Freeman Dyson, Visionary Technologist, Is Dead at 96
One of the early leaders in the drive to design the Orion nuclear pulse vehicle.
Sigh.
Feb 282020
Feb 282020
If you like the aircraft that applied atomic boot to Imperial Japanese ass – and who doesn’t – then the Smithsonian institution can hook you up. Not only do they have the famed Enola Gay on display, they also have a bunch of photos from 1945 up to more recent restorations available on their website in the form of a couple PDF collections. If you are building a B-29 model or are jsut interested in the B-29 in general or the Enola Gay in particular, this is a heck of a trove.
The first one is 419 pages (313 megabytes), with a lot of photos from what looks like the fifties to the nineties as the Enola Gay was trucked around and variously restored:
https://airandspace.si.edu/webimages/collections/full/A19500100000DOC20.pdf
The second is 318 pages (77 meg) and seems to be detail photos (mostly of pretty much individual components) from a restoration:
https://airandspace.si.edu/webimages/collections/full/A19500100000DOC06.pdf
A number of the photos can be viewed – thought not readily downloaded – here:
Support the APR Patreon to help bring more of this sort of thing to light! Alternatively, you can support through the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Feb 122020
Below is an image taken from a history of the B-52, artwork depicting the YB-52 configuration packing a single Navaho cruise missile. Cool and all, but there’s something bugging me: I could *swear* that a year or three back I came upon or was sent a passel of images showing, among other things, the B-52 carrying Navaho missiles, in the form of both artwork like this *and* diagrams. But I have been unable to locate these images, whether due to them getting separated during the move, or misplaced/misfiled prior to the move… or them not having existed in the first place because my brain is having a little joke at my expense. Unfortunately my tiny little brain is incapable of letting go of missing things like this and it’s driving me buggo. Does this sound at all familiar to anyone?
Feb 122020
Do you want to see what happens when an angled slab of metal hits a nuclear weapon at Ludicrous Speed? Of course you do.
Jan 222020
Greenpeace included with neo-Nazis on UK counter-terror list
The reason given for including Greenpeace here was not what I would have. I fully expect that in the fullness of time, the evil that Greenpeace has done to western civilization by setting back progress by the better part of a *century* through their anti-nuclear activism will be seen as an evil far exceeding that of the neo-Nazis and likely up there with the *real* Nazis. through fearmongering, intimidation and lies, Greenpeace has successfully served the interests of their dead Soviet masters and turned the western world into scientifically backwards fodder for conquest. Were it not for Greenpeace and their ilk, we could be several generations further along in nuclear power. The US could have several terawatts of installed nuclear electricity; coal and natural gas might well be on their way out. We could have nuclear reactors on the Moon and Mars powering manned bases. Our economy could be several times larger; our atmosphere substantially less loaded with carbon dioxide. Greenpeace ᚲᚨᚾ᛫ᚷᛟ᛫ᛋᛏᚱᚨᛁᚷᚺᛏ᛫ᛏᛟ᛫ᚺᛖᛚᛚ.
Jan 022020
The best 17 seconds of your day:
Dec 232019
Gentlemen: this h’yar is thinking bigly:
When you absolutely, positively have to use Kardashev Level 2 tech to move an entire solar system elsewhere.
Sources used in the video are HERE.
Dec 132019
The Ford Nucleon was the most audacious and least realistic concept car of all time: an automobile with a nuclear reactor. What more needs to be said? Well, other than “here’s a nifty bit of concept art.”
Note that this illustration is from 1956, while the Nucleon is generally described as dating from 1957. This is therefore almost certainly an early illustration, before the final-ish design was settled upon. The more widely known illustrations of the Nucleon depict a distinctly different roof to the passenger cabin.
Dec 032019
By 1985, the Solar Power Satellite was essentially dead, killed off by the plumetting price of oil. But the technology developed for it was still valid, and Rockwell thought there might be a use for microwave power transmission systems. Their idea here was to use a space-based nuclear reactor – apparently something along the lines of the SP-100 – to generate electricity and then use SPS-derived microwave beaming tech to send that power to distant “customers” such as space stations and satellites. This would permit the customers to basically have nuclear power, but without the risks of having a nearby radiation source. The receiver would be much lighter than a PV array in terms of construction, and vastly more efficient, since all the energy coming in is of a single fixed frequency. A space station could presumably have a power receiver in the form of a mesh “net,” perhaps a single sphere a few meters in diameter at the end of a modest mast, capable of capturing dozens to hundreds of kilowatts of clean electrical power. This would lower the cost and mass of power systems compared to PV arrays… and it would greatly reduce the drag produced by those giant sails.
Nov 282019
Sometime around 1973/74, NASA put out a report on future aeronautics and space opportunities. While lean on technical detail, and devoid of diagrams (bah), it did have some vaguely interesting 1970’s-style art. The painting below illustrates some of the “other” things that the forthcoming Space Shuttle could do, like launch solar power satellites, lob nuclear waste into deep space and be used for point-to-point Terrestrial passenger transport. Yeah, about that…
