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A nuclear powered jetpack? Wait, sorry, what? Has there been some incredible development regarding either nuclear reactors or propulsion engines that I've misse

• madaxe_again 11y ago
  If you don't mind heavy radiation, you could have a pu pile to rapidly heat air and blast it from a nozzle. This sort of thing was how project Pluto (bought to you by coors, of all people) worked. Nuclear powered cruise missile. Not sure if you could make it quite small enough to stick on your back, and again, heavy radiation.
  • mikeash 11y ago
    Pluto is an interesting one. So destructive that the plan was to have it just fly back and forth across the Soviet Union after it ran out of bombs, killing and destroying with the radiation from its unshielded reactor and the shock wave from flying past at low altitude at Mach three. One of the (many) reasons it was killed was the question of how you would test such a beast. If it went haywire, you'd have a weapon on the loose that killed just by flying around, and with an enormous endurance. Oh, and which was basically impossible to shoot down.
    • caf 11y ago
      There seems to be precious little military utility to such a mode of operation. It sounds like any possible use of it would be a war crime.
      • mikeash 11y ago
        Well, it was intended for use in a total nuclear war.
      • PhasmaFelis 11y ago
        It was a delivery system for strategic-scale nuclear warheads. Those are war crimes pretty much by definition.