"In 1956 we were severely limited in computing capabilities-compared to nowadays they were laughable, and miniscule, and arguably nonexistent. I had the equations of state of four materials. They were air and water, aluminum and uranium. As it happens, there is a lot of aluminum in NTS soil, so I called that "earth". I called that of uranium "fire", and the others were air and water, so with earth, air, fire and water, how could I fail?"
"Six times the escape velocity from the earth."
Of course the cap would act like a meteor in reverse and the compression heating would evaporate it. Still...
You don't need nukes to generate very high speeds. The Voitenko system also got 6x escape velocity, albeit with a gas jet rather than a physical object.
No comments:
Post a Comment