An item currently on eBay:
A display model of…something. A seeker head for some sort of missile, seemingly. Missile defense, perhaps? Or perhaps it’s part of a payload to be fixed to an aircraft, some sort of sensor?
Neutronium is a common substance in science fiction. It is a real substance of incredible density, so a lot of authors have decided that it would make a neato structural element. The problem: it would explode.
Neutronium is, as the name suggests, a substance made out of pure neutrons. It exists in neutron stars… but really nowhere else. It *can’t* really exist anywhere else. Neutrons exists in close proximity in the nuclei of atoms, but there they are held in place with the strong nuclear force; eliminate the protons, and the neutrons will go flying apart. In neutron stars, the neutrons are held together solely by gravity. If you were to somehow teleport a chunk of neutronium off a neutron star, it would promptly explode.
Here’s an old video from Thunderf00t explaining another problem with neutronium: outside of the gravitational field of neutron stars and the strong force of nuclei, neutrons decay with a half life of about 10 minutes. And the results of that are pretty energetic.
So if you want to use neutronium in your sci-fi story, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.
A Rossi 12-guage pistol with special loads: a single shot of pain directly to your wrist.
But then, a six inch barrel seems a bit much for some applications. How about a shotgun with barrels shorter than the actual shotgun shells?
One could argue that this is a little silly.
The IAEA not only has not visited a single site since the agreement, they foresee no need to do so in the future.
The B61-12 is called “dangerous” because it’s yield is *ridiculously* low, variable between 300 *tons* and fifty kilotons. How it’s a “super nuke” I can’t say.
Entertainingly, in an effort to define this bomb as “dangerous,” the author of the piece refers to both International ANSWER (a communist front group) and Russia Today (Putins mouthpiece in the west). these organizatiosn don;t want the US to have this or any other new nukes. Which means it’s probably a good idea to keep developing, testing and fielding new nukes.
Here’s an ok video about the Davy Crockett nuclear weapon. This was a dinky device… a recoilless-rifle launched projectile with a simple mechanical timer and a yield of around 25 tons (not kilotons… tons). It was really only meant for one thing… tormenting the hordes of Soviet infantry and armor that was expected to come pouring into West Germany Any Day Now.
I’ve been wanting to make a 1:1 scale replica of the M388 projectile for years, but I’ve never found the time.
Aww. Ain’t that adorable?
Also:
The GBU-43A/B “Massive Ordnance Air Blast (aka Mother Of All Bombs)” is dropped from a C-130. It sits on an aluminum cradle and rolls out the back of the plane, pulled out by a parachute. The question is: how does that chute work? If you watch the video below, you can see the parachute pack “drop” from the upper part of the doorway. This looks like either the pack was attached to the ceiling of the cargo bay (or the inner portion of the aft door that hinges upwards) and simply dropped, or perhaps it’s hurled out by a catapult of some type. Does anyone know? I’ve looked but so far I’ve failed to find any photos, diagrams or videos depicting the setup prior to deployment.
For what it’s worth:
Some folks associated with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists examined the trajectories of recent Nork ICBM test flights, looked at the presumed performance of the motors and propellant, and have concluded that the Hwasong-14 “ICBM” is a “sub-ICBM.” One of the authors of the study is a long-time critic of missile defense systems, so YMMV.
Even if the missile was a full-up ICBM capable of lobbing to New York City the kind of nuke the Norks could actually build, I would not bet large sums on the missile working as advertised in operational practice. That said… Lil’ Kim seems like a nut. Give him a weapon that will probably fail and tell him it’ll probably work (and I imagine his underlings will say what they think they need to in order to avoid the firing squad), and who knows, he might decide that The Stars Are Right and it’s time for his apotheosis via nuclear fire.
I’d be less sanguine about the chances of success for a missile like this lobbing a nuke *over* the US. A few dozen kilotons a few hundred miles up could wreak a whole lot of havoc via EMP.
This is the sort of thing you’d think we’d already have:
It can pack:
Video quality’s not great, but the subject is:
And:
And…
And…
And…