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Post by luxardens on Nov 23, 2019 23:35:57 GMT
I've recently had a lot of fun with octa-x-cubanes to design some more-powerful-than-usual chemical guns (7 km/s), as well as metallic hydrogen pellets (14 km/s). But it's not enough. I need my guns to have MOAR POWER. Railguns fire pathetic grains of sand. Coilguns take infinite electricity. No. It won't do.
I need a conventional, big tube to launch projectiles of several kilograms at ridiculous velocities and I figured: why no nuclear propellant? We can make pocket nukes in CDE, and variable yield nukes are already a thing in real life so why not use a 100 gram low-yield (10 ton "fizzle" for example) nuke to propel a projectile out of a barrel instead of several kilograms of chemical compounds? I'm trying to mod "nuke propellant" in, but the grain size feature kind of screws everything up. Anybody got ideas on how to fix that? A nuke shouldn't have a grain size.... Or should I maybe put it at the estimated size of the pocket nuke??
Also, does anybody know of any projects that examined nuclear guns? Would probably have to be recoilless and suffer excessive ablation, but I figure there must be something, right? I'm not looking for Casaba, or project Plumbbob, I know about those. But are there any papers on the kind of chamber thickness required to contain a very modest (10-1000 ton) nuclear explosion?
It only has to last a dozen shots at minimum. It would make immense spinal mount guns with multi-ton slugs more... feasible.
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Post by Pttg on Nov 24, 2019 20:18:37 GMT
We tend to call those casaba howitzers or nuclear shaped charges. The papers on how these devices function have either not been released or else haven't been written yet, so they aren't in the game.
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Post by luxardens on Nov 25, 2019 23:10:52 GMT
We tend to call those casaba howitzers or nuclear shaped charges. The papers on how these devices function have either not been released or else haven't been written yet, so they aren't in the game. Eh, did you read? I explicitly stated I did NOT mean those. And I know why they aren't in-game. I just want to discuss modding them in by creating a new "material" and wondered if anyone has papers on the concept. Also, how these devices would roughly work is open knowledge and described plentifully by civil sources, as far as is possible without actually building the things. I want to use a low-yield nuclear fission bomb as a propellant to launch a solid projectile through a big tube, not shatter it into a billion pieces or vaporize a shell.
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Post by bigbombr on Nov 26, 2019 7:46:03 GMT
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Post by luxardens on Nov 26, 2019 15:51:50 GMT
Ah, yes I guess a ground-based nuclear gun is always possible. I tried extrapolating information from underground nuke experiments, but they of course assume the nuclear weapon is completely surrounded (by dirt), instead of leaving an opening, so the resultant figures for how much material vaporizes are very pessimistic. Using figures for ablation due to flash alone gets me overly optimistic figures instead. For getting small yields, I figured you'd probably want to deliberately get a fizzle. Maybe even tweak the timing of the explosive lenses so that the core material is ejected (normally something you try really hard to avoid of course) in the direction that you want the projectile to travel anyway. That way you should be able to get any yield you want, albeit wasteful of fissile material.
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