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an engineering problem which I need to solve for a story
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
This refers to a bit of historical background for the next volume in the series of Thing I Want To Be Working On.
I have a human colony planet that is, between a combination of not having the right materials, losing some background knowledge, and having a government that is heavily down on research and progress and generally sort of stagnant, for the most part stuck at just-post-WWII tech levels. They have a fairly significant space presence, but it's been put there by brute force application of late 40s equivalent technology. (Sea Dragons!) They wanted to launch a large chunk of material to their moon for building with; a hundred-thousand-tonne or so total weight solid metal bullet packed with useful ores and things, launched with a suitably large nuclear explosion, and lithobraking on arrival. (Yep, there are bad consequences to setting off that large an explosion on one's planet; postulate a nihilistic imperium that is indifferent to some forms of collateral damage and actively welcomes others as signs of divine favour.)
I'm pretty good with most of what's needed to make this work - it's basically Jules Verne's Baltimore Gun Club writ large, except with realistic physics. My issue is that while smashing this thing into their moon and leaving a large crater with thousands of tonnes of metal buried in it is fine for delivering iron &c. one then intends to mine, I need somebody to hide a Significant Plot Object on the thing for later retrieval after its journey, and the Significant Plot Object has to make it through the journey intact. The Significant Plot Object can have plausible good real-world material strength (you can think of it as made of diamond or jade) but not be made of magic handwavium, and it can be cushioned by any plausible protective casing one could have made in, oh, 1948 (or say by 1960 if the technology to make it is something that works as an offshoot of tech development rather than having half a dozen other implications and obvious uses that mess up the setting) though the smaller and more discreet that protection is the better, and the upper limit would be, say, one standard shipping container; the object itself is small enough to hold in one hand.
So, anyone got recommendations for an engineering solution, or for good references/resources allowing me to figure one out ?
LDWriter2:
I have no idea how to answer that, even though I might come up with something in a few days but the real reason I respond is to say that I may know some place--a full writer's forum where there are people who might know.
Serack:
Suggestion.
This isn't an engineering suggestion but rather a paradigm suggestion.
How this Significant Object survives could (should?) be closely tied to its signficance.
If the object is significant because of the info it contains, then have it deformed in ways that preserves the information, but otherwise be fubar'd. Heck, you could even have some of the information lost in such a way that the stiching together of what is left is plot relevant.
Now replace "information" with what is Significant about your object.
Haru:
The first thing that comes to mind is sort of a pressure cooker, although that might be more steampunk rather that your time period. The idea would be to build a gigantic canon with an even bigger pressure tank below it, to give it a big chunk of speed from the start. After that, you can have some rocket contraption to maneuver it the rest of the way.
Heating up the pressure tank would probably not be easy by conventional means, so I would suggest building it on top of a volcano, so the hot lava will create the heat you need to create enough pressure. The whole thing build sort of like an artificial geyser with a giant cork on top, and then you loosen the cork so it flies pow, right to the moon.
Volcanos and mad science is always a great combination ;)
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Serack on June 21, 2012, 04:58:58 PM ---If the object is significant because of the info it contains, then have it deformed in ways that preserves the information, but otherwise be fubar'd.
--- End quote ---
This is in fact the case; the long-term plot relevance is for that information to have survived and got out in a context where it's thought to have been lost.
The problem is, finding a physically plausible means of storing rather a lot of information in a small space (even using remnant tech from higher tech levels, I want not to have to break physics here) that can readably survive the stresses of the launch and landing.
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