31–40 of 40 posts
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The barrel is part of the casing, necessary for a sustained reaction.
True, but does the barrel need to be a cylinder? That is, couldn’t the casing be a sphere with a hole cut out and a cylinder inserted? I suppose this could be much less pleasant to machine and to service.
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The plutonium cores were machined as hemispheres because they had to put an initiator in the center.
Also to prevent criticality problems when moving them.
There were squib explosions in various assembly and disassembly buildings when too many pits were put on the same cart.
One I read about destroyed an entire building, plus damaged the buildings on either side. A worker noticed a blue glow beforehand, and I think all the workers were able to run far enough away to survive the explosion(s).
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New Yorker, I found, is always obtuse, long-winded prose that fill up 14 pages where the whole thing can be, if it was written like a normal article, summarized in no more than 3 pages. It is prose porn for writers and readers alike. If I want good prose, I read the the Cabinet Magazine which is far superior in writing, curtness and straightforwardness while not affecting the charming and poetical aspects of writing.…
I don't even need to read the article to know this is going to be a long winded piece of popular bullshit. Just look at the title, manages to demean and belittle an entire industry that is entirely required for a functioning economy and society. Y'all wonder why blue collar America thinks we're stuck up entitled pricks? Maybe it's because we are.
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I think Chrome is the only browser left without a reader view.
chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode
In case you doubt this, here's an article from 2014 on how to enable the perpetually newly-added hidden reader mode: https://lifehacker.com/enable-the-new-hidden-reader-mode-in-...
I got this guy's "book" off Amazon back when he was taking them to Kinko's to be printed up. His is a fairly remarkable story of curiosity which I have always enjoyed. He even signed it for me. What is not often pointed out is that he managed to reason his way into understanding to various points, and the process of doing so revealed information that is otherwise still classified. As a teen in Las Vegas in the 70's w…
>> Fat Man used explosives to squeeze together two hemispheres of plutonium. I thought the plutonium core was one piece and the explosives compressed it, making the same mass critical due to increased density.
While other responses have explained it was not, I thought I should point out that any sphere, even if a single piece, will always have at least two hemispheres, iow, a sphere having two hemispheres does not imply it is more than one piece. When you leaned of the Earth's northern and southern hemispheres, did you wonder if it was more than one piece?
> In the standard historical accounts, the way that the bomb’s gun mechanism worked was by shooting a cylindrical “male” uranium projectile into a concave, stationary uranium target. This act of atomic coitus created a mass sufficient to produce a critical reaction. The mass of the projectile was said to be 38.5 kilograms, and the mass of the target was said to be 25.6 kilograms. But no matter how many times Coster-M…
On the breech end, you insert a large "hollow point" slug of the rest of the critical mass. (an empty ice cream cone, open end first) The hole in the middle helps keep the neutron flux low, for now. Following this slug is the cordite explosive which will push the slug down the barrel at great speed.
The charge is set off, the slug rushes down the barrel, and gets wedged against the sides, in the process it breaks the neutron initiator, crushing it, and setting off a rush of neutrons, into the now complete, supercritical mass. The temperatures and pressures in the gun barrel begin to rise exponentially as the chain reaction takes off, within microseconds it is just the inertia of the barrel that helps keep things in place, the melting and even vaporization temperatures have been passed, but the contents have yet to disassemble completely, the chain reaction reaches its peak as the temperature climbs past 50,000,000 degrees, and then everything spreads outwards, 7/10ths of a gram of mass (the weight of about 3 rain drops) has been converted to energy, yielding the explosive yield equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT.
I got this guy's "book" off Amazon back when he was taking them to Kinko's to be printed up. His is a fairly remarkable story of curiosity which I have always enjoyed. He even signed it for me. What is not often pointed out is that he managed to reason his way into understanding to various points, and the process of doing so revealed information that is otherwise still classified. As a teen in Las Vegas in the 70's w…
There is significant amounts of classified information already available publicly in documentaries etc. This is readily acknowledged by people at the labs who Ive chatted with, though I didnt push to probe specifics. Much of the secret sauce at the time (knowing the cross sections for various processes, reflecting neutrons etc) that enabled the design of working weapons is all well understood and publicly known now a…
For example, even if "everyone" knows how fast an SR-71 can fly, that number is still classified. And if you have a clearance you can't talk about it because it is classified and you know its classified. So it is illegal for you to talk about its top speed. This is another good reason to avoid getting a government clearance if it can be avoided.
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One of the first "public" descriptions of this process was phrased something like: "shooting a mass of uranium down a barrel into another mass of uranium to form a supercritical mass." My guess is that the person who first said that didn't intend for the metaphor/description to be taken quite as literally as everyone ended up taking it. (Or they meant to mislead.) Hypothetically, if you read "into" as crash/collision…
> My guess is that the person who first said that didn't intend for the metaphor/description to be taken quite as literally as everyone ended up taking it. (Or they meant to mislead.) This is the problem. Why are they trying to shoehorn male or female dominance here? The whole thing is not only unpleasant to read, but also confusing.
They are describing the shapes, and the orientations of the projectiles in terms of coital positions - with which, um, some percentage of the adult population has some familiarity.
Here, "female-superior arrangement" means that the male is supine, and the female straddles atop him