02-28-2019, 08:49 PM
|
 |
Master Modeler
|
|
Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
Posts: 6,507
|
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by luke strawwalker
Decades ago I built a "semi-scale" Minuteman III and a similar Soviet SS-17 nuclear missile model rocket... They had different scales, because I used tubes I had available, but they were broadly close in scale size.
For giggles I plugged in the maximum range and nuclear yields of the two missiles into my scale factor... I was rather shocked when I discovered that *IF* my model was capable of the same level of performance as the *real thing*, only in scale to the real thing, the Minuteman model rocket would be capable of delivering a warhead *almost* to San Antonio (210 miles from here) and would detonate with a scale yield of about 18 kilotons... and the SS-17 would deliver it's model warhead (which would be about the size of an incense cone for both models) just past San Antonio from here near Houston (to about Boerne) where it would detonate with a force of about 22 kilotons actual yield...
Of course our model rockets don't fly anywhere NEAR that far!
Later! OL J R  |
*That* would make a unique YouTube tutorial video! That illustrates how much "mere" *chemical* energy is concentrated in small volumes and masses (in "The Promise of Space," Arthur C. Clarke pointed out how a mass of kerosene and liquid oxygen--or even of gasoline and LOX, sufficient for complete combustion of both--contains several times as much energy as an equal mass of TNT). The scale warhead yields show, even more dramatically, how even fission reactions release, pound for pound, about a million times as much energy as chemical reactions (as well as the ^exponential^ differences in intensity between fission and fusion reactions). |