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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   5088 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 7, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The nuclear salt-water rocket propulsion that would give them range to Pluto and back one tank fairly fast are doable

"When Chernobyl reached peak x power during its explosion it was about 350 gigawatts for a fraction of a second. This is 700 gigawatts continuously, right, it's a non-stop Chernobyl going on."

are doable

Well, maybe? For obvious reasons we'll never get the EPA to approve a ground test, and I'd be a bit leery about LEO too, which leaves us just hoping that Zubrin's paper was solid.

Of course, the 66 km/s exhaust version was his conservative design; the really speculative version upgrades the uranium enrichment level from "20%" to "weapons grade" and bumps up the yield, to get the delta-V to a few percent of the speed of light. YOLO, right?

Either way, while I'm generally a big fan of the SpaceX "get hardware flying so if it breaks you learn more faster" strategy, I think I'd be cool with taking things more slowly before assembling a 200,000 megaton hopefully-not-a-bomb in orbit.

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