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Post by heroeblaster on Jan 30, 2018 19:48:40 GMT
heroeblaster , the fission reaction you might be thinking of is the beta plus decay of Helium-2 to Deuterium after the initial proton-proton fusion reaction, which Wikipedia states has a significantly lower probability of occurring than the proton decay of Helium-2 to two protons. To quote verbatim; "The first step involves the fusion of two 1H nuclei (protons) into deuterium, releasing a positron and a neutrino as one proton changes into a neutron. It is a two-stage process; first, two protons fuse to form a diproton: 1H + 1H → 0He followed by the beta-plus decay of the diproton to deuterium: 0He → 2H + e++ νewith the overall formula: 1H + 1H→ 2H + e++ νe + 0.42 MeV This first step is extremely slow because the positron emission of the diproton to deuterium is extremely rare (the vast majority of the time, the diproton decays back into two hydrogen-1 unbound protons through proton emission). This is because the emission of the positron is brought about by the weak nuclear force, which is immensely weaker than the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic force."Also relevant: "The half-life of a proton in the core of the Sun before it is involved in a successful proton-proton fusion is estimated to be about one billion years, even at the extreme pressures and temperatures found there."To be honest, using thermonuclear warheads to screw with the solar fusion rate sounds kind of outrageous, but I'm no expert. Yes, that's what I meant. I am not sure you could even force hydrogen to fuse fast unlike deuterium due to that.
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Post by heroeblaster on Jan 29, 2018 15:49:19 GMT
What exactly would detonating a tiny speck of nuclear bomb do to a massive runaway fusion explosion that has been at it for billions of years accomplish? The fusion that occurs inside the core of the sun is proton proton fusion that is only possible due to the immense pressure enabling fusion to occur at lower temperatures than normal due to quantum tunneling. Fusion from quantum tunneling also occurs fairly slowly. If you used a thermonuclear explosion to ignite fusion in the suns hydrogen using heat you could possibly trigger a fast fusion reaction using the hydrogen in the sun as the third stage of the nuke. Wait, i thought that P-P fusion can’t be in the fast form. I probably remember it wrong but doesn’t it require a rare fission event to happen somewhere along the way?
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Post by heroeblaster on Jan 12, 2018 19:44:50 GMT
Escape pods with prisoners of war, working radios, and dumped towards suborbital orbits. That sounds really cruel and probably a war crime
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Post by heroeblaster on Jan 9, 2018 22:48:00 GMT
No kill like overkill indeed. I was not sure that several dozen teratons of nuclear shaped charge would do the trick against a bunker designed for synthetics that is submerged in upper mantle. Well there are also 'supercavitation drills' in the setting but they are usually seen as harder to setup. If you are interested in an totally overkill idea, use an sun gun, an >1% dyson swarm powering an mini deathstar destroying the entire crust in under a month. Otherwise, a heck ton of small antimatter catalyzed bombs. An single microgram can just as well catalyze an 1kT bomb as an 100MT one. Requiring only lithium deuteride. Which can be generated from water and lithium. 1t of LiD creates 10MT of explosive force, an megaton would create 10 teratons, etc. Sounds low but it is much cheaper than accelerating an giant asteroid in most cases. The issue is of how difficult it is to set up space infrastructure due to parallel earths acting as anchors for trans-universe travel in that setting. It is relatively easy(in comparison) to dump stuff anywhere geostationary between the surface and LEO but it would be difficult to fight an entrenched AI by somehow deploying a rocket launchpad into a planet covered in turrets and teletanks, launching space operations under fire from orbit and ground and then building enough infrastructure to beam lasers from the sun or ramming a planet with a dinosaur killer. Stuff that can nail the entrenched AI by ramming it with a mile long rod at 30% c is a thing but you kind of need to get it there and up to to speed first. If anyone is interested I could write down my ideas on how the setting should work so far. To be fair it is a result of injecting myself with a ton of ProjectRHO, Orion's Arm, a bunch of Isaac Arthur's work and some other things.
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Post by heroeblaster on Jan 8, 2018 10:08:45 GMT
Details about killing underground bunkers with nukes tend to be kind of scarce for some reason. There is also no kill like overkill. If you're even thinking about this then subtle options like drilling a hole first or pouring foam insulation down the heat vents weren't seen as sufficient. No kill like overkill indeed. I was not sure that several dozen teratons of nuclear shaped charge would do the trick against a bunker designed for synthetics that is submerged in upper mantle. Well there are also 'supercavitation drills' in the setting but they are usually seen as harder to setup.
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Post by heroeblaster on Jan 6, 2018 12:00:00 GMT
Hello heroeblaster . A sufficiently large nuclear device would dig a very deep crater. The volume of rock and soil excavated to form the crater is blasted into the sky. If it is going fast enough, some may escape Earth's pull. A lot of it falls down slowly instead, but hot winds make the dust drift and cover huge areas of the world. It is unlikely that any nuclear weapon localized in one spot would produce enough energy to heat up the entire world all at once. If the energies are too extreme, they are simply lost a electromagnetic radiation into space. Instead, what you'll have is the ground itself absorbing a lot of this energy and becoming a massive lake of lava topped by hot rock vapours. This heat spreads to the atmosphere, where it is carried to the rest of the planet in a much slower fashion. This is how the planet gets covered in a single big firestorm - not in a flash, but by superheated winds flowing out of a massive hurricane. It is possible to produce a shockwave powerful enough to go around the world with enough force to topple structures. You will have to blow a big part of the atmosphere into space though. For sufficiently power shaped charges, you just calculate the volume of the cone of material you need to remove, multiply by its density, and then by its heat of vaporization. This will give you a rough estimate of how much energy is needed. For example, a 1000m deep cone of 60 degrees has a volume of 349 000 000m^3. Rock has a density of about 3300kg/m^3, so you want to vaporize 1.15 billion tons of rock. This requires very roughly 3.5 exajoules. Thanks a lot matterbeam. I completely lacked math behind my idea. A question though, do I need to vaporize all that rock from the surface to the upper mantle if i want to hit something just below the crust or are there any other forces at work? Like a shockwave that propagates through rock.
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Post by heroeblaster on Jan 6, 2018 1:51:17 GMT
Sorry for a really late reply. I had severe computer issues. From what I thought neutron bombs don’t have a huge range. A 1 kiloton neutron bomb will irradiate anybody unfortunate enough to be at a range of 900 meters with 80 Grays of neutrons. I also saw numbers in low hundreds of kilometers maximum and I don’t see a reason why neutron radiation won’t fall off by the same rules as a conventional nuke. Twice the distance- quarter the intensity. A huge neutron bomb would have to go off lower than ISS to touch the surface with neutrons even if we ignore atmosphere. If we somehow mix casaba with neutron bombs to fire neutrons in a tight cone I don’t think we would get much more than casaba’s result which would be below a thousand km. Also we steered off course a little bit. In that wip setting I have postbiological humans and AI hopping between alternative Earths with devices that work only within LEO and stationary relative to Earth’s crust. So local military sometimes has a need to blast someone who dug in with hordes of drone defenses all over the surface while having bases under kilometers of rock and graphene. I was wondering how hard it is to crack through a continental plate with a shaped nuke due to that. Also I wanted to know more about limitations to the shockwave generated by incredibly powerful explosions. Could you blow up a nuke big enough to level a building on the other side of a planet or would the blast just get wasted above a certain point? you might blast off the atmosphere, but a big enough rock can do it so I don't see why a large nuke wouldn't work Hmm... I wonder how devastating would it be if a huge chunk of atmosphere flows to one side of the planet due to a blast and then flows back in. Apart of two huge shockwaves.
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Post by heroeblaster on Jan 6, 2018 1:07:38 GMT
Doesn't radiation damage fall off insanely fast with distance? To the point if you are not in relatively point blank range it won't damage the ship. I think deployment of nukes in space is banned due to how easy it is to deorbit them literally anywhere with less warning than intercontinental ballistic missiles or even submarine based missiles while also being harder to intercept. a few Km for big nuclear weapons, sometimes inside the fireball. but s/he's talking about neutron or enhanced radiation weapons Sorry for a really late reply. I had severe computer issues. From what I thought neutron bombs don’t have a huge range. A 1 kiloton neutron bomb will irradiate anybody unfortunate enough to be at a range of 900 meters with 80 Grays of neutrons. I also saw numbers in low hundreds of kilometers maximum and I don’t see a reason why neutron radiation won’t fall off by the same rules as a conventional nuke. Twice the distance- quarter the intensity. A huge neutron bomb would have to go off lower than ISS to touch the surface with neutrons even if we ignore atmosphere. If we somehow mix casaba with neutron bombs to fire neutrons in a tight cone I don’t think we would get much more than casaba’s result which would be below a thousand km. Also we steered off course a little bit. In that wip setting I have postbiological humans and AI hopping between alternative Earths with devices that work only within LEO and stationary relative to Earth’s crust. So local military sometimes has a need to blast someone who dug in with hordes of drone defenses all over the surface while having bases under kilometers of rock and graphene. I was wondering how hard it is to crack through a continental plate with a shaped nuke due to that. Also I wanted to know more about limitations to the shockwave generated by incredibly powerful explosions. Could you blow up a nuke big enough to level a building on the other side of a planet or would the blast just get wasted above a certain point?
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Post by heroeblaster on Jan 6, 2018 0:11:09 GMT
I recently had a weird idea after reading about Ultra Dense Deuterium. From what little I understood it is a form of metallic hydrogen but based on deuterium instead of normal hydrogen and it has an incredibly low fusion ignition requirement. Just 3 kilojoules. We might have a material that undergoes fusion from basically a love tap(in comparison to most fusion fuels). So what if we have a mass driver that fires projectiles that are made out of or carry UDD and it would undergo fusion on impact with armor? Most nukes just break when hit hard enough when here we have an in- built contact detonator. We can have armor- piercing nukes that blow up as they power through the hull. On the plus side it also uses pure fusion with almost no pesky fallout. Probably it would be prohibitively expensive and dangerous as UDD has a tendency to go fusion randomly from quantum effects but still. Another idea I had is a kugelblitz accelerator. So... small black holes evaporate explosively and you can make them by concentrating enough lasers at small enough point of space. If you could launch a kugelblitz black hole at a target you can decide where exactly it decays because exact time depends on the initial mass and it can’t feed itself below certain size. It also passes through basically everything, glows like a tiny star and is smaller than a proton. So it is kind of an updated version of a Traveller’s Meson Accelerator concept. But instead of having an equivalent of a bunch of gamma rays teleporting behind any armor you get an equivalent of a large nuke teleporting in fraction of a second before going off worth of gamma rays behind any armor.
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Post by heroeblaster on Jul 30, 2017 18:25:08 GMT
It'd be much more efficient to just detonate a neutron bomb in low to medium orbit. I don't know the numbers, but I'd say a <10MT neutron nuke could wipe out half of all life if aimed right, a lot less if directional. Consider yourself lucky that no-one really knows the numbers. A very rough estimate for an orbital neutron bomb detonation would be one to cover a semiglobe that takes up very toughly 45° of the explosion radius with enough neutrons to penetrate the atmosphere and irradiate ground level to lethal conditions. While high yield neutron bombs are not effective in atmosphere, there's a reason why we have a treatise against use of nuclear weaponry in space; It wouldn't take much more than 500 kilotons to deliver lethal ionizing radiation over an area of the entire Pacific with one bomb. But ionizing radiation doesn't really decimate infrastructure, it only leaves everything sterilized. Just sayin' Doesn't radiation damage fall off insanely fast with distance? To the point if you are not in relatively point blank range it won't damage the ship. I think deployment of nukes in space is banned due to how easy it is to deorbit them literally anywhere with less warning than intercontinental ballistic missiles or even submarine based missiles while also being harder to intercept.
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Post by heroeblaster on Jul 27, 2017 9:50:40 GMT
Hello Enderminion. Thanks for a warm welcome. I've been lurking for a while here. I thought nuclear winter is caused by ash being thrown into stratosphere by fires caused by nukes and staying there for decades blocking sunlight which starves off all plant life. If i am not mistaken salted bombs coat surface of the Earth in a thin layer of highly radioactive material which would cause lethal doses for humans within hours and would last for several years. It seems that if I want to get nuclear winter I need to nuke forests and cities with low powered bombs. Funny enough the more modern a city is the less it burns. Nukes tend to melt it coating combustive materials in layer of slag before it has a chance to burn. And even though nuclear shaped charges don't mix with atmosphere well there is always brute force way. I think during project Orion it was suggested to use shaped nukes to sink warships from orbit. Even though nuking it would use the device more efficiently it still did a lot of damage hundreds of kilometers away and a stream of nuclear fire is way harder to intercept than a bomber or a cruise missile. In any case, the way I intend to use it is huge surface detonated shaped charge directed 'straight down' to crack a bunker in the upper mantle. Due to some in-world specifics in some cases deploying RKKV is harder than shipping a bomb the size of a skyscraper just over the target. A Cobalt bomb bombardment would effectively create a nuclear winter, if you have a skyscraper sized bomb, that is big enough for AM weapons I feel like that would be a bit of an overkill. Everyone would die from one cobalt bomb anyway as it would irradiate almost all surface of a planet by itself. And as it is a neutron bomb modification it is probably less efficient at causing firestorms.
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Post by heroeblaster on Jul 26, 2017 23:34:50 GMT
Welcome to the forums, if you want a nuclear winter, it would be better to use Cobalt-59 salted bombs. more smaller bombs is more efficient the only reason you want big bombs is surface and underground earthquake bombs. Atomic shaped charges don't mix with atmosphere, if RKKVs are impossible, then a large number of "normal" KKVs in the same area can work Hello Enderminion. Thanks for a warm welcome. I've been lurking for a while here. I thought nuclear winter is caused by ash being thrown into stratosphere by fires caused by nukes and staying there for decades blocking sunlight which starves off all plant life. If i am not mistaken salted bombs coat surface of the Earth in a thin layer of highly radioactive material which would cause lethal doses for humans within hours and would last for several years. It seems that if I want to get nuclear winter I need to nuke forests and cities with low powered bombs. Funny enough the more modern a city is the less it burns. Nukes tend to melt it coating combustive materials in layer of slag before it has a chance to burn. And even though nuclear shaped charges don't mix with atmosphere well there is always brute force way. I think during project Orion it was suggested to use shaped nukes to sink warships from orbit. Even though nuking it would use the device more efficiently it still did a lot of damage hundreds of kilometers away and a stream of nuclear fire is way harder to intercept than a bomber or a cruise missile. In any case, the way I intend to use it is huge surface detonated shaped charge directed 'straight down' to crack a bunker in the upper mantle. Due to some in-world specifics in some cases deploying RKKV is harder than shipping a bomb the size of a skyscraper just over the target.
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Post by heroeblaster on Jul 26, 2017 21:38:35 GMT
Hello guys!
Several months ago I've read that there is a subtype of Teller- Ulam nuclear weapons that can theoretically be layered with no upper limit and I immediately had an idea of a single bomb being able to glass a whole Earth- like planet like a cyclonic torpedo from Warhammer 40k. That is probably way less efficient than using a lot of smaller ones but for the sake of the rule of cool I went on classical Nukemap and started adding zeroes until thermal radiation radius encompassed the whole world and came up with something just over 100 teratons so I thought "sounds about right" and went with that assumption. However, recently I read that apparently any device larger than a certain point(10mt-100mt) just blows the same 10 square mile chunk of atmosphere into space faster due to Earth curvature protecting from the nuke flash.
So in the end I decided to ask here:
1) In your opinion, what would be the effects of such thing detonating? Apart of immediate ones, is it possible to cause nuclear winter just with this one device? Or any other possible unintended side effects like temperature rising across the world for a couple hours to several hundred degrees or global black rain?
2) If my estimate is wrong, how powerful of a bomb do I need to blow up to destroy all surface structures(shockwave should level buildings on the other side of the world) and is it even possible?
3) How powerful of a nuclear shaped charge do I need to blow a hole in a continental plate all the way to upper mantle? I have no idea how to guesstimate it and I need it for some worldbuilding as they are supposed to be one of three ways to destroy extremely deep "bunkers" that contain transhuman AI server nodes on par with slamming an RKKV into it and drilling for months.
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