Great Balls Of Fire
Dave Price
Project Orion, re-imagined and visualized.
I'm always amazed by the fact the proposed Orion "super" spacecraft had a mass of 8 million tons. For comparison, a modern supercarrier is about 100,000 tons.
(via TalkPolywell)
UPDATE: More video on Project Orion here.
UPDATE: In the comments, CaliforniaJOSH raises an objection:
Dishman, in all fairness, you must understand that the moon has a thriving ecosystem, and any human intervention could in theory turn it into a lifeless hunck of dead rock and dust.
It's cool. But, I mean, we have to all acknowledge there is something adolescent about the whole thing -- complete with "booms" in (soundless) outer space and the ultra-melodramatic orchestration...
Super-sized, of course.
Ryan
I'd love to see a serious effort to explore how damaging it really would be; supposedly the original project greatly mitigated the problems (like fallout).
For that matter, it strikes me that keeping the Orion plans up-to-date would be very good insurance against big meteors and other unforseen issues. If the circumstances are dire enough, a little fallout's an acceptable price to pay.
Come on, Ron. You have to have read Footfall. Or King David's Spaceship. As an IP lawyer, you've gotta keep up with geek stuff, right? (Please don't shatter my illusions by telling me that non-geeks need IP law, too...)
Look at it like this, sounds are the result of sound waves. Sound waves are compression phenomena of the atmosphere. If you are in a spaceship and are close enough to a nuclear explosion, when the shock wave of the nuclear blast hits your ship, it is almost certainly going to generate compression waves in your ship's local atmosphere that you will hear as a "boom."
Sound doesn't travel in a vacuum, but the immediate area of a nuclear explosion isn't really a vacuum any longer. It's full of very rapidly moving particles that are flying away from the center of the explosion in all directions.
You'll pollute space with radiation! You'll change the environment of space. You'll cause galactic warming! Can't you use something that's not bad for the environment, like coal?
In addition to numerous other advantages, Orion is probably the most reliable way to deal with rogue asteroids. If you had a space elevator, you could build - ideally well in advance - an Orion-powered "bulldozer" spaceship that would fly to an asteroid, push it out of a bad orbit, and fly back to Earth to be used again.
So logically I conclude I must make more errors if I wish to be on the front page.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.