Will this work?

[birdguy 3,995]

I believe I heard that artillery shell fuses with electronic components in proximity and other types of fuses can withstand 30,000G loads.  

The M110 self propelled howitzer firing an 8 inch shell weighing 200 pounds goes from 0 to 2300fps in 16 feet.  You can do the math.

Noel

 

[W2DR 1,867]

6 hours ago, birdguy said:

I know what gravity does, but what is it?  Where does the force come from?  Is anti-gravity theoretically possible?

Noel

There's some really good stuff here Noel. Well worth a look..... https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=space+time  .

Edited November 12, 2021 by W2DR
Kant spel

[W2DR 1,867]

2 hours ago, birdguy said:

believe I heard that artillery shell fuses with electronic components in proximity and other types of fuses can withstand 30,000G loads.

You heard right.

[birdguy 3,995]

It's been a long time since I was handling ordnance Dave.  When I was in EOD and station at Camp Fuji, Japan, we used to clear the artillery range at Camp McNair a couple times a year.  I wrote a story about it.  (Here I go changing the subject again.)

Ramirez Blows His Butt Off

Camp Fuji Japan was a complex of Marne Corp bases set around the base of Mount Fuji, or as the Japanese call it, Fujiyama (yama being the Japanese word for mountain).

I was stationed at South Camp.  I had mentioned Middle Camp in the story of my stint in the brig.  Additionally North Camp and Camp McNair rounded off the list.

About a year after I became our company clerk a call went out for qualified EOD personnel to help sweep the artillery range at North Camp.  I asked the captain if I could go and he gave me the OK.

We assembled in our temporary quarters and were divided into three man teams.  My buddy Frenchie and I and an EOD tech named Ramirez from Camp McNair made up our team.  I was told to watch out for Ramirez because he was kind of sloppy.  You don’t want sloppiness when working with explosives.

Each team went out with a Jeep and trailer loaded with packs of C-3, blasting caps, and a blastng machine and galvanomenter.

The operation was quite simple.  We would drive across our sector of the range searching for unexploded artillery rounds.  When we found we would drive safe distance away.  Frenchie stayed with the blasting machine and I would run the wire down to the unexploded round.  I would hook up the galvanometer to ends of the wires and with hand signals tell Frenchie to twist the handle of the blasting machine.  The galvanometer would measure the current from the blasting machine, Then I would hand signal Frenchie to place the place a short between the terminals on the blasting machine and twist the handle again.  If the galvanometer showed no response we were safe.

I would set a block of C-3 next to the round and Ramirez would take a blasting cap out of his pocket and hand it to me.  I would untwist the leads and then twist them to the blasting machine wires.  The blasting caps came out of the box with the leads shorted.  But  Ramirez had this nasty habit of carrying blasting caps in his back pocket.  And despite the many warnings we gave him he would untwist and twist the leads of the blasting cap while waiting for me to place the C-3 next to the unexploded artillery shell.  Sometimes the blasting cap leads he handed me were already untwisted.

I would insert the blasting cap into the C-3 and Ramirez and I would move up to where to Frenchie and the blasting machine were located, remove the short from the blasting machine terminals and Frenchie would shout "Fire in the hole!" twist the handle.

The artillery round would go BOOM!

Then we would wind up the blasting machine wire, pack up and search for the next unexploded round.

About the third day out our Jeep broke down and they gave us a pickup truck to drive around in.

Ramirez and I had set up to blow up an artillery shell and moved back to where Frenchie and the blasting machine were.  

He twisted the handle but nothing happened.  We waited 5 minutes and still nothing happened.  So we unhooked the wires from the blasting machine terminals and using short wires tested the blasting machine with galvanometer.  It wasn’t working.

I shorted the blasting wire and Ramirez and I rolled it up.  When got to the unexploded round I removed the blasting cap and handed it to Ramirez.  Then I picked up the C-3 and we walked back to the pickup.

Frenchie got in the driver’s seat and I slid into the front seat beside him.  As Ramirez slid into the back seat we heard the blasting cap he had put in his back pocket pop like an M-80.  Ramirez let out scream.

We pulled him out of the truck.  His back pocket was gone and his butt was bleeding profusely. There was a hole in the rear seat where he had tried to sit.  Ramirez has not shorted the blasting cap wires when he put it in his pocket after I removed it from the C-3 and handed it to him.

I got the first aid packet out of the pickup and opened the battle dressing.  Frenchie and I pulled Ramirez’s dungarees off and I applied the dressing and tied it around his waist.  We laid him out in the bed of the pickup and while Frenchie drove back to the base I applied pressure to the battle dressing to stem the bleeding.  When we got the clap shack (dispensary) we turned Ramirez over to the corpsman and returned to the base EOD office to make our report.

I heard they helicoptered Ramirez to the Navy base at Yokosuka since there were no hospitals at any of the Camp Fuji bases.

The accident report blamed Ramirez for carrying blasting caps in his pocket, not making sure the leads were shorted, and said that sliding across the plastic seat of the truck created enough static charge to make the blastng cap explode.

And I doubt Ramirez ever returned to EOD.
 

Noel

Edited November 13, 2021 by birdguy

[martin-w 3,315]

19 hours ago, birdguy said:

Is anti-gravity theoretically possible?

 

Now that's an interesting question. There was a Russian scientist some years ago called Eugenie Podkletnov, who claimed he was working in the lab with his colleagues and stumbled across anti-gravity. They were experimenting with a rapidly rotating superconductor and noticed that pipe smoke drifted upward. He claimed that further experiments demonstrated a definite anti-gravity effect. Research by a number of entitles including Sheffield university in the UK, Boeing, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and others, couldn't reproduce his results. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Podkletnov

Then we have Ning Li. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ning_Li_(physicist)

 

 

Quote

 

Anti-gravity claims[edit]

In a series of papers co-authored with fellow university physicist Douglas Torr and published between 1991 and 1993, she claimed a practical way to produce anti-gravity effects. She claimed that an anti-gravity effect could be produced by rotating ions creating a gravitomagnetic field perpendicular to their spin axis. In her theory, if a large number of ions could be aligned, (in a Bose–Einstein condensate) the resulting effect would be a very strong gravitomagnetic field producing a strong repulsive force. The alignment may be possible by trapping superconductor ions in a lattice structure in a high-temperature superconducting disc. Li claimed that experimental results confirmed her theories.^[1][2][3][4] Her claim of having functional anti-gravity devices was cited by the popular press and in popular science magazines with some enthusiasm at the time.^[5][6] In 1997 Li published a paper stating that recent experiments reported anomalous weight changes of 0.05-2.1% for a test mass suspended above a rotating superconductor. Although the same paper describes another experiment that showed the gravitational effect of a non rotating superconductor was very small, if any effect existed at all.^[7]

Li is reported to have left the University of Alabama in 1999 to found the company AC Gravity LLC. AC Gravity was awarded a U.S. DOD grant for $448,970 in 2001 to continue anti-gravity research. The grant period ended in 2002 but no results from this research were ever made public.^[8] No evidence exists that the company performed any other work, although as of 2021, AC Gravity still remains listed as an extant business.^[9]

 

 

[martin-w 3,315]

14 hours ago, W2DR said:

Although a bit dated, this unclassified document from the Army Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground clearly shows that the technology for hardening electronic components for a force of as much as 30,000 G's has been around for quite a while. And I'll bet that in the 15 years since this was published said technology has progressed even further....Doug

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.101.9472&rep=rep1&type=pdf

 

Yep, that's it. Electronics totally encapsulated. 👍

[birdguy 3,995]

Podkletnov himself complained that he had never claimed to block gravity, only to have reduced its effect.^[1]

Thats a start.

Noel

[Luke 788]

2 hours ago, martin-w said:

Yep, that's it. Electronics totally encapsulated. 👍

Fair enough. I'll still stand by my contention that blasting something at greater than orbital velocity through near-sea level atmosphere is going to be a non-starter. We've been able to launch projectiles on sub-orbital ballistic trajectories for over a century.

Getting them to stay up there requires a LOT more energy, especially if you cannot accelerate or change your trajectory after launch.

Cheers!

[martin-w 3,315]

6 minutes ago, Luke said:

Fair enough. I'll still stand by my contention that blasting something at greater than orbital velocity through near-sea level atmosphere is going to be a non-starter. We've been able to launch projectiles on sub-orbital ballistic trajectories for over a century.

 

Its not initially greater than orbital velocity though. A secondary rocket motor kicks in at higher altitude to boost the satellite to orbital velocity. Its just proposed as a more economical way to do things, by using electrical power initially, rather than burning rocket fuel all the way. 

I think the developers of this technology must have considered such things. 🙂

Edited November 13, 2021 by martin-w

[martin-w 3,315]

20 minutes ago, birdguy said:

Podkletnov himself complained that he had never claimed to block gravity, only to have reduced its effect.^[1]

Thats a start.

Noel

 

Yep, initially he claimed 0.3% and then claimed he had achieved 5%. Who knows, he seemed to do a disappearing act.  Apparently Ning Li  died this year.

 

Her story.

 

 

[Luke 788]

13 minutes ago, martin-w said:

Its not initially greater than orbital velocity though. A secondary rocket motor kicks in at higher altitude to boost the satellite to orbital velocity. Its just proposed as a more economical way to do things, by using electrical power initially, rather than burning rocket fuel all the way. 

We've tried this before - there have been a variety of efforts that involve aircraft to accelerate the rocket to 600mph and up to 40,000 feet. None of them seem to go anywhere, and they at least don't have the requirement that you design your entire upper stage to handle crazy accelerations. (Even if you can do it, what is the mass penalty?)

My prediction is that making the first stage radically cheaper by making it reusable is going to win out, both from an economic perspective as well as capacity.

16 minutes ago, martin-w said:

I think the developers of this technology must have considered such things. 🙂

Many of these efforts focus on the easier problem, extracting money from investors. I see a lot of "gee-whiz" videos on Youtube that never seem to go anywhere. I also see SpaceX launch regularly, and is in the process of working its way through the traditional space launch industry like a murder hornet going through a beehive.

Cheers!

[dave2013 1,180]

This method might be useful for getting rid of stuff.  For example, nuclear waste.  If you can accelerate the payload to escape velocity, then you can just launch the waste into the Sun.

This may be viable for more expensive payloads like satellites, but the hardware would have to be able to withstand the tremendous shock when going from 2 km/sec in a vacuum to 2km/sec in sea-level dense air.  The temperature isn't an issue as a capsule can be designed to withstand and absorb that.  Currently, payloads launched on rockets undergo high G-forces when accelerating through the atmosphere, but the acceleration and G-force increase is more gradual.  Moreover, to get the payload into orbit or simply to escape velocity would require additional propulsion, most likely a rocket engine built into the payload capsule.

There is another similar method of getting things into space which uses a very long electromagnetic rail gun to provide initial acceleration.  With this method, the acceleration in dense air would be more gradual depending on the length and rate of acceleration.

The amount of energy to get an object into orbit remains the same, so we wouldn't save any energy using this method vs a rocket engine.  However, we would use less rocket fuel to do it, which is a good thing IMO.

Dave

 

Edited November 13, 2021 by dave2013

[martin-w 3,315]

1 hour ago, Luke said:

We've tried this before - there have been a variety of efforts that involve aircraft to accelerate the rocket to 600mph and up to 40,000 feet. None of them seem to go anywhere

 

Err...Luke, where have you been. Virgin have already launched a satalite into orbit for NASA, from beneath a 747 😁 Have you not heard of Virgin Orbit and Launcher One? It's already in operation with a multitude of customers.

Did you not see the video I posted here of the live launch. Carried aloft by a 747.

https://virginorbit.com/vision/

 

I agree with you re SpaceX, no doubt you have seen the enthusiasm from me and others here in the hangar. But there's plenty of room for operators like Virgin Orbit to launch smaller satalites into orbit, cheaper than SpaceX can on Falcon 9. SN20/Spaceship is desighned to carry large payloads into orbit and indeed the Moon and Mars. And Falcon 9 launches reasonable sized payloads. Meanwhile there are quite a few companies competing for the smaller payload market. 

Spaceship is heavy lift, Falcon 9 is medium lift and Virgin Orbit and the company in this video (and others) are aiming at light payloads.

Edited November 13, 2021 by martin-w

[martin-w 3,315]

38 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

but the acceleration and G-force increase is more gradual. 

 

It is with this system too. It spins up gradually over time, before release. And as the company point out, even a standard smart phone can handle the G. And as we've already covered, encased electronics can withstand 10's of thousands of G.

It would save energy. Burning rocket fuel is inefficient. All forms of combustion are.

Edited November 13, 2021 by martin-w

[dave2013 1,180]

31 minutes ago, martin-w said:

It is with this system too. It spins up gradually over time, before release.

In a vacuum.  That's the difference.

When the payload hits the dense air, the shock will be tremendous.

Dave