http://www.damninteresting.com/the-little-crowbar-that-could

So apparently, in the 1950s, when we were all nuke crazy, we(the U.S. Government) designed and built a nuclear-powered nuclear missile. The thing would spew massive amounts of heat and radiation it's entire trip, while peppering stronger targets with smaller nuclear bombs. Read the article for more details, as well as the Air&Space magazine article it links to. These people were out of their goddamn minds.

Horrible real-life implications aside, I might have to recreate this in TBM or FreeBuild as a replacement for the nuke. It would be pretty awesome to see it melt people as it flys by.
We also considered interstellar starships that dumped nukes along the way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

URL detection fail. Whatever.

fixed
chronomex wrote:

Yeah. That
DShiznit wrote:
These people were out of their goddamn minds.


No they weren't, they were doing SCIENCE!

Jokes aside, they really weren't. You know it is a stupid idea now *BECAUSE OF* people like them. It isn't like we discovered nukes & radiation and immediately knew how it all worked or what was dangerous. For a while people were x-ray crazy, using it all over the place until we realized it can cause damage. This is basically the same thing. And in 50 years, we'll probably look back at what we're doing know and go "wtf? those people were *soooo* stupid"

Also, Project Orion is awesome. It is actually the highest performance rocket design we could actually build. Very fast and loads of thrust, and could potentially hit 10% the speed of light. By comparison, the current fastest man made object (Helios 2) only hit a measly 0.023% the speed of light.
I'm with K on project Orion. Nuclear radiation in space is meaningless, as each and every one of the billions of stars in our own galaxy is a nuclear furnace anyway. However, should the rocket crash or explode on launch(as is common with Needs Another Seven Astronauts) you'd have a flying Chernobyl.

EDIT- while we're on the subject of really bad nuclear ideas from the 50s-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_%28nuclear_device%29
Elfprince, I beg you to keep the language in check; I see I missed a particular word in the expletive filter. Kllrnohj, I often wonder what exactly we'll discover was so horribly terribly stupid.
KermMartian wrote:
Kllrnohj, I often wonder what exactly we'll discover was so horribly terribly stupid.


inb4 someone shouts "OBAMACARE!"
KermMartian wrote:
Kllrnohj, I often wonder what exactly we'll discover was so horribly terribly stupid.


IPv4 Razz

DShiznit wrote:
I'm with K on project Orion. Nuclear radiation in space is meaningless, as each and every one of the billions of stars in our own galaxy is a nuclear furnace anyway. However, should the rocket crash or explode on launch(as is common with Needs Another Seven Astronauts) you'd have a flying Chernobyl.


You wouldn't launch something like Project Orion with nukes you idiot. You use conventional rockets or build it in space (we really need a space elevator) and then switch on the nuke engines when it's a good distance away.
DShiznit wrote:
KermMartian wrote:
Kllrnohj, I often wonder what exactly we'll discover was so horribly terribly stupid.


inb4 someone shouts "OBAMACARE!"


inwhilst I yell "OBAMACARE!" :3

but oh my, this is a very nasty bomb indeed. My guess is that in 50 years from today we find all 16+ bit CPUs to be radiation-releasing so we'll have to move to z80 based computers with 52 bit data addressing Razz [/hopes]

This bomb is almost as stupid as some of the weapons in a "outer limits" episode -- close on the stupidity scale to the "Nuclear-tipped shell shotgun" in an episode I saw ~week ago.
Kllrnohj wrote:
KermMartian wrote:
Kllrnohj, I often wonder what exactly we'll discover was so horribly terribly stupid.


IPv4 Razz

DShiznit wrote:
I'm with K on project Orion. Nuclear radiation in space is meaningless, as each and every one of the billions of stars in our own galaxy is a nuclear furnace anyway. However, should the rocket crash or explode on launch(as is common with Needs Another Seven Astronauts) you'd have a flying Chernobyl.


You wouldn't launch something like Project Orion with nukes you idiot. You use conventional rockets or build it in space (we really need a space elevator) and then switch on the nuke engines when it's a good distance away.


You still have to get the nuclear material into space, and if the ship carrying it crashes or explodes in mid-air...
DShiznit wrote:

You still have to get the nuclear material into space, and if the ship carrying it crashes or explodes in mid-air...

We're not the only hunk of rock floating around the inner solar system. Wink
elfprince13 wrote:
DShiznit wrote:

You still have to get the nuclear material into space, and if the ship carrying it crashes or explodes in mid-air...

We're not the only hunk of rock floating around the inner solar system. Wink


Are you suggesting we could harvest nuclear materials in space? How are we supposed to get the all the large, heavy equipment for enriching it up there? I could be wrong, but I don't think it's feasible yet...
DShiznit wrote:
Are you suggesting we could harvest nuclear materials in space? How are we supposed to get the all the large, heavy equipment for enriching it up there? I could be wrong, but I don't think it's feasible yet...

NASA is funding my research group because of the applications for self-assembling robotics.
That's great, but self-assembling a nuclear material enrichment facility in space would be like trying to build the Burj Khalifa with legos.
DShiznit wrote:
That's great, but self-assembling a nuclear material enrichment facility in space would be like trying to build the Burj Khalifa with legos.

You don't need to self-assemble the whole thing. You need to self assemble the assemblers.
I won't argue this with you, because you clearly know more about the subject than I do. I still don't think it's feasible yet to build something as complex as a nuclear enrichment facility in space, but you'd know better than I would.
DShiznit wrote:
I won't argue this with you, because you clearly know more about the subject than I do. I still don't think it's feasible yet to build something as complex as a nuclear enrichment facility in space, but you'd know better than I would.


Any sensible plans for serious space exploration have to involve developing the ability to harvest resources and carry out refinement and construction in space because the economics of getting resources out of our gravity well are untenable.
DShiznit wrote:
I won't argue this with you, because you clearly know more about the subject than I do. I still don't think it's feasible yet to build something as complex as a nuclear enrichment facility in space, but you'd know better than I would.


Feasible now? No. Feasible in 20 years? Perhaps.

Like I said, we just need to get some space elevators up in here (we actually know how to make one, we just really, really suck at making the materials needed to build one - carbon nanotubes will work)
Kllrnohj wrote:
DShiznit wrote:
I won't argue this with you, because you clearly know more about the subject than I do. I still don't think it's feasible yet to build something as complex as a nuclear enrichment facility in space, but you'd know better than I would.


Feasible now? No. Feasible in 20 years? Perhaps.

Like I said, we just need to get some space elevators up in here (we actually know how to make one, we just really, really suck at making the materials needed to build one - carbon nanotubes will work)


In the long term, resource harvesting+refinement up there is still going to be the saner option against trying to truck it up there as far as energy consumption is concerned. Space elevators don't do much except relocate the costs of trying to break out of the well. We won't have to carry the fuel with us, but we'll still need to be burning something down here.

[edit]
On a related note, today's xkcd made me really sad inside:
http://xkcd.com/893/
  
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