McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

an engineering problem which I need to solve for a story

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knnn:

--- Quote from: Quantus on July 10, 2012, 04:46:17 PM ---Without that spin the bullet will inevitably start to tumble, which will hurt accuracy quite a bit even in space (rotating systems can skew the trajectory, not unlike a curve ball). 

--- End quote ---

Forgive me, but I don't understand how tumbling in space can skew the trajectory.  As I understand it, the reason curve balls work is because of air pressure, something you needn't worry about.  Am I wrong in thinking that as long as the center of mass of the bullet is pointed at the moon nothing else matters?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball#Physics_of_a_curveball

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: Quantus on July 10, 2012, 09:55:47 PM ---If they are aiming for a lunar base, I would think an orbital one would be a requisite first step, but I could be wrong.

--- End quote ---

They have orbital space stations, and fairly reliable hundred-tonne-to-LEO launch facilities.  They are not so much aiming for an immediate lunar base as for being able to mine materials for a lunar base in situ whenever they get around to it; or at least, that was the rationale for the project before it became a monumental imperialist national pride effort.

Endros:
Well... I have a whole bunch of issues with this plan, but let me throw in my couple of cents.

Have you thought about sectioning the mass with fault lines and deliberate failure locations.  Basically, you create a lattice of drilled holes in the object and mine them with explosives.  When the object approaches the moon, the explosives are ignited shattering the object into many smaller pieces and distributing the impact over a significantly wider area.  The larger pieces would be mined with the intention of shatter zones in order to absorb significant amounts of the energy of impact and allow for easier collection of the material (like a crumple zone on a car).

The object that is required to be "shipped" would be place in one of the larger pieces with the deliberate shatter zones and suspended within some form of energy absorbing material/foam.  The object itself would be made of an incredibly hard/resilient object.  I would also recommend lacing it with some form of radioactive tracer element deliberately designed to have a specific energy yield and there being SEVERAL of them within protected crumple zones.  Because honestly, if they were going through all this work they'd never leave this up to chance/just having one of them.

Basic assumptions are that the minerals are an ore rather than a processed material, because otherwise the shattering idea wouldn't work very well.

How, if I may be so bold, do you expect there to be a barrel of appropriate strength to contain the force of the explosion to launch this? ( Even the Saturn V rockets were only 3200 tons and they were mostly fuel )

Would not a more efficient method (and subsequently just as impressive) be multiple launches from a variety of locations with multistage rockets ( a la Saturn V rockets )?

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