I don't believe in any gods, but under the circumstances I still think prayer is your best shot.
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Moderator: LadyTevar
Or give it the finger to go out in a blaze of (useless, but gratifying) defiance.Night_stalker wrote:If you are at ground zero of a incoming nuke, all you can do is kiss your ass goodbye.
I think it's unlikely that you'll have time to experience the gratification the defiance would offer.iborg wrote:Or give it the finger to go out in a blaze of (useless, but gratifying) defiance.
Nah, I'd rather not be in that situation, ever. Nukes suck when you're the target !
This is true but remember, if the device is initiating over your head, it isn't doing so over somebody else's. Looking at it another way, if they're standing on Ground Zero, you're not. Close in, the only defense is to be somewhere else, but as you get further and further away from Ground Zero, you increasingly are somewhere else. With distance from GZ, relatively simple precautions greatly increase your chance of survival. Painting the windows is a good example. It sounds weird but if you're a few miles from the GZ, it's a major boost to your possibility of living.Night_stalker wrote:If you are at ground zero of a incoming nuke, all you can do is kiss your ass goodbye.
Actually, this is not quite true. During one test a metal sphere close to the initiation was found miles away: a relatively thin layer of it's outside had been vaporised, and the expanding metal plasma had acted both as a radiation shield, and a means of propulsion, flinging the ball away from the blast. IIRC it was the basis upon which the Orion Project (nuclear pulse propulsion for spacecraft) was based.Ruadhan2300 wrote:yah...you never hear about flying debris from a nuclear blast...I mean, at those ranges in the blast, you get temperatures hot enough to flash-boil lead. that fridge wouldn't have lasted more than half a second. as for riding the blast wave....not a chance, that thing's moving at hundreds of miles an hour, you might be able to if you started the fridge moving beforehand....
No... no they're not. *points to the last few pages of discussion*ChrisWWII wrote:But yes....I may not know as much as I would like about nuclear weapons and their defenses, but nukes aren't the BOOM everyone's dead weapon Hollywood says they are. They're just an unusually large bomb, and need to be treated as such. (Sorry if this has already been mentioned.....I haven't read all the way up yet.)
No he wasn't. He was at least a mile away, probably more, and given the size of the series of nuclear tests that actually happened that year, we'd be looking at a device around the 10 kt range.Saint_007 wrote:Before everyone can scream for your blood, iBorg, let me say: No. Just No.
The fridge worked against radiation because it was lead-lined, but I'm thinking that if you're ground zero on a ground blast, the radiation's going to be enough to be lethal, lead shielding or not. Secondly, it's a major "wallbanger", to quote TV Tropes, because Indy was effectively at ground zero of the blast -
Well, looking at the sequence Stuart describes, the direct pulse of infrared radiation and such would be a problem. Don't know about overpressure crushing the fridge; we can probably look at real evidence from places like Hiroshima for that.the fridge would get crushed like an empty soda can, turning one idiot adventurer into pulp, which would then be cooked to a crisp by the intense heat and radiation.
Ahem. The heat pulse from Terwynn's description emerges when the fireball cools to the point where it can start emitting direct blackbody radiation, without that radiation being automatically absorbed and re-emitted by the surrounding medium. Or am I mistaken?Baughn wrote:Different mechanism entirely. The cosmic microwave background has not been absorbed and re-emitted; the 380-kiloyear horizon for it is specifically because before then, it was.Simon_Jester wrote: Thinking it over, I've heard of the phenomenon in a different context; the cosmic microwave background started out as the heat pulse of the Big Bang, currently estimated as originating 380 thousand years after the event.
Its current low wavelength is purely due to red-shifting from an expanding universe.
Well, it's hard to avoid that; most of us aren't good at mentally processing "holy shit that was half a million people." Now, you could do it. Say, have footage of a huge marching column that stretches for miles, compare it to other massive crowds, that sort of thing. Done carefully, it might work.Ryan Thunder wrote:Stuart, just something I've noticed is that in spite of the detail of your descriptions, I don't seem to be getting a good sense of the scale of things. Just numbers aren't enough to communicate it, really. I know in my head that this was an incredibly large army that was just totally destroyed, but the emotional part of my brain just doesn't pick up on it. As far as its concerned all that happened was "Oh, okay, some angels got nuked." I'm just concerned that it might have the same effect on some other folks.
Anyway, I hope you find that helpful.
Once it's clear of the atmosphere, you only get a plasma striking the kick-plate. Various Orion designs actually included some mechanism which would spray a coating on the hull between blasts, which would ablate instead of the actual surface.Ruadhan2300 wrote:cool, hadn't heard about that metal sphere thing. makes sense though. I'm left wondering about the orion project....how would such a spacecraft stay intact long enough to get anywhere? beyond simple thickness of material, over time presumably the blast-shield will be eroded away. I guess in space though the heat-blast is less an issue, likewise the shockwave.
Yeah the idea was the initial launch from earth would just eat up the plate, since the blasts had to be very rapid to gain any height. But once the blast rate could be slowed down and you simply needed to add speed to leave earth orbit, oil sprays would keep coating the plate. The vaporization of the oil would also add thrust, helping make up for the mass penalty of hauling it along which is nice. If the craft was assembled in orbit then the plate could of course be coated from the onset. God help them designing the spray system. Orion is one of those things when math says it should work great, but the practical engineering is pretty insane.CaptainChewbacca wrote: Once it's clear of the atmosphere, you only get a plasma striking the kick-plate. Various Orion designs actually included some mechanism which would spray a coating on the hull between blasts, which would ablate instead of the actual surface.
I've heard a proposal where they bolt about a zillion SRB's to the Orion ship to get it into the upper atmosphere (not sure how close to orbital velocity); that would help with the eating up of the plate, and also with the fallout because you're not vaporizing hundreds or thousands of tons of steel with point blank nuclear blasts in the Earth's atmosphere.Sea Skimmer wrote:Yeah the idea was the initial launch from earth would just eat up the plate, since the blasts had to be very rapid to gain any height. But once the blast rate could be slowed down and you simply needed to add speed to leave earth orbit, oil sprays would keep coating the plate. The vaporization of the oil would also add thrust, helping make up for the mass penalty of hauling it along which is nice. If the craft was assembled in orbit then the plate could of course be coated from the onset. God help them designing the spray system. Orion is one of those things when math says it should work great, but the practical engineering is pretty insane.
Indeed it would, contrary to the moronic rantings of the naysayers who delight in mocking "Duck and Cover."JN1 wrote:Painting of windows was long standing Civil Defence advice in the UK; you only have to look at some of the CD films from the '60s to see that and it appears as late as the '80s.
It, along with much of the other advice, was, IMVHO anyway, unfairly maligned. In many circumstances the advice in Advising the Householder and Protect and Survive would save your life.
I think that's what led to the mass mockery of "duck and cover." Not so much the idea that it wouldn't work to some degree, as the idea that being alive after the bombs go off wasn't necessarily all that desirable a state of affairs.Bayonet wrote:Indeed it would, contrary to the moronic rantings of the naysayers who delight in mocking "Duck and Cover."
Granted, there is no defense if you are close enough, no more than there is if a grenade goes off in your hole. But if you are far enough away, and many-many people will be far enough away in an urban initiation, not being cut to ribbons by flying glass seems a worthy goal.
None of this addresses the issue of the devastation of society and its death toll, greater than that from the initial lay-downs, , which is covered in TBO and its follow-on works.
Yes, destroying hope and the will to resist, is an effective way to demoralize and weaken the enemy.Simon_Jester wrote: I think that's what led to the mass mockery of "duck and cover." Not so much the idea that it wouldn't work to some degree, as the idea that being alive after the bombs go off wasn't necessarily all that desirable a state of affairs.
I've heard that one too, it would be a rather expensive option though given how massive even a 'small' Orion was expected to be. Pretty quickly you'd have to ask why not just launch a ship in pieces totally conventionally. Once you are in space, much less reason exists to use an Orion drive instead of a nuclear reactor powered ion engine. Another idea for reducing fallout was to make the first blast be a big pile of conventional high explosives on the launch pad.Simon_Jester wrote:I've heard a proposal where they bolt about a zillion SRB's to the Orion ship to get it into the upper atmosphere (not sure how close to orbital velocity); that would help with the eating up of the plate, and also with the fallout because you're not vaporizing hundreds or thousands of tons of steel with point blank nuclear blasts in the Earth's atmosphere.
Except if you want to go places relatively quickly. Remember that Orion drives were concieved in a time when complex robot missions were still very much a pipe dream. Orion was manned. And you don't want your crew to suffer microgravity for any longer than needed, nor do you want them to spend a decade in space.Sea Skimmer wrote:I've heard that one too, it would be a rather expensive option though given how massive even a 'small' Orion was expected to be. Pretty quickly you'd have to ask why not just launch a ship in pieces totally conventionally. Once you are in space, much less reason exists to use an Orion drive instead of a nuclear reactor powered ion engine.Simon_Jester wrote:I've heard a proposal where they bolt about a zillion SRB's to the Orion ship to get it into the upper atmosphere (not sure how close to orbital velocity); that would help with the eating up of the plate, and also with the fallout because you're not vaporizing hundreds or thousands of tons of steel with point blank nuclear blasts in the Earth's atmosphere.
...?Bayonet wrote:Yes, destroying hope and the will to resist, is an effective way to demoralize and weaken the enemy.Simon_Jester wrote: I think that's what led to the mass mockery of "duck and cover." Not so much the idea that it wouldn't work to some degree, as the idea that being alive after the bombs go off wasn't necessarily all that desirable a state of affairs.
Then there was the collage kid in Florida who did it in '79, and managed - according to the newspapers - to get some Pakistani agents chasing him in the supposed "hope" of recruiting him for the Paki nuclear weapon design team. Whether he wanted to be recruited or not.Michael Garrity wrote:Iborg, Stuart et al:
Back in the 1970's, a student at Harvard wrote a senior paper titled 'How to design an Atomic Bomb'. As part of the writing process, he called Dupont and got them to tell him what kind of high explosive (major whoopsie on their part). He ended up getting an 'A' for the paper.
Two items of importance here are that his academic adviser was Dr. Freeman Dyson, and that once the Government saw what he wrote, they seized all copies and backup materials and classified them Top Secret.
Mike Garrity
Well it would really depend on what you want to do. Since you need as much thrust as you use to speed up to slow down, and you can only haul so many nuclear weapons, an Orion craft has a very limited mission profile. Its great for going from one point to another, and that's it. If you want to come back, or stop at many planets it wont work so well. An Ion drive is much slower to speed up and down, but its nuclear reactor core could last for decades, and you could find more propellent as you go. So on a long range mission the ion drive ship might end up being faster because the engine is always running.Atlan wrote: Except if you want to go places relatively quickly. Remember that Orion drives were concieved in a time when complex robot missions were still very much a pipe dream. Orion was manned. And you don't want your crew to suffer microgravity for any longer than needed, nor do you want them to spend a decade in space.