Originally Posted By high_order1:
They appear to have had several ideas. The B91 gravity system, too. I  think it was two things, not so much the fall of russia, I think the communist-led environmentalists and liberals broke it off in All Things Nuclear.

Throw in a couple of subject matter experts wringing their hands, and I think it was the death knell.

(I have no background here, policy is way out of my wheelhouse, but I think war should be short, meaningful, and so immediately painful to the other side they give up. No rebuilding, no pacification or police action bullshit. So, if it means making some glassy parking lots instead of sending more of my neighbors' kids overseas, I guess they shouldn't have asked for it. I'm not the least worried about counterforce or nuclear winter).




There is more on that topic, but it is in Mandarin and... uh, cyrillic? lol

Linear can mean a rod or tube of active material. It could also mean a truncated cone, like one of those old paper cups. Then there is the whole 'nonspherical implosion'. All are predicated on making the active material relatively non-critical until time of boom. You can actually put more than a single critical mass into a pit if you spread it out enough, and a tube geometry would absolutely allow for that.

The issue is 'efficient'.

Most small-volume designs are inefficient. (The most wasteful remain gun assembled devices). That's because, I think, they  prioritize a shape or volume over compression. There is a TON to compression, and ways to keep the mass assembled for slightly longer. None of these fit into small volumes.

I believe efficient designs rely on ultrapure thin levitated shells, graded compression, focused neutron drive, boosting, and ample energetics. Insensitive High Explosives are relatively safer, but at a penalty of less drive for the same volume of material. (there are legit weaponeers, EOD and Production Technicians on here that could correct me... but they won't. o well)



ERW is generally poorly understood. My limited understanding is that once they pretty much got the idea of fission and fusion for defense applications down, they realized they could modulate and prefer certain outputs at the expense of others. This came from the so-called 'clean' vs 'dirty' systems, and I suspect, culminated in using tiny nuc systems to pump LASERS or other devices for... reasons. lol

There are a lot of routes to creating neutrons. But there are also ways to make a system more opaque to other energies at the expense of losing neutrons. (Neutrons are the secret sauce to nuc systems. Just a handful of them are what kick off the reaction. Adding a handful more... I THINK increases efficiency logarithmically. (Don't quote me, I am math dumb).



As far as the chemical high explosion portion of the physics package, they have been doing additive since the late 50's. Without having any of my reference material in front of me, I could make a case that they essentially invented it. Using layering technology they were able to adjust the refractive index of explosives, causing chapman-jouguet wave shaping, which started with multi-piece lens casting techniques, where they did have a terrible time with voids, but learned a great deal about non-destructive testing in order to make things better. Although, sitting with a 40 pound piece of explosive in your lap, and using a dentists' drill to bore a hole in live HE to fill a void doesn't sound like something you'd really want to be doing... but they did it.

Figuring out how to layer different products during the pour I think is where 3d printing started, honestly. I'm probably wrong, but I know for a fact they did it, and I know that them figuring it out reduced the CHE burden from hundreds of pounds to under a hundred pounds, and in some cases, much less.

Also, it's not just in active materials and conventional explosives. They also invented foamed metals. Imagine a sponge, but of actual metal. And, they made it into something called graded impactors, where it starts out almost squishy, but as you progress through it, it gets harder and stiffer. Doping this metal with various items gives... other benefits as well.

The control of density may not have been invented at the Labs, but it is where it is now because of them, in my opinion.



Funny story.

I was not there for this, but I (as well as others) put this together independently before NNSA fessed up to it. There is a component in certain systems, that does a certain function. It was a pain in the balls to make from several standpoints, and eventually, they stopped making it because... they assumed something better was coming? Who knows.

They tried to restart production of this product, and failed. Not really failed, but they didn't have as-built and batch data, and some other things were lost to the sands of time. What they made was absolutely pure and perfect in the lens of modern materials science. Then (I think, they never said) they did some underground low-yield testing with it, and... it did not behave like the legacy material.

Turns out, they had to re-introduce certain impurities, and alter the process in a less-optimized way in order to maintain the legacy, benchmarked material.

... well, I think it's funny. Like, Nile Red trying to bake a cookie in his lab using ochem techniques funny.

anyway



Guarantee it. Submarines are quiet, and people run faster due to it.



Totally agree.

And, apparently, they've had a lot of pushback over the years. It's like you have a 1981 car, but you can't change the tires on it because, is that a new weapons system? That's a treaty violation. Ok, so we leave the frame alone, but we put electronic ignition in it and power door locks. Same motor, so has to be same weapon. Right? Maybe. Well, let's replace the cylindrical transmission with a spherical one. Well, now it goes faster in the same lift weight and cone volume, so treaty violation, right? Nope, we used that transmission on a truck before, so it's not new. (I suspect this is where the ATF got some of their policymaking guidance.)




I agree completely. What is the point of leaving a pristine countryside if it's going to be taken by Godless commies? I think a point came where they knew the jig was up, but by then there were so many contractors trying to squeeze the last pennies out of the programs that they could have started doing better and remediating, but they said fuck it and kicked that can down the road, which I believe was wrong, and yet another nail in defense production work.

Plus, they had the advantage of testing.

To this day, the computer models are not super accurate. They have to adjust them to fit the actual test data, and they still don't seem to know why. My favorite, the 54, needed a few shots before they got it dialed in, but that was during the Fun Era of weaponeering. Plenty of material, plenty of talent, what magic can we squeeze out of the atom next?




I don't either, and no one has ever told me. I do know there is a component inside codeword TONY, that was a problem. Eventually one of them came up with an elegant as fuck solution to it, and it's something that amazes them all to this day. I wish to know what it was. The Russians know. The Chinese know. Taiwan knows. A ton of contractors, servicemen, scientists, printers, secretaries, and others know. (shrugs)




There has been a TON of speculation in the few places I've ever wormed my way into. The craziest part is that when you look at a 79 shell, most of that isn't the physics package, at all. (There are cutaway pics on the net).

I think the 79 is thinner than the 54. The 54 is spherical with a hemispherical hemishell, and a so-called "shaped hemishell".
The 54 was fission only. The 79 was a true TN system, and I've never read why besides military characteristics planning why they arrived at the yields they chose.   As far as volumetric space, .... mmmm not too certain. You can take an orange-sized lump of clay and squish it into a hollow football shape. Same amount of material, but now you can adjust the volume to be more amenable to a cone, or a sphere-cone, or even a cylinder.

Adding fusion can come in two routes. The soviets are known to have layered fusion materials around a fission system. Another speculative version has a fusion fuel at the end of a fission primary. The fanciest version uses container geometry and a delayed, filtering barrier to briefly focus fission energies onto a co-located fusion fuel system. These can be linked like sausages, creating fission>fusion>fission chains. Dunno, a lot of that got declassified because people wanted badly for fusion power generation and the power and defense versions apparently have great overlap. I never really dug into it that much.

But, I know the 79 has a secondary. And gold the thickness of a beer can, and somehow ultra-pure carbon fashioned into sheets that can withstand tens of thousands of revolutions per second at a ton of G forces, and somehow the whole thing maintains geometry and distances internally.

Again, fascinating. I wish to know more.

(I don't really want to kill anybody; I also enjoy watching shows on the clever ways they run assembly lines, especially foods. I just am a huge fan of engineering, and there is a ton of it in ordnance. Also, I hate not being in on a secret.Even if it is a dumb secret).



As far as US systems, design released ones I don't know of one. AEC/ERDA test item? No telling. Threat nations, I've seen an image they told me was a russian one, but it wasn't a briefcase. It was much larger.

Having said that, and knowing that most US systems were designed in 2d and not 3d, if they had a way to flatten a football, the 54 would have fit in a briefcase. The smallest gun assembled device would have gone in a fat briefcase or potentially a doctor's satchel, if it didn't have to withstand being shot out of a cannon. (Shrugs) dunno

Originally Posted By Brundoggie:

Before release, the code in the dial was set by a PAL team and was split knowledge.  Upon weapon release, the using unit had the complete unlock code.  Unless the using unit had a recode key for the lock secure cover, they couldn't recode the lock nor was there any reason for them to do so.

You are correct that it was not limited try, none of the physical lock systems were including 155mm or 8 inch.

Originally Posted By high_order1:
They've never declassified what the product consisted of, or what its use was for. But they did release an environmental impact statement on the 'purification facility', and some discussion on how easily they forgot it, and what it took to match legacy batches.

Those things strongly suggest what you say is true as far as the doped aerogel. The mechanism is still hotly debated. It could be solid, it could be canalized, others say there are plugs of material that fail first, allowing tailored shaping of the energy that illuminates the secondary in time. It is possible that the doping follows contours instead of being homogeneous. It may even be lensatic, or as simple as a hole filler in a dense material allowing for protection of the secondary.

(Shrugs)

Since it continues to live (thank you sir), here are a couple of real photos.
https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/17550/97kco6suggu91_jpg-2843429.JPG
https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/17550/djgtx5suggu91_jpg-2843430.JPG

That's how close many of the above-ground shots were to populated areas.

When people start telling you about 'EMP' and 'nuclear winter' and 'uninhabitable for eternity' and 'death' and giant ants...


Well, they may have one of them right. Fuck ants.

Originally Posted By NotTheUsual:

For posteriority,  the lost material was fogbank and a silica style aerogel utilized for xray channeling via conversion to plasma.
How that devil magik works, no idea.
Just wanted to let the lurkers know the 100,000 foot view is declassified and covered in a bunch of details on the usual suspects.

It also cost them something retarded like 400 million to figure out.

Originally Posted By Brundoggie:


Not exactly correct.  The using unit would receive a release message authorizing the use of the weapon and the message would contain the PAL code in an encrypted format.  The using unit would authenticate the validity of the message using the Sealed Authentication System (SAS) and decrypt the PAL code with a separate sealed decrypt card.  Once the PAL code was decrypted, the using unit would have the entire code to unlock the cover.  Depending on circumstances, a unique PAL code could be used for a specific weapon (by serial number), a group of weapons at a single location or theater wide.  With electronic PAL systems found in weapons systems that could accept multiple codes (e.g., B61 series)  the PAL coding could be quite complex.

Please note this applies to tactical nuclear systems, strategic systems could be quite different.

I was on the PACOM PMCT/PAL team in the late '80s so things may have changed since then.

Originally Posted By TheAvatar9265ft:

I have 1950, 1957, 1962, and 1977 which was the last. The last 3 at least all had the circular slide rule bomb effects computer. The 1950 version was call "The effects of atomic weapons." They added info for sure... not sure what was left out? I certainly didn't follow closely enough to notice.

Originally Posted By high_order1:
...The
Other security features they apparently used over the years included some high tech shit, like putting an enormous, massive block in front of the door. Only one machine could lift it, and they kept it far away and disabled. You could use jacks, but you'd be there for a long time. That's just to get to the locked front door of the mag. (vets, care to comment?)

The current hotness overseas is called a WS3. While there's a bunch about it online, I don't feel good about saying anything past it probably is adequate as long as the base hasn't been evacuated. Guess that's kind of hypocritical of me, but... sorry