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Space Forum / Space Flight / September 2005shaped charges for launch
Shaped charges using normal explosive via explosions perpendicular not behind path of travel "fingers on watermellon seed" squirt a molten bunch of formerly solid materials to 6 - 10 km/s. Not efficient I think, but maybe benefits make it worth it. 1. Any way to have this on repeating system, so maybe methane powered cannon (like Gerald Bull's supergun, which is another issue, so maybe this issue already covered so ignore), thus maybe squirting molten metal or even water in solid stream across solar system to wherever needed? Not an accurate sytem, but moon with its gravity well is big target, maybe terraform it by dumping 10 meters of water over surface. Sorry to raise crazy idea, just is a novel and working method of launch maybe worth exploring. > Shaped charges using normal explosive via explosions perpendicular not > behind path of travel "fingers on watermellon seed" squirt a molten > bunch of formerly solid materials to 6 - 10 km/s. Not efficient I > think, but maybe benefits make it worth it. Nope. Several problems. The control is very poor, and will only give approximate direction. The accelleration is rather high, so you can only put in basically bulk materials. What you shoot has to be very strong, and temperature resistant. It's a very inefficient way of launching - you use far more mass of explosive than you'd use rocket propellant. You can't shoot anything through atmosphere at these speeds (well, nothing smaller than many tens of meters in size), so you need to launch all the explosive into orbit first. In balance, it's not worth it, as it much heavier, and much less flexible than rockets. >> Shaped charges using normal explosive via explosions perpendicular not >> behind path of travel "fingers on watermellon seed" squirt a molten >> bunch of formerly solid materials to 6 - 10 km/s. Not efficient I >> think, but maybe benefits make it worth it. Check out Project Orion. This sounds very similar to what they intended to do, only they were going to use atomic bombs for the shaped charges. Whether or not there would be any use to trying with conventional explosives I don't know. Jonathan ----- Jonathan Sivier Beckman Institute Flight Simulation Lab jsivier AT uiuc DOT edu Home Page: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/jsivier/www/ "In the mid-80s I heard of a "Project Thunderwell" from someone who had been employed at Livermore. In about 1991, I asked Dr. Lowell Wood about it, who was (and presumably still is) a prominent weapon physicist at Livermore. He told me that it was a project, never actually constructed, to launch a spacecraft on a column of nuclear-heated steam. The idea was that a deep shaft would be dug in the earth and filled with water. A spacecraft would be placed atop this shaft, and a nuclear explosive would be detonated at the bottom." - Carl Feynman http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Plumbob.html > Shaped charges using normal explosive via explosions perpendicular not > behind path of travel "fingers on watermellon seed" squirt a molten > bunch of formerly solid materials to 6 - 10 km/s. Not efficient I > think, but maybe benefits make it worth it. Shaped charges (or, in particular, "retarded shaped charges") are a standard technique used to simulate orbital debris in laboratory tests. It is a very effective way to create a spray of 10-12 km/s metal particles. Do a search on "shaped charge" and "hypervelocity impact" and you will find lots of examples. > thus maybe squirting molten > metal or even water in solid stream across solar system to wherever > needed? Not an accurate sytem, but moon with its gravity well is big > target, maybe terraform it by dumping 10 meters of water over surface. > Sorry to raise crazy idea, just is a novel and working method of launch > maybe worth exploring. Fritz Zwiky may have done just that (spray a shaped-charge jet into solar orbit from atop of an Aerobee sounding rocket) in 1958: http://utenti.lycos.it/paoloulivi/aerobee.html http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/beamline/31/1/31-1-maurer.pdf -- Andrew J. Higgins Mechanical Engineering Dept. Associate Professor McGill University Shock Wave Physics Group Montreal, Quebec CANADA http://www.mcgill.ca/mecheng/staff/academic/higgins/ |
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