Look out! It’s a cloud!!!

blather, dumbassery, Gah., Meh., news, nukes, photography, Utah, ಠ_ಠ 3 Responses »

Jun 122015

‘World War 3 has begun’: Mystery mushroom cloud sparks Armageddon panic as ‘nuclear’ pics go viral

Oy.

If the article is to be believed (who knows anymore), photos taken over the Russian city of Tyumen caused “panic” because some people believed they were looking at a nuclear explosion mushroom cloud:

As I said… oy. It’s like people have never seen clouds before.

Sigh.

And through sheer random chance, I saw this cloud today. Clearly this is a mushroom cloud from a smaller nuke, I’d estimate in the 40 to 50 kiloton range. Yeah.

“Hot Flight” NB-36 film

aircraft, awesomeness, history, Hmm..., nukes, science, youtube 2 Responses »

Jun 052015

A Convair film about the NB-36H, a heavily modified B-36 bomber equipped with a nuclear reactor. The reactor was not hooked up to anything but instruments; all it did was sit there and give off radiation. Which was in fact the point of the exercise; the plane was an experiment in support of atomic powered aircraft, but the experiments were to see how crew, structure and instruments would stand up to the radiation environment produced by an airborne reactor.

Mike shot

awesomeness, history, nukes, photography, youtube 7 Responses »

May 292015

Operation Ivy was a nuclear test series of only two tests, carried out in the Pacific in late 1952, using the most powerful bombs then available.

The Mike shot (Ivy Mike) was the first US thermonuclear test, November 1, 1952. While the yield was impressive (10.4 megatons) as are the photos of the mushroom cloud, what really tells the tale is the before-and-after aerial photo of Enewetak Atoll showing the crater the ground-level blast punched into the Earth:

The fireball reached four miles in diameter, while the mushroom cloud topped out at 136,000 feet in altitude and spread to 100 miles in diameter. The crater was more than 6,200 feet in diameter and 164 feet deep; the island was stripped bare of vegetation and structures.

The Ivy Mike test used a one-off type of thermonuclear bomb that utilized liquified (cryogenic) deuterium. This resulted in a wholly impractical device as far as deliverable weapons go, but it was adequate to test the effects of decamegaton devices, as well as the basic physics.

A good documentary about Ivy Mike:

And a one-hour contemporary film about the test (the full-length film that the first clip above was taken from):

Sci-Fi Cyanotypes: Limited Editions

art, awesomeness, blather, cyanotype blueprints, drawings, Hmm..., models, new products, Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, nukes, rockets, science fiction, spacecraft 2 Responses »

May 152015

I’ve made a number of science fictional CAD models for Fantastic Plastic. Wonderfest, an annual hobby convention in Louisville, Kentucky, is coming up at the end of the month, and Fantastic Plastic is going to set up there. A while back I thought it might be interesting to take some of the CAD models I’ve created for current and forthcoming Fantastic Plastic model kits, specifically the Helicarrier, the Prometheus and the Messiah, and create 2D layout drawings… and then make cyanotype blueprints. Further, the blueprints would be at the same scale as the kits.

The end results? A moderately sized Helicarrier blueprint, two big Prometheus sheets (one showing the craft in flight, the other showing it in landed configuration), and one enormous Messiah blueprint, a full six feet long.

I don’t know if there is a market for such things. The Prometheus and the Messiah in particular are just gigantic. Were I to really try to commercialize them, I’d probably scale them down to at least 2/3 and more likely 1/2 the current size. Still, creating them was not a minor effort… so what the heck. I’m going to make them available for a limited time. Yes, they’re pricey. But they’re also *huge.* And a pain to make. And there won’t be very many of them on the entire planet (right now, two copies each of the Helicarrier and the Messiah; a grand total of one of the Prometheus prints).

~~These will be available for a two-week period, starting now.~~ If some dark miracle occurs and I sell a hundred of them within that span, then, great! But however many, at the end of the two weeks, that’s it. All done, no more. I will total them up, and hand notate each one as numbered limited edition (“1 of 5,” or whatever, based on the order that orders come in) plus I’ll initial each one. Because why not.

F~~eel free to order as many of each as you want. Don’t forget postage… and don’t forget that with this one-time postage you can order as many *other* cyanotype prints as you like.~~

Prometheus prints:

Helicarrier:

Messiah: Halleluiah!!

art, awesomeness, models, news, Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, nukes, rockets, science fiction, spacecraft 6 Responses »

Apr 172015

Finally done modelling this thing. Took long enough!

The multiview layout drawing generated from the model would take a good deal of effort to clean up proper, but it’s needed for the “Nuclear Pulse Propulsion” book. Now that the model is very nearly complete (I need to convert each part, individually, into a separate STL file… bleah), I can devote more time to other stuff, including potentially getting back to work on NPP. But before I let the Messiah go entirely… anyone interested in large format blueprints based on the layout drawings?

Fukushima radiation has arrived to kill us all

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Apr 062015

Fukushima radiation has reached North American shores

Ahhhh! We’re doomed!

Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution detected small amounts of cesium-134 and cesium-137 in a sample of seawater taken in February from a dock on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

DOOOOMED!

“Even if the levels were twice as high, you could still swim in the ocean for six hours every day for a year and receive a dose more than a thousand times less than a single dental X-ray,”

DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!

Asteroid mining crew transport

awesomeness, drawings, Hmm..., nukes, projects, rockets, spacecraft 57 Responses »

Apr 042015

Every now and then you stumble across something that provides tantalizing yet nonchalant hints to something amazing. Recently this occurred while perusing a Boeing report on closed life support systems for spacecraft. One concept mentioned and minimally described was a previous 1981 study of a spacecraft meant to transport crew to the asteroid belt for the purpose of mining asteroids for their resources. Just the basic concept was fairly amazing on its own, especially all the way back in 1981. Second: the propulsion system was vaguely described as a nuclear fusion system. Third: well, here’s the disappointingly small diagram that was included for illustration purposes. See if you can see what makes the design especially interesting…

What can be seen: three arms that rotate for artificial gravity; three vast radiator fins and a relatively tiny fusion engine in the tail. But what makes the design amazing: just in front of the spacecraft is a Space Shuttle Orbiter, giving a sense of scale to the vehicle. It’s *vast.* And it would have to be… the cargo transported to the asteroid was 150 metric tons. Plus the passengers, all 1,250 of them. All ONE THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY of them.

The vehicle massed 10,000 tons; the powerplant (two 6 GW fusion reactors, spitting out 4.8 GW of thrust power, 2.8 GW of heat needing radiating and 4.4 GW of high energy neutron) massed 2000 tons; 4000 tons of hydrogen fuel; and 4000 tons of spacecraft/payload/passengers. The vehicle would boost for 11 days, coast for 226 days and brake for 13 days to rendezvous.

That, sadly, is all that’s available in the report I have. A FOIA request has been made for the reference that *seems* like might describe this further.

I hope to be able to define this vehicle further. As it is I can only guesstimate sizes; the habitation modules at the ends of the arms appear to be repurposed Shuttle External Tanks. But even nine of them would seem to be kinda cramped for 1250 people for two-thirds of a year… nearly 140 passengers per tank.

Yet more threats from Putin

Crazy, Forward!, Gah., history, Hmm..., news, nukes, politics, russian empire, ಠ_ಠ 4 Responses »

Apr 022015

Putin: try to take Crimea away and I will give you a nuclear war

You know, I can understand having an 80’s nostalgia. But come on, there are better aspects of that time to focus on. If Putin were to hang up some Debbie Gibson and Tiffany posters and listen to some Flock of Seagulls, maybe he’d get over his Soviet-style nuclear aggression.

In seriousness: there seems to be a whole lot of crazy over yonder.

See, this is why I support space colonization

Crazy, Forward!, news, nukes, politics, russian empire, ಠ_ಠ 42 Responses »

Mar 312015

Russian analyst urges nuclear attack on Yellowstone National Park and San Andreas fault line

The “analyst” is one of those loons who thinks the US and the West are out to destroy Russia. And so he’s proposing to develop weapons systems designed specifically to kill a large fraction of the population of the United States as a way to bully the US into not protesting when Russia gobbles up its neighbors.

From the Google Translate version of the original Russian-language piece:

What’s in the US? First of all, attention is drawn to Yellowstone National Park, located in the caldera of the same name supervolcano, which, according to geologists, close to the period of its activation, which occurs at a frequency of 600 thousand years. About as long ago there was its last eruption. The power of this supervolcano several orders of magnitude weaker than the Siberian, so it has not led to the eruption of mass extinction of living creatures on the planet as a whole, but for the Americas this eruption was undoubtedly disastrous. Geologists believe that the Yellowstone supervolcano could explode at any moment. Signs of growing its activity there. Therefore it suffices to push the relatively small, for example the impact of the munition megaton class to initiate an eruption. The consequences will be catastrophic for the United States – a country just disappears. All of its territory is covered with a thick (several meters or tens of meters) layer of ash.

Another vulnerable area of the United States from the geophysical point of view, is the San Andreas – the break length of 1300 kilometers between the Pacific and North American plates. It passes along the coast of the territory of the State of California, somewhere on land and partly under water. Are parallel to the faults of the San Gabriel and San Hosinto. This is an area of geophysical instability generating earthquakes with a magnitude of 8.5 on the Richter scale. Impact powerful enough nuclear weapon can trigger catastrophic events that can completely destroy the infrastructure of the United States on the Pacific coast-scale tsunami.

Sometimes ya gotta wonder if you’re paranoid *enough.* The one bright spot I’m seeing right now is that even while the current administration seems determined to see the US weakened, that administration will be out of office in less than two years. Hopefully to be replaced with an administration that is sane, sober, wise and devoted to keeping America strong, safe, and, hopefully, dedicated to conquering the heavens. Or at least not getting in the way of American private enterprise as *it* conquers the heavens.

At last: decent microfilm/fiche scanning

awesomeness, blather, drawings, history, nukes, projects, rockets, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ 3 Responses »

Mar 282015

I’ve had a stack of fiche and a number of rolls of microfilms sitting around doing nothing for a decade and more due to a lack of ability to get good images off ’em. Every scanner I came across out in the wild would only do two-bit black-and-white scans, which turned the already dubious image quality into useless mush; efforts to capture the images via photography were roughly equally useless. Fortunately, at long last, I found that the University library up in Logan has microform scanners that do proper grayscale. So today I blew a number of hours digging through some old periodicals (“Space World”) and making scans. At last I can get half-ass decent copies of a whole bunch of German V-2 diagrams, among other things.

The image quality still kinda blows compared to good scans taken directly off the documents, but this is about as good as it’ll get for microfiche.

For those of you too young to remember microfiche and microfilm: these technologies were… you know, screw it. If you’re too young to remember these, get off my damn lawn. You’re probably like all those college-goin’ youngsters at the library today who were wondering “what’s that creepy old guy was doing at that mysterious machine that none of us ever use?”

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