You are tasked with coming up with a nuclear powered aircraft concept that is useful and can justify its budget or else your mother will die in her sleep.How do you accomplish this?
>>65240177>inb4 not an aircraftFuck you, it's airworthy and airborne.>BudgetAlso fuck you, you're retarded for thinking a aluminium dildo should have reactors, might as well weaponize the damn thing
>>65240177I'll make it out of cheese and glue the cheese with more cheese
>>65240244swiss postin
>>65240177>nuclear powered aircraft conceptIt's been done (sort of). But from an operational point of view, most military aircraft go down over friendly territory during peacetime. We'd just end up bombing ourselves.
>>65240177nuclear powered bomber
Nuclear powered space plane strategic bomber that can enter sub orbital trajectories to bypass air defence and then drop a shit ton of bombs or missiles onto backline targets.
>>65240177mom's fucked
boring answer, but id just use those nuclear batteries we put in mars rover to power some electric motors for a propeller drone that can loiter for years and use it as a suborbital satellite for observation and or communication in case nations start taking out each others actual satellite.
>>65240177Just project orion in atmosphere. And fuck anybody who live under it's trajectory.>>65240811What's the advantage compared to solar power. It would be just as vulnerable as any other satellite.
There were several versions of nuclear powered aircraft proposed. I kinda liked the Flying aircraft carrier concepts myself. For fun find yourself a copy of Steambird. Nuclear powered aircraft based on steam engine tech run by Train Engineer nuts.
>>65240177Do intel satellites count?
>>65240177I'm shoving the nuclear rods into your gaping butthole to make you zip around the atmosphere. Nothing personal, mom gets to live and you get to live your dream.
>>65240244It ain't easy bein' this cheesy.
>>65241252No, because they use a chemical rocket to get into orbit.
>>65240177I just dust off the existing designs from the 1950s and 1960s, and modernise the avionics and weapon stations to accept new shit, plus mount some ungodly powerful emitters for radar and EW that just melt stuff they're trying to look at, and make it optionally manned for 24/7 assured second strike and global persistent presence, finally putting the USN and Army out of existence forever, winning the Service Rivalry Game once and for all.
>>65240177Instead of carrying jets it carries anti-submarine helicopters. And idk maybe they're a special carrier variant that can fold their blades up for storage
>>65240177I'll start planning her funeral, then.> YIMBYism and regs wouldn't allow anything nuclear within a thousand miles of the nearest inhabited settlement (suburbia).> Those asshats are afraid of reactors inside 10 meters of concrete for Goddess' sake.> The closest you'd get to a flying reactor would be fucking NERVA, and that's a vacuum rated rocket engine> Or an open-cycle nuclear rocket where the plume of fallout *is* an intended destructive effectAneutronic fusion reactor with 3He mined from the Moon. Nothing closer to present day.Tl;dr:No shielding is enough.
>>65242475Hey Spaceman Spiff, how we doing on developing higher impulse rocket fuel?
>>65242487There already are rocket fuels with absurdly high specific impulse ratings.Problem is that exceptionally powerful oxidizers like liquid fluorine are toxic, corrosive, and difficult to handle safely.High-mass fuels required to reach higher specific impulse, such as borane compounds and mercury compounds are EXTREMELY toxic.So these rockets can be built, but it's difficult.And the rockets and the exhaust from them are extremely dangerous. The technology has been around since the 60s. It's just not used because it's way too dangerous to be practical.
>>65242512How volume efficient are those high specific impulse fuels, Einstein?
>>65240244And then we send it to the moon, because the moon is made of cheese and once we arrive there, no one will be able to stop our cheese based space armada.I'm with you brother.
>>65240177
>>65240943I did think about that. I suppose it wouldnt few decaderun the risk of being effected by any lack of sunlight, and mars rovers are supposed to have a lifespan of about 14 years, so they should have a longer service life than a solar powered drone. also if i was really malicious, I bet I could rig them up to be mini dirty bombs in a pinch. if nothing else crash them into enemy rivers and lakes to deny them clean water, but that would be kinda fucked. The advantage over actual satellites is that they would be cheaper, easier and faster to deploy and/or replace if they get destroyed. I can envision a doomsday scenario where someone says “fuck it” and puts enough tungsten or depleted uranium spheres into orbit that conventional satellites become an impossibility for a few decades.
>>65240177>>65240177Something like this>Unmanned>Electric-only contra rotating propellars>Laser PD>MASSIVE flying wing design>Drones, Drones EVERYWHERE>Basically limitless loiter timeYes, I'm stealing the Arsenal Bird from Ace Combat. I'm not being paid enough to be original.
nuclear saltwater rocket powered genocide bomberuses turboprops or w/e for initial ascent, the NSWR once at altitudemission: countervalue followup strike via falloutmaxxing, you launch it and it just loiters over general enemy territory spreading hot love from low mesospherenot expected or equipped for return to base (there is no base anymore)
>>65242704>Genocide bomberThis deserves to be a distinct class
A huge ass Zeppelin. The nuclear reactor will be used to power the railguns.
>>65240177Atomic Zeppelin using one of these:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP-10AIt would act in combination with battery storage/solar to for the Zeppelin which would use the power primarily to crack condensed water into hydrogen for lift gas. The Zeppelin would maintain it's station by altering altitude and burning excess lift gas via a small hydrogen powered jet. The practical uses would be as a stationary radio relay station and unmanned observation platform in sparsely traveled areas like the extreme south pacific.
>>65247456To attack London I presume? Watch out for Samantha Fox lookalikes firing rifles in 30mm Avenger.
>>65240177>activator>plutonium in a submarine reactorWhat kind of thirdie shit is this? Explain yourself.>nuclear powered aircraftIs a non starter, and has been for 60 years or so. Blame the ICBMs and satellites, it's their fault.>>65242475Nuclear powered SPACEcraft. Now we're talking.>YIMBYism and regsAnd yet it almost happened in the 21st century, but then DRACO got cancelled. Many such cases. Sad.>>65242512Chemical reactions will never generate the energy that nuclear reactions do. It's a physical impossibility.
>>65240177Just gotta get that Protoculture Overtechnology going.
>>65240177Nuclear power as we have it now is both high and low tech. The high tech is nuclear fission but then to harness this energy, we must couple it with the earliest form of engine: the steam engine. Steam engines uses water which is heavy and sloshes around. The tubes and tanks need to be thick and resist high pressure, so they add more weight. For nuclear power to be used in aircraft, you need fusion tech, which is still several decades away from reality and even more decades for it to shrink in size to fit a plane.
>>65252630I'm not aware of any fusion designs that don't ultimately use boiled water to turn a turbine, and regardless there isn't any fundamental difference in harnessing fission vs fusion they're just different methods of turning matter into heat.What on earth made you think the shit you just said?
