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.
what if we were to build a large wooden badger...
Can these scientists apply this technology to Greyhounds ?
Give me a couple billion and I'll bribe someone to go in and take out Mr. "I'm so Ronery" altogether :-)
Hint: 34,000 / 1700 = 20, a nice round number, and a good upper bound for the delta-V imparted. You shouldn't assume I am stupid.
You're assuming I'm stupid. Please stop.
Sounds like an ideal safer replacement for depleted uranium shells---which are pretty sweet themselves in what they do when busting an enemy tank (superheat the inside, suck the organic contents out a small hole as they incinerate and cause the fuel tank to explode, all in 3 seconds).
Haha, Kim Jong Il will be very, ronery!!!
Noo, don't shut mad Howie up, let him talk all the way to an 06 congressional victory and 08 Presidential victory for the GOP!!!!
Asteroid chucker.
It is my misfortune to have to deal with your style of noisemaking in my professional work. It offers no enlightenment, and seems mainly to derive from a desire for self-aggrandizement on the part of the noisemaker. Continue if you like.
Mount it on the moon...
Why? If you're gonna shoot at people from space it's easier and a whole lot cheaper to just drop things from LEO. You've got an intrinsic orbit velocity of almost 8 km/sec, plus whatever kick you give it to start it on its way, plus whatever extra gravity can provide. As noted above, Jerry Pournelle and Stefan Possony wrote about the idea back in the early '80s. Drop a steel rod from orbit, and you've got the means to deliver tremendous energy to a target.
Other considerations: raw material, unlimitted ammo, stable platform, possible self-sufficiency, less vulnerable to attack. The facility may eventually be decomissioned, but it won't be another Skylab.
All valid points, but think of what it'd cost (in time and money) to build a moon-based facility that wasn't vulnerable to disruptions of our ability to launch payloads to the moon. It'd be a heck of a lot easier for the bad guys to take out our moon base by bombing our launch sites, than by attacking the moon.
Also, it's worth considering how well you could aim this thing from the moon. What would it take to be able to hit a specific building from that distance? How do you deal with aiming errors? This is the "how big should we make the nuclear warhead" problem -- you have to make up for aiming errors by creating larger craters, which is why Russian nukes were generally far larger than ours. For a moon-based system, I think you solve the problem by launching much larger projectiles. Power generation probably isn't a problem, but there could be difficulties in scaling up the device to handle larger bullets.
It's a cool problem, though, ain't it?
You said it. You no longer maintain it. You have taken the correction. Just with bad grace.
First you'll have to lure the enemy to less than 5mm or increase the range.
As for Lunar Base vulnerability, a colony, as self-sustaining as possible would be necessary. (That creates other questions, such as how long would it take for such a self-sustaining colony to decide that if it did not need Earth to continue, then why not be independant?)
In the meantime, though, accuracy becomes paramount, and could be achieved as with the Apollo missions--with "mid course corrections" or a delivery package similar to the guidance setup on a "smart" bomb.
Actually, little man, I corrected myself long before you came in to save the world.
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