Comments by "Stephen Villano" (@spvillano) on "Sandboxx"
channel.
-
11
-
9
-
8
-
7
-
@danielleriley2796 it'd have to fly a hell of a lot higher while hypersonic. Even at the notionally high 30000 feet, the air is pretty damned dense for such travel, even our space capsules have slowed to subsonic by that altitude due to the density of the lower atmosphere. Think 100k feet, you'd be more on target and avoid essentially impossible stresses on the airframe and obscene temperatures generated by the denser lower atmosphere.
Also, the story is bullshit as to radiation, it didn't spew reactor fuel, it did release a lot of gamma, x-ray and neutrons though, along with some daughter isotopes from the fission. Stay away from its exhaust, it'd be fairly safe, given its cruise altitude. It'd only come down for its terminal maneuver into its final target.
Oh, NERVA did actually fly - without fuel, only ballast, just to see if the aircraft would be stable. Thankfully, they never lit off either for actual full power flight testing, not too sure if any might have or not have flown at low power, although I think that any benefit would be dubious at best. Low power doesn't equal producing usable thrust and the damned things were so radioactively hot, survival of a flight crew was questionable at best.
Still, regardless of who would actually release such a product from the insanity factory, they'd most likely be suborbital single stage to suborbital altitude, then skip for range, then penetrate the upper atmosphere for the remainder of Mr Toad's Wild Ride.
All, while ICBM's and SLBM's passed one another in their own suborbital pathways into oblivion.
Still survivable, in a way. The Bikini Atoll is now habitable - as long as one doesn't eat the food or drink the water, lest one get a hell of a dose of cesium-137 and strontium-90 (mostly). Safe to stay there to visit and even spend a week there, if you bring your own food and drink. So, we'd be safe enough, just bring a century or so worth of food and water.
I'll wait. ;)
And yeah, I worked on them long ago. A stupider weapon I have yet to discover. Nukes are like having a handful of thermite grenades, while standing on top of a refinery tank full of gasoline. There won't be any winners in that game of chicken.
So, go toward the light, my children! Go toward the light!
7
-
6
-
5
-
4
-
2
-
The biggest reason is, experimental UAV's and aircraft are failure prone and tend to crash far more often than production models. There are around a dozen crashed A-12 and SR-71 hulks buried around Groom Lake, to give one example.
Roswell is another infamous example, as the documentation has been declassified, but the hand waving crowd ignore them in favor of space aliens. What crashed was a sample capturing unit to capture fallout from Soviet nuclear testing. Remnants of the thing still get shown around as some magical exotic substance, while failing to recognize what was a classified material at the time is mundane and in common use today - honeycomb aluminum.
I and my unit tested quite a few devices and technologies, ranging from at the time, classified UAV's that are common knowledge now to portable computing devices that gave squad level communication and personnel location tracking, with point and click artillery being experimentally available. Guess what? Each of those technologies had their own project code name, even for the team developing the primary software didn't know those names or capabilities, as it was all compartmented.
Which long ago lead to a standing joke that remains alive today, "My job is so secret, I'm not allowed to know what I'm doing" and in some cases, one's boss isn't allowed to know what you are doing.
So, what is really here is an SAP nothingburger.
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1