Posted on 06/09/2005 6:21:36 AM PDT by anguish
Scientists at the Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, New Mexico have accelerated a small plate from zero to 76,000 mph in less than a second. The speed of the thrust was a new record for Sandia's "Z Machine" - not only the fastest gun in the West, but in the world too.
The Z Machine is now able to propel small plates at 34 kilometers a second, faster than the 30 kilometers per second that Earth travels through space in its orbit about the Sun. That's 50 times faster than a rifle bullet, and three times the velocity needed to escape Earth's gravitational field.
The ultra-tiny aluminum plates, just 850 microns thick, are accelerated at 1010 g. One g is the force of Earth's gravity. Doing so without vaporizing the plates was possible because of the finer control now achievable of the magnetic field pulse that drives the flight.
Z's hurled plates strike a target after traveling only five millimeters, or less than a quarter-inch. The impact generates a shock wave -- in some cases, reaching 15 million times atmospheric pressure -- that passes through the target material. The waves are so powerful that they turn solids into liquids, liquids into gases, and gases into plasmas in the same way that heat melts ice to water or boils water into steam.
One purpose of these very rapid flights is to help understand the extreme conditions found within the interiors of giant planets in our solar system. By creating states of matter extremely difficult to achieve on Earth, the flyer plates provide hard data to astrophysicists speculating on the structure and even the formation of planets like Jupiter and Saturn.
Didier Saumon, an astrophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, noted that the internal structures of Jupiter and Saturn are composed mostly of hydrogen. So knowing its equation of state -- how hydrogen and its isotopes behave at pressures from one to 50 million atmospheres -- is highly relevant to how scientists infer the interior properties of these planets.
An upgrade of the Z Machine is planned for next year and is expected to achieve higher plate velocities.
i hope that princess lea can get this information to obi wan kanobi so the rebel alliance can take this thing out before it become operational.
teeman
Unless
a) The gun is much more massive than the projectile
b) They have counter thrusters
c) Ya fire two projectiles, one in, one out...
Ran the numbers above....
It would bring new meaning to liquidating you enemy!
The problem would be, however, that the gun would end up flying off in the other direction, probably leaving Earth orbit...
Zero to 76,000 mph in a Second!
Yep... an atomically timed simultaneous firing out of each end should negate even the instantaneous jolt. (of course it would require 2X the power as well)
A small hole in a nuclear warhead will make the thing just a dirty bomb....right?
What little I understand about the stuff is that the design and implosion forces are arranged in a critical manner; a slight deviation in the equal force design makes the thing fizzle. If you can't "kill" the warhead, reducing its effectiveness to that of a car bomb is quite an improvement.
Yes it probably would but the chances that it would hit it's target would be zero or darn close to it. Something coming at that speed would simply explode the missile and scatter the radioactive material. Remember - kinetic energy is .5 x mass x velocity squared. When you have even a small mass that velocity squared term really adds up. For example, if the velocity is 5 times that of a bullet then the energy is equivalent to a bullet that is 25 times as big. Make that "bullet" big enough and it could bring down a missile since the missile would have to absorb all of that kinetic energy.
You have to bet that there have been numerous studies on this possibility because the government has been working on impact and laser destruction of missiles for a long time. I would guess that if intercepted at sufficiently high altitude the radioactive material would be so dispersed that it would not be an issue. But that is just a guess.
And once they get the range beyond 5mm.
1700 kg would be car sized, way too light. Even a tank is more like 10-20 times that. Putting your dV in the 1-2 m/sec range, not going to do much of anything to an orbit.
I'm thinking more of the warhead, not the missile. If we have a space weapon, the target will be the delivery platform, not the booster.....right?
All the same, this stuff amazes me. I'm still impressed with dragsters....8,000 hp and 0-320 in 4.5 secs.
MORE POWER!!
But an ICBM is vulnerable once it get into it's ballistic trajectory. That is why they MIRV them and use decoys. One launch yields multiple re-entry warheads. Some are real. Some are not. That makes intercepting them all a much harder problem. A good impact weapon floating around in space knocking off the decoys and the real ones sounds a lot easier to me than trying to figure out which is which and then shooting them down with ground based missiles. Space platforms that are defended and armed with high power lasers and impact weapons with a good ground based radar to feed tracking data to should take care of the North Korean threat. Give me a couple of $Trillion and I'll build you a system.
I use a desktop model for opening enevelopes.
The gun is kind of big and the projectile is kind of small for military apps.
You'd have to switch to "Extra Hold" hairspray.
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