Cross Format Debate II
Pat Flannery Aug 11, 2:35 am
Newsgroups: alt.religion.asatru, sci.space.history, sci.space.tech, sci.space.policy
From: Pat Flannery flan...@daktel.com
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 01:35:37 -0500
Subject: Re: OT: Booyah!
bombardmentforce wrote:
>Here's an animation of an atomic Mars misson
>http://spacebombardment.blogsp ot.com/2005/07/quality-animati on.html
>This gives you a gut feeling of what real technology availible to us
>could do if we had the guts.
And the EMP effects of the repeated nuclear blasts as it leaves the
atmosphere and ascends into space are dealt with how exactly?
Then you've got the Argus Effect on the solar arrays of satellites in
LEO to deal with.
I've got a "gut feeling" that this thing should only be revved up
somewhere near the distance of one of the Earth-Moon Lagrange points.
Pat
---------------------
From: "bombardmentforce"
Newsgroups: alt.religion.asatru,sci.space.history,sci.space.tech,sci.space.policy
Subject: Re: OT: Booyah!
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 12:15:36 -0000
Pat Flannery wrote:
> bombardmentforce wrote:
>
> >
> >Here's an animation of an atomic Mars misson
> >
> >http://spacebombardment.blogspot.com/2005/07/quality-animation.html
>
> And the EMP effects of the repeated nuclear blasts as it leaves the
> atmosphere and ascends into space are dealt with how exactly?
Care to quantify your EMP concerns? Here are some rough numbers for
Rhysy's Mars lander.
Gross Mass 10000 T
Propulsion System Mass 3250 T
Exhaust Velocity 120000 m
Diameter 56 m
Height 85 m
Average acc 4 G
Thrust 4.00E+008 N
Propellant Mass Flow 3000 kg/s
Space charge size 15 Kt
Pulses Trans Mars Injection 967
Tot yield Trans Mars Inj 14500 Mt
Payload 5300 T
Tons of Pulse units used 1450 T
Average size 3000 Kg
> Then you've got the Argus Effect on the solar arrays of satellites in
> LEO to deal with.
> Pat
Both Sakharov and Taylor looked to polar trajectories to minimize
particle trapping.
--------------------------------
A detailed response
>Pat Flannery Aug 12, 4:20 pm
>From: Pat Flannery flan...@daktel.com
>Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 15:20:33 -0500
>Subject: Re: OT: Booyah!
>>bombardmentforce wrote:
>>>Here's an animation of an atomic Mars misson
>>>http://spacebombardment.blogsp ot.com/2005/07/quality-animati on.html
>>And the EMP effects of the repeated nuclear blasts as it leaves the
>>atmosphere and ascends into space are dealt with how exactly?
>Care to quantify your EMP concerns? Here are some rough numbers for
>Rhysy's Mars lander.
>Gross Mass 10000 T
>Propulsion System Mass 3250 T
>Exhaust Velocity 120000 m
>Diameter 56 m
>Height 85 m
>Average acc 4 G
>Thrust 4.00E+008 N
>Propellant Mass Flow 3000 kg/s
>Space charge size 15 Kt
Assuming 15 Kt charges, that is nearly the yield of the Hiroshima
"Little Boy" bomb. This is going to generate fallout.
>Exactly how many of these are to be detonated in Earth's atmosphere
>during ascent?
>I assume you are going to get the vehicle airborne somehow before you
>start the explosions, as to do them from the ground up is going to
>generate a huge fallout cloud.
I'll break my replay into sections
for this discussion launch is as in Rhys's video
http://spacebombardment.blogspot.com/2005/07/quality-animation.html
with the launch site moved to Desolation Island.
So the lanch numbers are pulled from Geroge Dyson's book, with the lofter pulses ommitted and replaced by SRBs.
-----------------------------------------
The Congressional report "Military Space Forces- The Next 50 Years"
(John M. Collins, Pergamon-Brassey's Publishers, 1989, ISBN
0-08-037432-8) includes a map of EMP effects of nuclear detonations
over the United States with height of burst ranging from 60 to 300
miles. At 300 miles the whole U.S. is blanketed by EMP.
A launch of the Orion Mars ship on a polar trajectory would mean that
you would have to assure that no inhabited areas fell under it's path as
it used its nuclear drive to accelerate toward Mars. the most logical
way to do that is to launch from the Arctic or Antarctic and accelerate
over the mid Pacific ocean.
----
Here's the proposed launch path...gearth image
----
Assuming that you did get the thing up without wreaking to much EMP or
fallout havoc on the Earth during its ascent, you would still have
violated both the above-ground nuclear test treaty and the ban on
nuclear weapons in outer space.
----
----
that would open a whole can of worms regarding a new nuclear arms race
in space, with all of the expense, risk, and potential accidental war
breaking out that led to the nuclear ban on space in the first place.
It's becoming clear in the early years of the 21st century that the
battles the U.S. will probably be fighting in the future will be fairly
limited in scope against adversaries whom we have far superior
technology to.
When we did the invasion of Afghanistan, our adversaries had AK-47s,
RPGs, and the occasional Grail missile launcher; we, on the other hand
had stealth flying wings attacking from 60,000 feet with satellite
guided bombs.
The disparity in weapons was like that shown in George Pal's "War Of The
Worlds" when the U.S. army takes on the Martian war machines: We have
tanks, artillery, and rocket launchers. The Martians have force shields,
heat rays, and meson disrupters.
Oddly, we have a hard time fighting them effectively. ;-)
I doubt the Deep Space Bombardment Squadron would have been much of an
asset in our invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq.
---
But Captain X explains later in this very post how it could, strategically. Imagine a small comet docked to a space elevator, it would crater the market price for hydrocarbons because the rare thing in the Solar System as a whole is free Oxygen.
---
>This sounds like the giant dreadnought building race starting up again.
>No one is quite sure what you do with all the giant battleships when
>they aren't sinking the opposing side's battleships, but they sure do
>look impressive, and every nation needs some for the sake of bragging
>rights.
----
Did the U.S. benefit from the Great White Fleet?
----
The fact that you can do a Mars mission this way isn't worth the risk
of getting a pointless and economically ruinous arms race going in space.
In his book "Weapons And Hope" Freeman Dyson talks about how the "Deep
Space Bombardment Force" concept came into being; here's the story:
"Twenty years earlier, I witnessed another Star Wars fantasy which was
closer to us in space and time and also closer to being real. I was at
the time engaged in the design of a spaceship called Orion. We intended
Orion to be a large and ambitious spaceship, driven by nuclear
explosions and capable of traveling from planet to planet. All the
civilian and engineers who worked on the design, including our leader,
Ted Taylor, who invented it, had come to it with peaceful intentions. We
wanted to build a ship that could carry mankind peacefully from one end
of the solar system to the other. But our work was funded by the United
States Air Force, and some people in the air force had other purposes in
mind.
There was one air force captain in particular who had grand ideas
for the future of Orion. Orion was to become a space battleship. Great
fleets of space battleships were to patrol the ocean of space. The
captain had read Admiral Mahan's classic work, The Influence of Sea
Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, and his imagination had
been fired by Mahan's famous description of the British navy in the
years of the Napolionic (Napoleonic) Wars: 'Those far distant, storm-beaten ships,
upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the
domination of the world.' the Captain's Deep Space Bombardment Force was
to preserve the Pax Americana in the twenty-first century, as the far
distant storm-beaten warships of England had preserved the Pax
Brittanica in the nineteenth. Cruising majestically in orbits beyond the
moon, manned by air force captains as brave as the English sea captains
of old, the ships of the Deep Space Bombardment Force would stand
between the tyrants of the Kremlin and the dominion of the world.
-----
Captain X has me convinced, and frustrated that Dyson and the generals don't present the counter-agrument.
-----
The captain worked hard to convince us of the practicality of his
plans. He drew big charts of cislunar and translunar space, depicting
the maneuvers of the Deep Space Bombardment Force, and the various
subsidiary forces required for provisioning, communication, and
reconnaissance. But few of his colleagues in the air force took his
ideas seriously. The charts of the Deep Space Bombardment Force only
once in a briefing to the senior air force dignitaries who were
responsible for the funding of our project. The dignitaries made it
clear that they wished no more of their funds to be spent on dreams of
imperial glory. The captain's dream fleet, the ghostly armada of Orion
ships silently keeping watch over our planet, did not impress them
favorably. After the briefing the captain's charts disappeared into a
drawer, and the captain's dreams remained dreams."
Not a terribly favorable assessment of the idea.
Pat
----
It comes across, to me, as unfavorable to the dignitaries, I see Billy Mitchell up against the ignorant Admirals.
-----
http://www.princeton.edu/~globsec/publications/effects/effects.shtml
The prompt gamma rays
from a nuclear explosion carry, on
average, about 0.3 percent of the explosion
energy (Table 10.138) and only
a fraction of this, on the order of ap-someproximately
10-2 for a high-altitude
burst and 10-7 for a surface burst, is
radiated in the EMP.
Newsgroups: alt.religion.asatru, sci.space.history, sci.space.tech, sci.space.policy
From: Pat Flannery flan...@daktel.com
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 01:35:37 -0500
Subject: Re: OT: Booyah!
bombardmentforce wrote:
>Here's an animation of an atomic Mars misson
>http://spacebombardment.blogsp ot.com/2005/07/quality-animati on.html
>This gives you a gut feeling of what real technology availible to us
>could do if we had the guts.
And the EMP effects of the repeated nuclear blasts as it leaves the
atmosphere and ascends into space are dealt with how exactly?
Then you've got the Argus Effect on the solar arrays of satellites in
LEO to deal with.
I've got a "gut feeling" that this thing should only be revved up
somewhere near the distance of one of the Earth-Moon Lagrange points.
Pat
---------------------
From: "bombardmentforce"
Newsgroups: alt.religion.asatru,sci.space.history,sci.space.tech,sci.space.policy
Subject: Re: OT: Booyah!
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 12:15:36 -0000
Pat Flannery wrote:
> bombardmentforce wrote:
>
> >
> >Here's an animation of an atomic Mars misson
> >
> >http://spacebombardment.blogspot.com/2005/07/quality-animation.html
>
> And the EMP effects of the repeated nuclear blasts as it leaves the
> atmosphere and ascends into space are dealt with how exactly?
Care to quantify your EMP concerns? Here are some rough numbers for
Rhysy's Mars lander.
Gross Mass 10000 T
Propulsion System Mass 3250 T
Exhaust Velocity 120000 m
Diameter 56 m
Height 85 m
Average acc 4 G
Thrust 4.00E+008 N
Propellant Mass Flow 3000 kg/s
Space charge size 15 Kt
Pulses Trans Mars Injection 967
Tot yield Trans Mars Inj 14500 Mt
Payload 5300 T
Tons of Pulse units used 1450 T
Average size 3000 Kg
> Then you've got the Argus Effect on the solar arrays of satellites in
> LEO to deal with.
> Pat
Both Sakharov and Taylor looked to polar trajectories to minimize
particle trapping.
--------------------------------
A detailed response
>Pat Flannery Aug 12, 4:20 pm
>From: Pat Flannery flan...@daktel.com
>Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 15:20:33 -0500
>Subject: Re: OT: Booyah!
>>bombardmentforce wrote:
>>>Here's an animation of an atomic Mars misson
>>>http://spacebombardment.blogsp ot.com/2005/07/quality-animati on.html
>>And the EMP effects of the repeated nuclear blasts as it leaves the
>>atmosphere and ascends into space are dealt with how exactly?
>Care to quantify your EMP concerns? Here are some rough numbers for
>Rhysy's Mars lander.
>Gross Mass 10000 T
>Propulsion System Mass 3250 T
>Exhaust Velocity 120000 m
>Diameter 56 m
>Height 85 m
>Average acc 4 G
>Thrust 4.00E+008 N
>Propellant Mass Flow 3000 kg/s
>Space charge size 15 Kt
Assuming 15 Kt charges, that is nearly the yield of the Hiroshima
"Little Boy" bomb. This is going to generate fallout.
>Exactly how many of these are to be detonated in Earth's atmosphere
>during ascent?
>I assume you are going to get the vehicle airborne somehow before you
>start the explosions, as to do them from the ground up is going to
>generate a huge fallout cloud.
I'll break my replay into sections
for this discussion launch is as in Rhys's video
http://spacebombardment.blogspot.com/2005/07/quality-animation.html
with the launch site moved to Desolation Island.
So the lanch numbers are pulled from Geroge Dyson's book, with the lofter pulses ommitted and replaced by SRBs.
-----------------------------------------
The Congressional report "Military Space Forces- The Next 50 Years"
(John M. Collins, Pergamon-Brassey's Publishers, 1989, ISBN
0-08-037432-8) includes a map of EMP effects of nuclear detonations
over the United States with height of burst ranging from 60 to 300
miles. At 300 miles the whole U.S. is blanketed by EMP.
A launch of the Orion Mars ship on a polar trajectory would mean that
you would have to assure that no inhabited areas fell under it's path as
it used its nuclear drive to accelerate toward Mars. the most logical
way to do that is to launch from the Arctic or Antarctic and accelerate
over the mid Pacific ocean.
----
Here's the proposed launch path...gearth image
----
Assuming that you did get the thing up without wreaking to much EMP or
fallout havoc on the Earth during its ascent, you would still have
violated both the above-ground nuclear test treaty and the ban on
nuclear weapons in outer space.
----
----
that would open a whole can of worms regarding a new nuclear arms race
in space, with all of the expense, risk, and potential accidental war
breaking out that led to the nuclear ban on space in the first place.
It's becoming clear in the early years of the 21st century that the
battles the U.S. will probably be fighting in the future will be fairly
limited in scope against adversaries whom we have far superior
technology to.
When we did the invasion of Afghanistan, our adversaries had AK-47s,
RPGs, and the occasional Grail missile launcher; we, on the other hand
had stealth flying wings attacking from 60,000 feet with satellite
guided bombs.
The disparity in weapons was like that shown in George Pal's "War Of The
Worlds" when the U.S. army takes on the Martian war machines: We have
tanks, artillery, and rocket launchers. The Martians have force shields,
heat rays, and meson disrupters.
Oddly, we have a hard time fighting them effectively. ;-)
I doubt the Deep Space Bombardment Squadron would have been much of an
asset in our invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq.
---
But Captain X explains later in this very post how it could, strategically. Imagine a small comet docked to a space elevator, it would crater the market price for hydrocarbons because the rare thing in the Solar System as a whole is free Oxygen.
---
>This sounds like the giant dreadnought building race starting up again.
>No one is quite sure what you do with all the giant battleships when
>they aren't sinking the opposing side's battleships, but they sure do
>look impressive, and every nation needs some for the sake of bragging
>rights.
----
Did the U.S. benefit from the Great White Fleet?
----
The fact that you can do a Mars mission this way isn't worth the risk
of getting a pointless and economically ruinous arms race going in space.
In his book "Weapons And Hope" Freeman Dyson talks about how the "Deep
Space Bombardment Force" concept came into being; here's the story:
"Twenty years earlier, I witnessed another Star Wars fantasy which was
closer to us in space and time and also closer to being real. I was at
the time engaged in the design of a spaceship called Orion. We intended
Orion to be a large and ambitious spaceship, driven by nuclear
explosions and capable of traveling from planet to planet. All the
civilian and engineers who worked on the design, including our leader,
Ted Taylor, who invented it, had come to it with peaceful intentions. We
wanted to build a ship that could carry mankind peacefully from one end
of the solar system to the other. But our work was funded by the United
States Air Force, and some people in the air force had other purposes in
mind.
There was one air force captain in particular who had grand ideas
for the future of Orion. Orion was to become a space battleship. Great
fleets of space battleships were to patrol the ocean of space. The
captain had read Admiral Mahan's classic work, The Influence of Sea
Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, and his imagination had
been fired by Mahan's famous description of the British navy in the
years of the Napolionic (Napoleonic) Wars: 'Those far distant, storm-beaten ships,
upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the
domination of the world.' the Captain's Deep Space Bombardment Force was
to preserve the Pax Americana in the twenty-first century, as the far
distant storm-beaten warships of England had preserved the Pax
Brittanica in the nineteenth. Cruising majestically in orbits beyond the
moon, manned by air force captains as brave as the English sea captains
of old, the ships of the Deep Space Bombardment Force would stand
between the tyrants of the Kremlin and the dominion of the world.
-----
Captain X has me convinced, and frustrated that Dyson and the generals don't present the counter-agrument.
-----
The captain worked hard to convince us of the practicality of his
plans. He drew big charts of cislunar and translunar space, depicting
the maneuvers of the Deep Space Bombardment Force, and the various
subsidiary forces required for provisioning, communication, and
reconnaissance. But few of his colleagues in the air force took his
ideas seriously. The charts of the Deep Space Bombardment Force only
once in a briefing to the senior air force dignitaries who were
responsible for the funding of our project. The dignitaries made it
clear that they wished no more of their funds to be spent on dreams of
imperial glory. The captain's dream fleet, the ghostly armada of Orion
ships silently keeping watch over our planet, did not impress them
favorably. After the briefing the captain's charts disappeared into a
drawer, and the captain's dreams remained dreams."
Not a terribly favorable assessment of the idea.
Pat
----
It comes across, to me, as unfavorable to the dignitaries, I see Billy Mitchell up against the ignorant Admirals.
-----
http://www.princeton.edu/~globsec/publications/effects/effects.shtml
The prompt gamma rays
from a nuclear explosion carry, on
average, about 0.3 percent of the explosion
energy (Table 10.138) and only
a fraction of this, on the order of ap-someproximately
10-2 for a high-altitude
burst and 10-7 for a surface burst, is
radiated in the EMP.
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This is a bit off topic... But I would like to thank you for placing me under consideration for your sidebar. I will also place a link to your blog via my "QUALITY BLOGGERS" page.
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