pebble bed something something? I bet you could power an airship with it 
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2016 20:35
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:Yeah, Platystemon quoted my original post in the AI thread about these images. For the confused, I have a blog post. The TL;DR version is that the atomic hate needle is unshielded or maybe has limited shielding way, way out front. The multi-part hanger was a pretty desperate ploy to imagine how the reactor could be handled. The central chamber is so hot when the plane's reactor core is being moved from the plane to the pool of water everything has to be remote control. Reminds me of the Oak Ridge unshielded reactor experiment where they had a reactor in a shielded pit in the woods on an elevator. They'd open the pit and lift it out and let it irradiate the area just to see what happened to the flora and fauna. Spoiler alert: it killed everything.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2016 20:43
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:Reminds me of the Oak Ridge unshielded reactor experiment where they had a reactor in a shielded pit in the woods on an elevator. They'd open the pit and lift it out and let it irradiate the area just to see what happened to the flora and fauna. That’s not true. It also gave use ruby red grapefruits and frost‐resistant wheat. That might well have been a different experiment. I don’t remember the nuances.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2016 20:45
|
|
|
Platystemon posted:That’s not true. It also gave use ruby red grapefruits and frost‐resistant wheat. http://pruned.blogspot.com/2011/04/atomic-gardens.html
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2016 21:13
|
|
|
PCjr sidecar posted:Looks like it's on rails. I can't tell if it's on rails or if those are supposed to be painted lines and hangar doors. Edit: loving Cold War, man. Godholio fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Jun 15, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2016 22:42
|
|
|
 Friendly reminder that we actually tested an open-cycle nuclear ramjet back in the 50s.  (repeat step 2 as necessary)
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2016 23:07
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:atomic powered Ratte* Just imagine the design ideas you could've sold to Hitler if nuclear power had been available.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2016 23:58
|
|
|
aphid_licker posted:Just imagine the design ideas you could've sold to Hitler if nuclear power had been available. None. Hitler will have none of your seditious Jüdische Physik. To the camps you go.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 00:11
|
|
|
LostCosmonaut posted:
http://www.lanl.gov/science/NSS/issue1_2011/story4full.shtml Even though this is on a .gov site, the layout is hilariously bad. The second "Fig.2" is actually a NERVA motor being tested. Yup, an absolutely unshielded reactor producing thrust.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 03:02
|
|
|
babyeatingpsychopath posted:http://www.lanl.gov/science/NSS/issue1_2011/story4full.shtml On a scale of 1 to 50,000 years, how uninhabitable is the area around that testing to perpetuity?
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 03:33
|
|
|
At least NERVA is only meant for use in outer space which is swimming in radiation anyway. Most proposals for actually using nuclear rockets involve launching the fuel separately and fueling the reactor in space for orbital operations.B4Ctom1 posted:On a scale of 1 to 50,000 years, how uninhabitable is the area around that testing to perpetuity? It's hydrogen run through a cooled reactor core in tubes, unlike project Pluto which I believe ran air directly over the fissile material. I'd be way more worried about direct radiation from the reactor than any nasty stuff coming out the nozzle. That, and Jackass Flats is located in Nevada where they did a shitload of bomb testing; the radiation from NERVA is probably a rounding error. In any case, modern projects generally run nozzle testing and reactor development separately; they use a different heat source to stand in for the reactor.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 04:23
|
|
|
mlmp08 posted:Finally someone is acknowledging how loving bonkers that hangar is. It's pretty much the Wile E. Coyote school of bomber design.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 04:42
|
|
|
PhotoKirk posted:It's pretty much the Wile E. Coyote school of bomber design. 1950s.txt Enourmo posted:In any case, modern projects generally run nozzle testing and reactor development separately; they use a different heat source to stand in for the reactor. Wait, how much nuclear rocket testing is going on these days?
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 05:01
|
|
|
Well, I guess I meant "would run". There's little trickles of development going on like here. It would actually be a pretty drat useful technology for deep space missions. The very best chemical rocket engines have a specific impulse (impulse per unit fuel mass, basically how much you can accelerate a given payload using x amount of fuel) of about 450 seconds; nuclear thermal rockets, have on the order of 1000. Double the efficiency is pretty good, but it's actually better than that, because for every extra pound of fuel you have to carry several extra pounds of fuel to accelerate that pound, and even more to accelerate them... for a 1000 lb payload, you'd need about 1,500 pounds of fuel to send it to Mars with chemical engines, vs about 500 with a fully developed NTR. Double the efficiency doesn't get you a 50% fuel mass savings, it gets you 67%. You can scale the numbers up (a long-term mars mission would have a spacecraft of about 100 tons, plus a rocket stage to return it from mars, etc), but the ratios remain about the same between engine types. If you can use 2/3 the propellant, your transfer stage is 2/3 the size, which makes the whole shebang way easier to get off the ground in the first place. Basically, they're aces if you ever want to send heavy poo poo away from Earth at very high speeds. That's actually what the NERVA program was for; Apollo was originally planned to continue on past the moon landings to a full interplanetary program. Replace the S-IVB stage with one running nuke engines and hydrogen, and you can send manned missions just about anywhere in the solar system. Then the N1 poo poo the bed (removing the BEAT THEM COMMIES motivation), Congress got cold feet and slashed NASA's budget, and demanded a big heavy non-modular spaceplane that could never go beyond nice, cheap low earth orbit. Which is why going on 50 years after the last moon landing we've yet to have an astronaut above 250 miles again. gee, Enourmo, tell us how you really feel
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 05:55
|
|
|
But but that spaceplane was going to be cheap and reusable and capable of taking off into a polar orbit, grabbing an arbitrary shaped payload and coming down to the same site before completing a full orbit!
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 05:59
|
|
|
Don't forget atmospheric skip bombing! (fears of which prompted the USSR to develop Buran in response but that's a whole nother story) Actually, I forgot this but there was a brief development project called Timberwind from '87 to '92. quote:Advances in high-temperature metals, computer modelling and nuclear engineering in general resulted in dramatically improved performance. Whereas the NERVA engine was projected to weigh about 6803 kg, the final SNTP* offered just over 1/3 the thrust from an engine of only 1650 kg, while further improving the specific impulse to 930 to 1000 seconds. Got cancelled because reasons, but we got a bunch of materials science developments out of it. *Space Nuclear Thermal Propulsion, the USAF program it was later folded into
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 06:04
|
|
|
It's a little more complicated than that* because with the ISP savings you also have a much heavier engine, and you need to bring along the fuel mass to push the heavier engine and so on. There's no furry launch. * 
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 06:41
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:It's a little more complicated than that* because with the ISP savings you also have a much heavier engine, and you need to bring along the fuel mass to push the heavier engine and so on. There's no furry launch. Suppose we have a 100 metric ton (100k kg) payload, including the rocket engine and tankage, which puts out 914kN of thrust. Using the Merlin 1d as a base, which weighs 470kg with a TWR of 200, and converting for a TWR of 30 (what's listed for Timberwind motors) gives us a mass of 3100kg for the equivalent-thrust nuclear engine. That's an increase of 2630 kg, so we'll add that to the payload mass in the rocket equation. SO Delta-V of 4000, chemical has a payload of 100 tons and isp 450s, nuclear has 102.63mt/1000s. Plugging those into the rocket equation, we get 150 tons of propellant for the chemical, and 50.4 tons not accounting for the increased weight, 51.7 if we do. Those are 34 and 35 percent of the chemical propellant load, or a difference of 1 percent. Total mass difference is an increase of about 2.6% of the total stage mass. That's not taking into account smaller tankage for the reduced propellant load; given how big hydrogen tanks have to be due to its low density, there might be a net decrease in mass.  (Incidentally all those numbers give a total thrust-weight ratio of about 0.6, perfectly reasonable for an earth escape stage already in orbit) fake edit: Of course that doesn't take into account whatever shielding/distancing they do to protect the crew from the reactor, but given the relative magnitudes of propellant/payload vs engine mass it's probably not that much more. Even if you only got a ~30% mass reduction that's still worth pursuing.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 08:01
|
|
|
The nuclear engine is massively handicapped in KSP because if it had real‐life performance, it would be the only vacuum engine anyone would use for any craft of modest size and up.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 08:15
|
|
|
The only down side is, when your rocket crashes, it's an even bigger disaster. Kerbals don't care, but NASA does.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 08:18
|
|
|
It's true, everything I know about rockets I learned from KSP. So virtually nothing, since it's good for teaching orbital mechanics but doesn't even calculate a rocket's delta v much less teach you the rocket equation. Peak
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 08:20
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:It's true, everything I know about rockets I learned from KSP. So virtually nothing, since it's good for teaching orbital mechanics but doesn't even calculate a rocket's delta v much less teach you the rocket equation. The newest version does (or possibly mechjeb makes it) because I used it to teach my daughter about delta v budgeting and Hohmann transfers when she asked how much fuel she needed to get to the mars knockoff planet. It's a great game for teaching kids stuff without them really realising they are getting edumacated.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 08:51
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:Reminds me of the Oak Ridge unshielded reactor experiment where they had a reactor in a shielded pit in the woods on an elevator. They'd open the pit and lift it out and let it irradiate the area just to see what happened to the flora and fauna. There was also this one where they ran a train about with an unshielded reactor oin the back and hosed the place up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawson_Forest Bonus points for this map of the area having a place labelled 'Supposed burial site of nuclear reactor' http://wikimapia.org/#lang=en&lat=34.364906&lon=-84.156218&z=14&m=b poo poo was crazy back in the day...
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 09:01
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:It's true, everything I know about rockets I learned from KSP. So virtually nothing, since it's good for teaching orbital mechanics but doesn't even calculate a rocket's delta v much less teach you the rocket equation. I’ll have you know that I have an encyclopædic knowledge of the precise specifications of long‐dead rocket engines. I spend all my waking hours at the archives or in advanced engineering classes. I wouldn’t be caught dead playing a popular videogame, no siree.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 09:05
|
|
|
Can't we do both?  E: I'm not a walking repository fyi, just really good at math and googling.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 09:57
|
|
|
Platystemon posted:None. Hitler will have none of your seditious Jüdische Physik. To the camps you go. That is way over played. It was something a handful of party hacks had a hard on for but the scientific establishment squashed it at the research level. The back story is hilarious. The physics failure hacks who were pushing it had some limited success with getting the SS to harass actual scientists especially Heisenberg. It turns out that Heisenberg went to grade school with himmler. Heisenberg has his mom call himmlers mom and in the end the SS cleared him of all the BS and let him get back to work. This was 38 or so. The general antisemitism pushing out a big chunk of the big league physicists had way way more of an impact than the Deutsche Physik movement.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 17:53
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:
That's amazing and I never knew that. Thanks!
|
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 19:10
|
|
|
Well - and I say this from experience - in science, it's all about who you know.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 19:19
|
|
|
    
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 19:50
|
|
|
Chuck Tingle posted:"oh whats gonna happen if we let buds kiss buds whats next are they gonna kiss PLANES TOO?" so i thought "YES ALL LOVE IS REAL WE SHOULD KISS PLANES because they are HANDSOME." Those are some very, very handsome planes.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 19:55
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:It turns out that Heisenberg went to grade school with himmler. Heisenberg has his mom call himmlers mom and in the end the SS cleared him of all the BS and let him get back to work. This was 38 or so. This is the best thing 
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 20:28
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 05:50 |
|
Nebakenezzer posted:This is the best thing The OSS also supposedly tasked a retired Jewish professional baseball player with assassinating Heisenberg. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moe_Berg
|
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2016 20:43
|
|
