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>Also, the Satan missile is a scary, and surprisingly huge, thing. Oddly I saw a Polaris missile at RAF Duxford recently and was surprised by how small it was,
by sgt101 10y ago
>Also, the Satan missile is a scary, and surprisingly huge, thing.
Oddly I saw a Polaris missile at RAF Duxford recently and was surprised by how small it was, in particular the warhead cowl. Or maybe the one at Duxford is a scale model or something? I know that Polaris's only had a 1500 mile range, maybe the true ICBM's need massive upscale?
- throwanem 10y agoThe Polaris is an SLBM, and thus not exactly comparable to something like a Titan or a Satan; in particular its size is dictated largely by the physical necessity of being able to fit a worthwhile payload aboard a nuclear missile submarine. Same goes for its propellant; you don't want to be dealing with RFNA and similar nasty stuff aboard a submarine, where things are dangerous enough without adding something that's toxic, corrosive, pyrophoric, and in general just enthusiastically terrifying.
- arethuza 10y agoEarly Soviet SLBMs actually did use nasty liquid fuels and oxidizers (hyrazine, nitrogen tetroxide) - I find the idea of being on a submarines pretty terrifying even without scary liquids and leaky reactors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-27_Zyb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-27_Zyb
- stickfigure 10y agoThere is a fantastic book by rocket-chemist-turned-science-fiction-author John D Clark called Ignition that documents the research and discovery of liquid propellants. It's a great read - out of print, but available online as a pdf: https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd... I toured the museum in Tuscon in the article when I was in high school - it's still one of my favorite museum experiences of all time. I remember seeing a roll of punch tape still sitting on the targeting computer and wondering who it encoded for nuclear annihilation.
- _asummers 10y agoFYI: that particular pdf copy is illegible, at least the first couple dozen pages.
- throwanem 10y agoI'm not having any trouble with it in Firefox or iBooks; perhaps try another reader?
- _asummers 10y agoOn Chrome, it shows up like: https://puu.sh/qn7yn/8e295774e5.png https://puu.sh/qn7yn/8e295774e5.png Opening in Preview seemed to fix it.
- throwanem 10y agoNot nice to read, but it does offer some hope for being able to convert to something like EPUB for more comfortable reading on a small device - from looking at the rendered content, I suspected it just contained page images, but if that were true, Chrome wouldn't misrender it the way your screenshot displays. Thanks!
- grkvlt 10y agoDisappointing - that used to be the best source for a copy. It's been out of print for a long time, but I checked on Library Genesis and found this copy: http://93.174.95.27/get.php?md5=4ACE426B937741B4ACFFFC81F658ED99&key=DDPHJA8OU04R1VWT http://93.174.95.27/get.php?md5=4ACE426B937741B4ACFFFC81F658...
- _asummers 10y agoApparently it was just Chrome's PDF reader acting up. Opens fine in other readers.
- arethuza 10y agoCan you actually see one of the RVs? They might have been the infamous Chevaline 'destroy Moscow at any cost' devices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevaline_Re-entry_Body https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevaline_Re-entry_Body
- sgt101 10y agoNo RV on display at Duxford, AFAIK, however here's a photo of a Chevaline REV. http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y235/Section1/swiki/c1/Chevaline2.jpg http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y235/Section1/swiki/c1/Chev... Apparently it was made of balsa wood! What I find interesting is that the REV was not the point/be all and end all of the system, the point of the system was that all the missiles and decoys that a submarine could fire would arrive over Moscow at once and co-ordinate their behavior to overwhelm the defense systems. Pretty amazing!
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoPolaris is tiny. There's another example at the Science Museum at Wroughton, which isn't usually open to the public. You could easily fit the packaged warhead - 200kT - in the trunk/boot of a car.