You had *one* job, History Channel…

 AARRRGH, aircraft, blather, drawings, dumbassery, Gah., history, nukes, projects, rockets, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ  17 Responses »
Dec 232016
 

And that job is “history.” You know, to actually know what happened or, failing that, to make some minimal effort to look it up. Seems simple enough…

So there I was, minding my own business, watching the latest thrill-packed episode of “Hunting Hitler.” For those who have somehow missed out, this is the latest iteration of the “Ghost Hunter” and “Bigfoot Hunter” phenomenon… overpaid idjits use hyperbole and fairy tales to go run around in the woods and poke around in some abandoned properties looking for mythical entities. in this case, Our Heroes are stomping around Argentina attempting to prove that Hitler survived WWII and wound up there. The most recent episode was focused on the bullcrap notion that the Nazis actually got an atomic bomb up and running and set it off in Thuringia during the war, and then attempted to set up another A-bomb program post-war in Argentina to further the aims of the Fourth Reich.

Yeah, I know. “I’m not saying it’s Nazis… but it’s Nazis.”

Shows like this are really only good for two things: background noise while you’re working on something, and hate-watching. Now, I don;t know a whole lot about Argentina, so I don’t throw things at the TV when they undoubtedly make howleriffic errors about that country and it’s history. But there are a few things I *do* have some knowledge of. Some things I recognize right off the bat. And they trotted one of these things out and repeated a decades-old lie about it.

Early in the episode, someone who I guess is supposed to be one of their researchers pulls out a page from a German document, a piece of evidence meant to show that the Nazis were planning on nuking Manhattan. This page right here:

sangermap3 sangermap2 sangermap1

I bet there are more than a few reading along who saw that and went, “Hey, I recognize that.” And of course y’all should… I’ve brought it up before. It’s from Eugen Sanger’s 1944 report on his global-range rocket bomber. And, yes, it shows the bombardment of New York City. But *not* with atomic weapons. It’s simply a bell curve… a statistical representation of the distribution of bomb damage if a *lot* of bombs were dropped on a target and the bombs had the usual sort of circular error probability. There’s not a single damn word in Sangers report about nuking New York, very likely because Sanger probably didn’t know a single thing about atom bombs. If there was one thing the Nazi system was good at, it was compartmentalizing programs. If there was another thing the Nazis were good at, it was screwing up atomic physics, what with their hatred of Jews and their reliance upon Werner Heisenberg who either wholly misunderstood what is needed to make an A-bomb or who spent his time on the German A-bomb program busy designing faulty exhaust ports in it.

Way back in 2009 I posted about this map and how it has been misrepresented by charlatans and lazy authors for years. The abuse continues, it seems.

 

 Posted by at 2:48 am

Pax Orionis Update

 blather, drawings, My Fiction, news, Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, nukes, Patreon, Pax Orionis, rockets, science fiction, spacecraft  2 Responses »
Nov 222016
 

Due to other commitments, progress has been slow on Pax Orionis. Still, a few days ago I posted a new piece, “Birth of the Bomb Part Two,” for Pax Orionis patrons. This is the second of a two-part newspaper article… the first described an event in the 1990s – well after the Great War – that led to Orion spacecraft becoming far more economical. In the second part, a reporter catches up with the people responsible. Excitement! Adventure! Inadvertent multi-kiloton nuclear detonations! Death from above! What’s not to like?

As with all Pax Orionis tales, each part comes with two bonuses: a technical diagram describing some piece of technology important in the Pax Orionis universe, complete with both in-universe and factual descriptions; and a small newspaper or magazine article that, when all put together, tell an important part of the Pax Orionis backstory.

pax-01 pax-02 pax-03 pax-04 pax-05 pax-06

If interested – and why the hell wouldn’t you be – check out the Pax Orionis Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/PaxOrionis

There are two level of patronage… $1 and $2. At $1, you get a new story when it comes out. At $2, you get the story, the tech diagram and the article.

Any Pax Orionis patrons who have read the most recent story, feel free to leave a comment. Praise or constructive criticism or anywhere in between.

 Posted by at 1:43 pm

Another Orion in the wild

 Hmm..., Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, nukes, rockets, science fiction, spacecraft  4 Responses »
Oct 172016
 

The History Channel has a new series, “Doomsday: 10 Ways he World will End.” Each episode describes some scientifically possible doomsday scenario… the first episode had a dinosaur-killer asteroid impact, the second had the Earth swallowed by a supermassive black hole. (One of these is more likely than the other…). The third episode, aired just a few days ago, has a rogue planet with the mass of Neptune plow into the Earth.

At the end of the last episode, discussion was made of the possibility of mankind surviving Earth getting steamrolled by an interstellar interloper by sending an emergency colonization mission to Mars. It was only a couple of minutes, mostly illustrated with stock footage of modern launch vehicles being assembled. But one of the talking heads suggested that the means of getting to mars would be via Orion nuclear pulse vehicle. A *very* brief shot of the Orion vehicle zipping past was included. The Orion CG model was obviously rather quickly slapped together. It was pretty generic, but on the whole looked reasonable enough. But for some reason the craft was given an unnecessary and impossible to justify rocket nozzle smack in the middle of the pusher plate. I took a few snapshots of the TV screen with my cameraphone… seemed good enough under the circumstances.

wp_20161016_001 wp_20161016_002wp_20161016_003 wp_20161016_004wp_20161016_005 wp_20161016_006wp_20161016_007

 Posted by at 3:12 am

Navaho Down

 AARRRGH, aircraft, Gah., history, news, nukes, rockets, ಠ_ಠ  9 Responses »
Oct 112016
 

While Kennedy Space Center did not receive the apocalyptic death blow from hurricane Matthew that some were projecting, that doesn’t mean that the storm passed without causing damage. One sad casualty was the SM-64 Navaho missile and booster on display at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station; it has been *badly* damaged. Restoration will be a chore… assuming that it is restored.

These photos came to me from aviation historian/writer Dennis R. Jenkins. If you post ’em, make sure to point that out.

img_2502 img_2487 img_2489 img_2490 img_2491 img_2495 img_2497 img_2499 img_2501 img_2484 img_2483 img_2480

UPDATE:

Word is that the 45th Space Wing of the USAF has determined that they *will* restore the Navaho. Far too early to work out the details, such as “when” and “how much will it cost.” The possibility exists of a solicitation of donations to aid the effort.

 Posted by at 3:23 pm

More good news

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Forward!, Gah., news, nukes, politics, russian empire, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  5 Responses »
Oct 072016
 

I’m old enough to remember the time I thought “Yay! The threat of global thermonuclear war is over!”

Sigh.

Russia moving nuclear-capable missiles into Kaliningrad, says Estonia

And…

Russia tells citizens ‘nuclear war with the West could happen soon’

And…

Russia Adds Hundreds of Warheads Under Nuclear Treaty

And…

Army Warns that Future War with Russia or China Would Be ‘Extremely Lethal and Fast’

Gosh, I guess it’s a good thing that in the coming years the US will be helmed by strong, wise leadership…

 Posted by at 11:23 pm

Nuclear rockets: triple-pack

 art, nukes, projects, rockets, spacecraft  3 Responses »
Oct 072016
 

A piece of NASA art illustrating a lunar-bound craft equipped with three relatively small nuclear thermal rockets. The payload is a lunar lander, similar in appearance to the “First Lunar Outpost” landers of the early 1990s, dating the art. To my eye this looks a bit dubious from the standpoint of nuking the crew… the reactors aren’t that far from them, what with the rather short hydrogen tank. *Perhaps* this was intended to be sent to lunar orbit unmanned, there to be met by a crew sent via chemical rockets. For lunar missions the utility of nuclear rockets would not be in getting payloads to the destination sooner; three days just isn’t that long, really. The advantage would be in sending *massive* payloads. So a small manned capsule sent chemically and a big heavily loaded lander sent via nukes might well make considerable sense.

ntr-triple

 Posted by at 4:15 pm

India vs. Pakistan vs. The World

 Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., Hmm..., news, nukes, politics  19 Responses »
Sep 292016
 

Well, this looks fun:

Heavy price of India-Pak N-war: 21 mn may die, half of ozone layer will vanish

If India and Pakistan fought a war detonating 100 nuclear warheads (around half of their combined arsenal), each equivalent to a 15-kiloton Hiroshima bomb, more than 21 million people will be directly killed, about half the world’s protective ozone layer would be destroyed, and a “nuclear winter” would cripple the monsoons and agriculture worldwide.

Well, at least that’s a load off my mind… no more worrying about global warming.

I need these guys to hold off on their little nuclear war for a few decades, otherwise it’ll mess with some stories I’m writing. And that would be a tragedy.

 Posted by at 9:53 pm

BLAMMO!!!

 awesomeness, history, nukes, rockets, weapons, youtube  8 Responses »
Sep 272016
 

Yeah, we’ve all seen videos of ICBM launches. But how many videos have you seen of the *other* end of the flight, with the RV’s smacking into the target zone? This video documents a launch of a Minuteman III from Vandenberg AFB in California to the impact of the three warheads (w/o nukes) in Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands.

It’s just plain impressive to see those RVs come screaming in, glowing so hot that they light up the clouds.

 Posted by at 2:49 pm
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