3 ms·

Indeed. I'm a gigantic booster of "Atomic Everywhere"[1] myself, so this site has always been pure catnip. [1] To be clear, I don't favor mass production of so

Indeed. I'm a gigantic booster of "Atomic Everywhere"[1] myself, so this site has always been pure catnip. [1] To be clear, I don't favor mass production of something like the SLAM's PLUTO air-cooled reactor, spewing fission fragments and God knows what else. I'm not insane. But nuclear-electric distributed propulsion for aviation? Oh yeah.

brucethemoose2 3y ago
> nuclear ramjet I dunno what you are talking about, this is a fantastic idea. It will be fiiiine.
- MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  Here's a back-tingles moment: the SLAM, with its open reactor - sans its H-bombs - is in principle almost exactly H.G. Wells' "Atomic Bombs"[1] from his The World Set Free. Radiation-jetting objects that bounce all over the place, blasting everything. That novel has a good claim to inventing the nuclear bomb, at least the concept of it. Leó Szilárd, after reading the novel in 1932[2], talked about the possibility of a chain reaction[3] bomb with the BWO, which would later, after a long and predictably political road, lead to the Einstein-Roosevelt letter. Wells is one of those writers whose nickel-paperback reputation hides what a peerless visionary he was, even as a largely self-educated layman. [1] His phrasing! "Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century, than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible ... but they did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands" Holy balls, that is still every single bit as relevant today. [2] 21 years post publish!! [3] Rather than the "radiant elements" used in Well's atomic bombs. Wells in 1901 had been reading the work of William Ramsay, Ernest Rutherford, and Frederick Soddy. Wells realized that although the decay (of the time) was slow, the total amount was insanely gigantic, converting the entire mass into energy. So he posited a future material that decomposed all at once. If you had a fist-sized hunk of Francium, that you got somehow, you'd get similar effects . . assuming you had a time-freezey casing to keep it from just spontaneously nuking your everything.
arethuza 3y ago
"God knows what else" AFAIR not only would SLAM arguably be a WMD in its own right but it would also be dropping multiple H-bombs along the way.
- MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  As a weapon . . system? . . it's hard not to gawk at this awesome assemblage of megadeath. Charles Stross gave the SLAM the honor of fighting Cthulhu in "A Colder War". http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm This also features another nuke engine, the ANP turbojet that would have been installed on the B-36 variant using it (test aircraft was, I believe, NB-36). Stross seems to think the ANP was open-cycle, but the (probably) most likely choice for that program would have been a closed-cycle nuclear turbojet. Any weight/efficiency loss would have been more than made up for by the . . the just general pain in the ass of having an open nuclear reaction fooshing onto the tarmac and everywhere else.
  - arethuza 3y ago
    "the honor of fighting Cthulhu" Didn't work though?

brucethemoose2 3y ago

> nuclear ramjet I dunno what you are talking about, this is a fantastic idea. It will be fiiiine.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago
Here's a back-tingles moment: the SLAM, with its open reactor - sans its H-bombs - is in principle almost exactly H.G. Wells' "Atomic Bombs"[1] from his The World Set Free. Radiation-jetting objects that bounce all over the place, blasting everything. That novel has a good claim to inventing the nuclear bomb, at least the concept of it. Leó Szilárd, after reading the novel in 1932[2], talked about the possibility of a chain reaction[3] bomb with the BWO, which would later, after a long and predictably political road, lead to the Einstein-Roosevelt letter. Wells is one of those writers whose nickel-paperback reputation hides what a peerless visionary he was, even as a largely self-educated layman. [1] His phrasing! "Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century, than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible ... but they did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands" Holy balls, that is still every single bit as relevant today. [2] 21 years post publish!! [3] Rather than the "radiant elements" used in Well's atomic bombs. Wells in 1901 had been reading the work of William Ramsay, Ernest Rutherford, and Frederick Soddy. Wells realized that although the decay (of the time) was slow, the total amount was insanely gigantic, converting the entire mass into energy. So he posited a future material that decomposed all at once. If you had a fist-sized hunk of Francium, that you got somehow, you'd get similar effects . . assuming you had a time-freezey casing to keep it from just spontaneously nuking your everything.

arethuza 3y ago

"God knows what else" AFAIR not only would SLAM arguably be a WMD in its own right but it would also be dropping multiple H-bombs along the way.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago
As a weapon . . system? . . it's hard not to gawk at this awesome assemblage of megadeath. Charles Stross gave the SLAM the honor of fighting Cthulhu in "A Colder War". http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm This also features another nuke engine, the ANP turbojet that would have been installed on the B-36 variant using it (test aircraft was, I believe, NB-36). Stross seems to think the ANP was open-cycle, but the (probably) most likely choice for that program would have been a closed-cycle nuclear turbojet. Any weight/efficiency loss would have been more than made up for by the . . the just general pain in the ass of having an open nuclear reaction fooshing onto the tarmac and everywhere else.
- arethuza 3y ago
  "the honor of fighting Cthulhu" Didn't work though?