Apparently, there are cadets at Colorado Springs who take the engineering track, and those who take the history track. He was a pretty smart guy and was on an important technical advisory committee, but he seemed to think a weapon laser had a power draw comparable to a radar set: no big deal. The more one looks into it, integrating a laser weapon could involve some significant internal changes in component location and space, thermal management, power management, and airframe isolation from the pointer-tracker. I really have my doubts that so much modification would be tolerated for something as tightly designed as the F-47.
Yes. And I remember every area was stealing a little bit of the F-22’s weapons bay in the design. They had a big crack down and it took practically an act of God to get another cubic inch out of the weapons bay. It was the incentive for me to come up with the Small Powerful Bomb. My energetics efforts faded though and we got the Small Diameter Bomb. Which turned out to be a hit. I really like the ground launched version too.
When I went to Lawrence Livermore in CA, I was being shown around by the head guy. He told a joke: How do you tell an Explosives Engineer? Then he held up his hand with 3 of his 4 fingers showing. It was only a minute or two when I was greeted by an Engineer with 3 fingers. Static electricity is a big deal when dealing with open explosives. They were working on insensitive explosives that were nearly twice as powerful as TNT. I gave them one that was safe and 5 times as powerful as TNT but they needed to figure out how to manufacture it efficiently. It looks like they are migrating to BOM, which is 1.5 x TNT and safe.
Rockets: What is your opinion on taking liquid methane, super heating it with a small nuclear reactor and then added to oxygen. Not sure how this would work out, but super heated oxygen creates an energetic plasma. But keeping it from reacting with the pipelines would be a challenge.
Didn't know about the finger joke, but had one turn handling a double-base (nitrocellulose-nitroglycerine) rocket propellant grain. Absolutely foul smell. We had to wear scuff pads on our shoe soles made of copper sponge, wired to contacts on our calfs, so we were always at ground potential to avoid static sparking. The handling room was equipped with blowout panels in case there was a light-off. Absent that, I calculated that the gas flow out the door would have been over 100 mph. Serious business.
What you describe for an idea was an invention disclosure that I came up with in the 1980s: using a small nuclear reactor to heat up propellants not to expel directly, but to amp up the effective specific impulse upon combustion. The problem was how to get Centaur-level performance out of a stage that could fit into the payload bay of the Space Shuttle. The hydrogen tank was the problem. Too big. And going pure nuclear wouldn't help because the required hydrogen tank was still too large. I was just looking at heating up (e.g.) hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide to injection temperatures several hundred degrees hotter than normal. It looked like it could work, and it packaged fairly densely. Reactor power was about a tenth that of a pure nuke. I think I anticipated NASA's LANTR concept by about 7 years.
As for high Isp, both methane and ammonia have been considered as nuclear thermal engine propellants. The trick there is to heat them high enough to dissociate them into hydrogen and methylene (CH2) or nitrogen, arriving at a lower molecular weight. LANTR would have added oxygen in the nozzle for supersonic combustion. I think they may have been concerned about the reactivity of hot oxygen as well. If that splits into single oxygen atoms, they are terribly reactive. In Dr. Robert Bussard's text on nuclear rocket engines, he points out that one can gain a significant boost in Isp by running a nuclear thermal engine at max temperature and lower chamber pressure, so the hydrogen is dissociated into separate atoms.
When I was in my teens, I was convinced that a way to go was to create monatomic hydrogen and let it react by recombination. I recall the performance numbers were equivalent to a nuclear thermal rocket engine. Easy enough to make: just run hydrogen through an electric arc. Power supply? I speculated a compact nuclear -electric generator. So, the advantage? Separation of the reactor design problem from the direct thrust chamber environment, and no fallout problem from terrestrial operation. (I figured out the benefit later. At the time, it was just a cool idea.)
Apparently, there are cadets at Colorado Springs who take the engineering track, and those who take the history track. He was a pretty smart guy and was on an important technical advisory committee, but he seemed to think a weapon laser had a power draw comparable to a radar set: no big deal. The more one looks into it, integrating a laser weapon could involve some significant internal changes in component location and space, thermal management, power management, and airframe isolation from the pointer-tracker. I really have my doubts that so much modification would be tolerated for something as tightly designed as the F-47.
Yes. And I remember every area was stealing a little bit of the F-22’s weapons bay in the design. They had a big crack down and it took practically an act of God to get another cubic inch out of the weapons bay. It was the incentive for me to come up with the Small Powerful Bomb. My energetics efforts faded though and we got the Small Diameter Bomb. Which turned out to be a hit. I really like the ground launched version too.
Good for you! I like energetics, though my interest was in more powerful rocket fuels.
When I went to Lawrence Livermore in CA, I was being shown around by the head guy. He told a joke: How do you tell an Explosives Engineer? Then he held up his hand with 3 of his 4 fingers showing. It was only a minute or two when I was greeted by an Engineer with 3 fingers. Static electricity is a big deal when dealing with open explosives. They were working on insensitive explosives that were nearly twice as powerful as TNT. I gave them one that was safe and 5 times as powerful as TNT but they needed to figure out how to manufacture it efficiently. It looks like they are migrating to BOM, which is 1.5 x TNT and safe.
Rockets: What is your opinion on taking liquid methane, super heating it with a small nuclear reactor and then added to oxygen. Not sure how this would work out, but super heated oxygen creates an energetic plasma. But keeping it from reacting with the pipelines would be a challenge.
I would like to see the Isp on that one.
Didn't know about the finger joke, but had one turn handling a double-base (nitrocellulose-nitroglycerine) rocket propellant grain. Absolutely foul smell. We had to wear scuff pads on our shoe soles made of copper sponge, wired to contacts on our calfs, so we were always at ground potential to avoid static sparking. The handling room was equipped with blowout panels in case there was a light-off. Absent that, I calculated that the gas flow out the door would have been over 100 mph. Serious business.
What you describe for an idea was an invention disclosure that I came up with in the 1980s: using a small nuclear reactor to heat up propellants not to expel directly, but to amp up the effective specific impulse upon combustion. The problem was how to get Centaur-level performance out of a stage that could fit into the payload bay of the Space Shuttle. The hydrogen tank was the problem. Too big. And going pure nuclear wouldn't help because the required hydrogen tank was still too large. I was just looking at heating up (e.g.) hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide to injection temperatures several hundred degrees hotter than normal. It looked like it could work, and it packaged fairly densely. Reactor power was about a tenth that of a pure nuke. I think I anticipated NASA's LANTR concept by about 7 years.
As for high Isp, both methane and ammonia have been considered as nuclear thermal engine propellants. The trick there is to heat them high enough to dissociate them into hydrogen and methylene (CH2) or nitrogen, arriving at a lower molecular weight. LANTR would have added oxygen in the nozzle for supersonic combustion. I think they may have been concerned about the reactivity of hot oxygen as well. If that splits into single oxygen atoms, they are terribly reactive. In Dr. Robert Bussard's text on nuclear rocket engines, he points out that one can gain a significant boost in Isp by running a nuclear thermal engine at max temperature and lower chamber pressure, so the hydrogen is dissociated into separate atoms.
When I was in my teens, I was convinced that a way to go was to create monatomic hydrogen and let it react by recombination. I recall the performance numbers were equivalent to a nuclear thermal rocket engine. Easy enough to make: just run hydrogen through an electric arc. Power supply? I speculated a compact nuclear -electric generator. So, the advantage? Separation of the reactor design problem from the direct thrust chamber environment, and no fallout problem from terrestrial operation. (I figured out the benefit later. At the time, it was just a cool idea.)
You’re quite welcome. 😎