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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on June 20, 2012, 08:04:58 PM
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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 ?
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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.
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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.
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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 ;)
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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.
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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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.
Doing the numbers, you only plausibly get enough energy from that to launch a capsule in the hundred-of-kilotons range to something close to Earth excape velocity, at late 1940s tech level, with an underwater nuclear detonation. (Unless I am missing an alternative which I do not think I am.)
After that, you can have some rocket contraption to maneuver it the rest of the way.
Not really plausible, alas, neither with the amount of fuel for a chemical rocket to make any significant difference to a mass that big, nor with building anything robust enough to take the stress of launch. (particularly launch-from-seabed, which needs extra energy but is better for not covering half a continent with fallout.)
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 ;)
Yes, but tying such a cork down until you build up enough pressure under it to carry so big a vehicle to escape velocity does, alas, get into magic materials tech.
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Hmm you're probably right. Still, I kind of like the idea of using geothermal energy to fire a
space ship huge rock to the moon. But I realize that was not even the integral part of your question.
Maybe the SPO can be put on the rock rather loosely and detach on entry, where it can fall down on its own little parachute. It could be attached magnetically and released on a timer or remotely. Or it is anchored with metal rods that are drilled deep into the rock and detach with small explosives. Or some other way I can't think of right now.
In that case, I don't think the container would have to be all that durable, a sturdy metal box would probably do the trick. A mini spaceship if you will, like the capsule the astronauts used to come back in, only it can possible be even smaller than that.
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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.
Just had an idea, I would think this depends on how the info is storied. I was trying to think of what type of data storage they had in the 40s. Computer tape, written word, audio tape, punch cards, vinyl records. They may have had some type of metal "paper". Not sure if they had cassette tapes back then or not. But as I think someone suggested your world could have some tech that is from the fifties or sixties. A little mixing of tech might be a good idea because it wouldn't be a complete parallel development. Anyway what type of container would depend on what type of data storage. Lead lined for sure, padded probably, maybe a box or barrel completely filled so the object would not be able to bounce around. Not sure if they would have suspended the object by straps as I have seen at times. Not sure when that university started the yearly challenge to drop an egg from a great height and not have it break. But if you could find one of the first year results on line you might find some ideas.
A bullet shaped container maybe with either a very hard nose or a false one that is made to break off. I can picture this one going alone with the tech they had in SF TV shows-movies from the forties.
Maybe more than one copy, I think they believed in back-ups back then. Or find a way to connect it to the front of the ball in a way so that it would drop off just before impact. Some type of mechanical release mechanism or slow acting acid to burn through a strap. I believe they could have worked something out back then.
That's all I have for now.
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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.
titanium robust punch cards. Large amounts of punch cards were used in mechanical calculators during the Manhatan project according to Feynman's "Surely You Must be Joking Mr. Feynman"
You could even have organic (paper) ones laced through the major payload, and the recoverers discover them as stratta, and retrive the information by analyising the patterns in the residual whatsits between stratta.
Redundancy might be key.
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Maybe the SPO can be put on the rock rather loosely and detach on entry, where it can fall down on its own little parachute. It could be attached magnetically and released on a timer or remotely. Or it is anchored with metal rods that are drilled deep into the rock and detach with small explosives. Or some other way I can't think of right now.
In that case, I don't think the container would have to be all that durable, a sturdy metal box would probably do the trick. A mini spaceship if you will, like the capsule the astronauts used to come back in, only it can possible be even smaller than that.
I see I didn't specify my initial problem space in enough detail; all of what you suggest makes sense as options (well, modulo that a parachute's not much use on an airless moon) except that I need to expand on what I meant by "hide" in the first post. This is an object that has been concealed about the bullet in ways that most people involved with the project need not to have seen, and retrieved from the crash site in ways that weren't noticed by anyone until events elsewhere prompt a forensic re-examination (this latter being the bit that happens in my actual story). I think that tends against securing the object to the outside of the bullet in some way that detaches before impact; this is a situation where somebody would have noticed that.
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Just had an idea, I would think this depends on how the info is storied. I was trying to think of what type of data storage they had in the 40s. Computer tape, written word, audio tape, punch cards, vinyl records. They may have had some type of metal "paper". Not sure if they had cassette tapes back then or not. But as I think someone suggested your world could have some tech that is from the fifties or sixties. A little mixing of tech might be a good idea because it wouldn't be a complete parallel development.
It's a world of people originally from Earth who have got records of Earth history to serve as guidelines, so I'm not opposed to a certain degree of following the path they are given as tech development goes; I'm thinking that they may be balked at some levels by not having a great deal of aluminium around, for example.
Lead lined for sure, padded probably, maybe a box or barrel completely filled so the object would not be able to bounce around. Not sure if they would have suspended the object by straps as I have seen at times. Not sure when that university started the yearly challenge to drop an egg from a great height and not have it break. But if you could find one of the first year results on line you might find some ideas.
Good thought. Thank you.
A bullet shaped container maybe with either a very hard nose or a false one that is made to break off.
It's bullet-shaped basically to minimise the amount of heat generated by friction while going up through the atmosphere of the planet during launch. The scale of the impact with the moon isn't one where the shape of the original container will survive - the principal intent of the project is to deliver large quantities of raw metallic ores, the designers do not care whether they get melted or scattered about some or buried on landing and are much more likely to err on the side of overkill where the propulsion is concerned.
The thing that's really balking me about the possible solutions I have come up with is that I'm not seeing any way of guaranteeing the thing won't tumble randomly in flight - fins are useless in vacuum even if I could believe in any surviving the launch, and I'm not seeing any plausible way to spin-stabilise it either.
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The thing that's really balking me about the possible solutions I have come up with is that I'm not seeing any way of guaranteeing the thing won't tumble randomly in flight - fins are useless in vacuum even if I could believe in any surviving the launch, and I'm not seeing any plausible way to spin-stabilise it either.
Try to find a way to use tidal forces (principles similar to tidal locking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking) and the Roche limit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking)) to cause it to auto stabilize as it descends into the moon's Gravitational Well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_well).
In otherwords, depending on shape and size, the difference in gravitational force seen on the portions closest to the moon could be sufficiently different from the forces seen by the portions furthest that they effect its orientation, solving the tumbling problem.
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When NASA sent the Voyager probes on a trip outside our solar system, they put data about Earth and our solar system embossed on thin gold plates attached to the spacecraft. A scroll of gold, or gold-plated alloy could hold a considerable amount of data, and be rolled up compactly inside a heavy protective armored tube to suvive a considerable amount of impact force.
Getting many tons of cargo from an Earthlike gravity well to a nearby moon with 1940s technology is doable, if not exactly cheap. An enlarged V2 type rocket with an extra stage, all the way up to something like an Atlas booster like the ones that sent the Apollo missions to the moon would be feasible, using hydrogen or some hydrocarbon fuel with liquid oxygen.
Launching thousands of cargo rockets is no problem in a controlled economy. There were even plans in the late 1940s and early 1950s for using an atomic power plant to power a plasma rocket engine, but those got scrubbed because of civilian concerns about radiation damage if one ever crashed. Those concerns would be unlikely to stop a project under a totalitarian government, it would just relocate the rocket base away from population centers near the capitol.
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The thing that's really balking me about the possible solutions I have come up with is that I'm not seeing any way of guaranteeing the thing won't tumble randomly in flight - fins are useless in vacuum even if I could believe in any surviving the launch, and I'm not seeing any plausible way to spin-stabilise it either.
Why do you need to be stabilized after it leaves the atmosphere? Once it is in vacuum, I'd think that all you care about is that the center of mass is pointed at the moon.
Also, how complicated is the information you are trying to encode? If it is only a few bits of information, you could store it as the ratio between the total quantities of two (unusual) elements used in the bullet.
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I like what Yeratel said about the gold plates although you would probably want a harder metal to survive your giant bullet. You could stamp the information onto sheets of steel or some other hardened metal then roll the steel into tubes ( I say tubes plural because some redundancy is probably needed.). If you made the steel tubes to look part of a steering rocket or some other mechanism that was on the "bullet" no one would notice them. Say, for instance, that you had some steering rockets with minimal fuel that were only to be used in the very final stages of the bullet approaching the moon. If the rocket broke apart just as the bullet was approaching the moon's surface, no one would probably notice a few extra metal tubes amidst the exhaust tubes or support struts or whatever other part of the mechanism that the tubes were created to mimc. There would have to be some way of identifying which tubes actually contained the message. Someone who was unaware could have one of the tubes for a souveneir for years as long as they never cut it down one side and flattened it out, they would never know what they had.
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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 ?
How in Sam Hell did I miss an Engineering thread!?! Im an engineer that designs industrial processing plants for the mining industry, and in college I designed wheels for a now-scrapped JPL lunar rover. So this will be all kinds of fun for for me.
I have several Ideas, but questions first:
How much in the way of Time and Resources are available to encode the Object?
How much time and/or privacy to attach/implant this Object?
How much information are we talking?
A data recording can be done with anything that has a lasting pattern, so the options are wide open. But size, time, and capacity will all be deciding factors. Your basic need is a recorded pattern that can survive physical impact and/or deformation, some heat (the impact will make a bit even if with no atmo) and misc radiation during space-flight. The temp swing on the moon is extreme (something like 40-400K shade to sun) so there is that even after impact. You also have to deal with some pretty abrasive dust. Magnetics are basically out, radiation, impact, or heat could threaten that. The intensity of both the Nuke to Launch and the comparable explosive compression on impact is even enough to cause crystaline changes in certain minerals.
Landing is just a deceleration problem, so a prepared landing target would help quite a bit. FIrst thing theu could do is pile up a bunch of moon-dust as a cushion. The biggest issue with a zero-atmo landing is that the object has to decellerate from space speeds in the distance between its ass and nose, since its hitting a stone wall (floor, I guess). IF you can give it a little more tome to slow down, it doesnt face near as much stress. Outside of a physical cushion, a magnetic counterpulse to rob it of speed as it comes in could reduce a lot of strain. Even a little atmosphere on the moon would simplify things greatly. If there is large-scale industrial work going on, a thin atmosphere of pollutants and industrial by-product could have been released from the Raw Materials they are crashing down and processing.
Offhand encoding options:
-Metal laminant
-DNA Encoding, requires sequencing tech, and/or massive (analog) computer
-Radioactive serial tracer
-crystalline lattice
Tell me if Im picturing the Industrial process correctly: They use a nuke and what is essentially a giant cannon to blast a material slug to escape velocity, presumably timed so that the trajectory will carry it to the moon. Id expect there to be some orbital way-station on one end or the other to do some course corrections, or else that is a 250,000 mile bullseye, and I would be very impressed. Once at the moon, it is crashed into a predefined landing site, where it crashes down, before some sort of sifter/excavator comes in and scoops up what’s left. Whats left will come in two parts; the buried core and the ejected scrap. At this point some machine or worker(s) are dispatched to dig out the primary core, while others sift out the scrap from the surrounding dust, to be sorted in the Factory.
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Im an engineer that designs industrial processing plants for the mining industry, and in college I designed wheels for a now-scrapped JPL lunar rover. So this will be all kinds of fun for for me.
Whee ! Excellent, thank you. And I really must clear out my PM box this weekend, home connectivity permitting.
How much in the way of Time and Resources are available to encode the Object?
How much time and/or privacy to attach/implant this Object?
How much information are we talking?
What we are talking about is a download of half a dozen or so human personalities, which I am thinking of as a relic artifact from a higher tech level. Diamond about the size of a thumb would do it, for example. Time to encode is on the scale of a few days, time to attach/implant has to be fast and sneaky.
Your basic need is a recorded pattern that can survive physical impact and/or deformation, some heat (the impact will make a bit even if with no atmo)
Back of an envelope calculations, unless I'm slipping a zero, largely melted on landing is an option the designers could not rule out.
and misc radiation during space-flight.
Fairly deep inside the shell should answer that one, I reckon.
The intensity of both the Nuke to Launch and the comparable explosive compression on impact is even enough to cause crystaline changes in certain minerals.
Indeed, and that's my principal problem with the diamond idea.
IF you can give it a little more tome to slow down, it doesnt face near as much stress. Outside of a physical cushion, a magnetic counterpulse to rob it of speed as it comes in could reduce a lot of strain. Even a little atmosphere on the moon would simplify things greatly. If there is large-scale industrial work going on, a thin atmosphere of pollutants and industrial by-product could have been released from the Raw Materials they are crashing down and processing.
There's nothing on that scale, alas. part of the plan here was to get the raw materials ttere for setting up that scale of industry.
(The people doing that scale of set-up are a) not great at long-term planning and b) crazy death-worshipping nihilists. Collateral failures on the scale of the famine caused by Stalin's collective farming initiatives are not implausible. This is not a long-term survivable regime, and has in fact been overthrown some time ago.)
-Metal laminant
-DNA Encoding, requires sequencing tech, and/or massive (analog) computer
-Radioactive serial tracer
-crystalline lattice
DNA's not feasible, but options derived from the other three might be.
They use a nuke and what is essentially a giant cannon to blast a material slug to escape velocity, presumably timed so that the trajectory will carry it to the moon. Id expect there to be some orbital way-station on one end or the other to do some course corrections, or else that is a 250,000 mile bullseye, and I would be very impressed.
The planet and moon are Earthlike but not exactly identical. Inflight course correction's not hugely feasible, unless I'm missing an option for attaching 1948-tech rockets with enough reaction mass to make a big difference that could plausibly survive the launch; I suppose tugs to intercept en route are vaguely feasible. And the scale of accuracy of landing is, they don't care overly much where on the moon it lands - this is not "place bits for building a station", this is "land resources we can mine out of an impact crater for a few decades to develop the whole moon."
Once at the moon, it is crashed into a predefined landing site, where it crashes down, before some sort of sifter/excavator comes in and scoops up what’s left. Whats left will come in two parts; the buried core and the ejected scrap. At this point some machine or worker(s) are dispatched to dig out the primary core, while others sift out the scrap from the surrounding dust, to be sorted in the Factory.
More or less, yes.
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The reason you have all of that heat and pressure and such as the Bullet hits is that essentially its ass doenst start decelerating until the nose has already touched the ground, so the distance left is very short. But all that heat and pressure only exists because you are talking about a solid material and a whole lot of mass. It its a separate object, and that object has an escape path out the ass of the bullet, then it only has to survive its own mass''s deceleration, and could be ejected out the back during the impact event. Then you could make a bouncy re-entry cushion like they use for the mars rovers. An even better route might be to have it be rigged to explode off the back just before impact. This could be done so that the gravitational acceleration on lunar approach would trigger a small bomb that would separate and decelerate the Package. If it can be separate by still in the air when the Impact event hits, that could also provide a sort of shock wave cushion (in the dust and debris, if not atmo). That would also be a useful source of the later evidence that you said they needed to find: the explosion cold leave trace chemical residue, a camera may have caught the separation explosion, and the crash pattern might show evidence of the bullet coming apart just before impact.
OK, so safe to say a full personality is out of the realm of real world media storage capacity. If its encoded on a diamond of some form, call it a Hyderdiamond (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggregated_diamond_nanorod) Matrix or lattice, saying that the crystallize structure was artificially constructed on the molecular level to function as a storage media, and in doing so it optimized its crystaline structure by varying the presence of interstitial atoms (Graphene, necessary to act as circuitry) and the density of dislocations (natural result of artificial crystal ordering). That has enough basis in reality to appease the hard-asses, but enough recognizable pseudo-science x-factor to keep them from being able to run too many calculations on its actual strength.
Wrap it all up in an inner shell that is as hard and light as possible, and a much thicker outer shell that is elastic enough to divert some of the compressive energy around the harder core. Then it will be able to bounce the energy a little bit, and have a plausible chance of surviving with the rest.
Thoughts?
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It its a separate object, and that object has an escape path out the ass of the bullet, then it only has to survive its own mass''s deceleration, and could be ejected out the back during the impact event. Then you could make a bouncy re-entry cushion like they use for the mars rovers. An even better route might be to have it be rigged to explode off the back just before impact. This could be done so that the gravitational acceleration on lunar approach would trigger a small bomb that would separate and decelerate the Package. If it can be separate by still in the air when the Impact event hits, that could also provide a sort of shock wave cushion (in the dust and debris, if not atmo). That would also be a useful source of the later evidence that you said they needed to find: the explosion cold leave trace chemical residue, a camera may have caught the separation explosion, and the crash pattern might show evidence of the bullet coming apart just before impact.
All of these eminently practical suggestions, alas, fall foul of the "hidden" requirement. The package needs basically to have been sneaked into the bullet by a local intelligence type. Shooting a couple of workers who get in the way is an option, but some sort of recovery mechanism that anyone involved in the project could have seen, or that could have been noticed en route, is not. It needs not to have been obvious that the thing was there; it needs not to show up on a reasonably thorough examination of the landing site that does not know there's an Object to look for. Indeed, it needs not to show that the Object's been retrieved until a forensic team who find out about it by other means confirm it.
OK, so safe to say a full personality is out of the realm of real world media storage capacity.
I'm willing to count that under "we really have no clue so I can assume as appropriate for setting".
If its encoded on a diamond of some form, call it a Hyderdiamond (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggregated_diamond_nanorod) Matrix or lattice, saying that the crystallize structure was artificially constructed on the molecular level to function as a storage media, and in doing so it optimized its crystaline structure by varying the presence of interstitial atoms (Graphene, necessary to act as circuitry) and the density of dislocations (natural result of artificial crystal ordering).
Something like, yes, though I am not sure I would be convinced of a dislocation pattern surviving the stresses of transit. Or maybe it could be patterns of which isotope of carbon is at which position in the crystal.
Wrap it all up in an inner shell that is as hard and light as possible, and a much thicker outer shell that is elastic enough to divert some of the compressive energy around the harder core. Then it will be able to bounce the energy a little bit, and have a plausible chance of surviving with the rest.
That is the direction I am thinking is most likely to work. So what's a good candidate for the relevant materials that could have been machined in 1948 - or as I said, in 1960 if you can do it without technology that implies a bunch of other stuff that was around in 1960 but not 1948 ?
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What if the Bullet itself was set to explode prior to impact? Could you argue that the effect of having 90% debris is better for mining/gathering operations than having a 50% debris and 50% buried deep in the ground? This way, a secondary explosion might not be noticed.
Another idea is to have a *lot* of redundancy in the message. If you send 100 copies of the same steel plate you might reasonably assume that even if parts of some of the plates got warped beyond recognition, finding enough intact fragments might allow you to reconstruct the entire message. Archaeologists have had decent successes reconstructing ancient texts using these methods.
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What if the Bullet itself was set to explode prior to impact? Could you argue that the effect of having 90% debris is better for mining/gathering operations than having a 50% debris and 50% buried deep in the ground? This way, a secondary explosion might not be noticed.
From the Mining operation standpoint that would make a lot of sense, it would do a lot to spread out the impact force. Makes a larger recovery zone, but it might be worth it.
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All of these eminently practical suggestions, alas, fall foul of the "hidden" requirement. The package needs basically to have been sneaked into the bullet by a local intelligence type. Shooting a couple of workers who get in the way is an option, but some sort of recovery mechanism that anyone involved in the project could have seen, or that could have been noticed en route, is not. It needs not to have been obvious that the thing was there; it needs not to show up on a reasonably thorough examination of the landing site that does not know there's an Object to look for. Indeed, it needs not to show that the Object's been retrieved until a forensic team who find out about it by other means confirm it.
I was thinking something that they could bore a hole in the tail end, stash it in a cavity, then lodge a plug in the top of the hole to hold it securely and hid it. The force of the launch will be pushing it forward, so it will be pressed further in instead of coming out. IT would be the force of the impact (or the separation charge) that pushes it back out once its over the moon.
Something like, yes, though I am not sure I would be convinced of a dislocation pattern surviving the stresses of transit. Or maybe it could be patterns of which isotope of carbon is at which position in the crystal.
Ooh, I like that. Assume they could customize a graphene sheet to place individual atoms as they choose, then stack it up into a Hyper-diamond matrix for structural hardness.
That is the direction I am thinking is most likely to work. So what's a good candidate for the relevant materials that could have been machined in 1948 - or as I said, in 1960 if you can do it without technology that implies a bunch of other stuff that was around in 1960 but not 1948 ?
For the Inner Shell, more of the same diamond could make sense for hardness, or maybe a ceramic carbide of some kind, Id have to dig into the materials. Titanium is strong for its weight, but only as strong as some low-grade steels, and its difficult and expensive to produce (still possible with 1940's tech i think). Memory Metal (a Nickle-Titanium Alloy) is head and shoulders above all other metals for resisting permananent deformation. For the outer... Im not sure, we are talking pretty far outside the normal range of materials. Something a durable as possible in a collapsible foam structure that will absorb as much energy as possible as if deforms. How specific do you want to get on its description?
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I'm not an engineer or scientist but just to let you know.
Diamond is the hardest stone but if you hit or just tap it in the wrong place you
can reduce it to diamond dust.
Jade is the toughest stone and can take punishment that would reduce a diamond to dust.
That's why the Chinese used it in wind chimes so to speak.
You want your ginormous payload to hit the moon in more or less a certain position, yes?
What if there were tunnels inside the payload filled with fluid and a giant rough kind
of gyroscope to keep it 'level and/or upright'. Venting or shifting fluid into different
tunnels to adjust trajectory.
Perhaps your 'special package' could be disguised as flotsam floating in this fluid.
Along with other junk.
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I'm not an engineer or scientist but just to let you know.
Diamond is the hardest stone but if you hit or just tap it in the wrong place you
can reduce it to diamond dust.
Jade is the toughest stone and can take punishment that would reduce a diamond to dust.
That's why the Chinese used it in wind chimes so to speak.
True, which is why a super-special Hyperdiamond sounds better. The simple fact is that ANYTHING would be destroyed by what we are talking about, so a touch of X-factor has to be added.
Jade is durable in earth terms because its soft (as opposed to brittle) and so can deform easier. It it also proous enough to be impregnated with resin to stabilize it, which is where the really durable pieces come from. But it wouldnt survive impact without complete deformation. in this instance it would be better for it to shard off but maintain its relative shape than deform overly much, which would corrupt the internal patterning that it would be using for data storage.
You want your ginormous payload to hit the moon in more or less a certain position, yes?
What if there were tunnels inside the payload filled with fluid and a giant rough kind
of gyroscope to keep it 'level and/or upright'. Venting or shifting fluid into different
tunnels to adjust trajectory.
Perhaps your 'special package' could be disguised as flotsam floating in this fluid.
Along with other junk.
"More or less the same position" seems to be more of a "Within a hundred miles or so of the target" but not a a bullseye by any means.
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Ooh, I like that. Assume they could customize a graphene sheet to place individual atoms as they choose, then stack it up into a Hyper-diamond matrix for structural hardness.For the Inner Shell, more of the same diamond could make sense for hardness, or maybe a ceramic carbide of some kind, Id have to dig into the materials. Titanium is strong for its weight, but only as strong as some low-grade steels, and its difficult and expensive to produce (still possible with 1940's tech i think).
This is precisely where my own knowledge is at its weakest.
How specific do you want to get on its description?
Specific enough that nobody reading the text can fill in plausible assumptions based on details I've not given, do the sums and conclude that I have in fact broken physics.
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You want your ginormous payload to hit the moon in more or less a certain position, yes?
Not with any huge degree of accuracy.
What if there were tunnels inside the payload filled with fluid and a giant rough kind
of gyroscope to keep it 'level and/or upright'. Venting or shifting fluid into different
tunnels to adjust trajectory.
Perhaps your 'special package' could be disguised as flotsam floating in this fluid.
Along with other junk.
That, however, is a very nice thought. Thank you. It would fit well with being something that would not be obvious to anyone looking over the crash site afterwards, either.
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Er, good jade doesn't require resin to stabilize it.
I worked at a jade importing firm.
Maybe resin is used to color some jade but not stabilize it.
Now Turquoise is often stabilized but jade????
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Er, good jade doesn't require resin to stabilize it.
I worked at a jade importing firm.
Maybe resin is used to color some jade but not stabilize it.
Now Turquoise is often stabilized but jade????
Then Ill bow to your expertise, i was workign off this fromt eh wikipedai article:
Enhancement
Jade may be enhanced (sometimes called "stabilized"). Note that some merchants will refer to these as Grades, but it is important to bear in mind that degree of enhancement is different from colour and texture quality. In other words, Type A jadeite is not enhanced but can have poor colour and texture. There are three main methods of enhancement, sometimes referred to as the ABC Treatment System:[11]
Type A jadeite has not been treated in any way except surface waxing.
Type B treatment involves exposing a promising but stained piece of jadeite to chemical bleaches and/or acids and impregnating it with a clear polymer resin. This results in a significant improvement of transparency and colour of the material. Currently, infrared spectroscopy is the most accurate test for the detection of polymer in jadeite.
Type C jade has been artificially stained or dyed. The effects are somewhat uncontrollable and may result in a dull brown. In any case, translucency is usually lost.
B+C jade is a combination of B and C: it has been both artificially dyed AND impregnated.
Type D jade refers to a composite stone such as a doublet comprising a jade top with a plastic backing.
[/tt]
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That's something new to me, Quantus.
The jade carried by the firm I worked for wasn't treated in anyway that I know of.
I do understand why they would enhance it however.
Jade is sold in boulders - they cut a couple of small windows in different places to show you
the quality of the jade. Problem is - you can't see what's inside the rest of the boulder - so
the really high quality stuff you see may only comprise one percent of the entire boulder - so
the cost of the boulder has to be spread over all the stones you get out of it. So if you could
get more stones of a better color out of it - then yes I can understand the resin and coloring stuff.
By the by - jade is actually two minerals with the same chemical composition but a different
molecular structure. Nephrite which has duller colors and a kind of waxy or soapy look to it
when polished. (most antique Chinese jade is Nephrite) And Jadeite which can be polished to
a hard shine and has brigher colors - apple green, black (really a dark green) red, yellow,
and lavender. Pure jade is actually white.
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I would imagine its a practice used on the cheap tourist stuff ive seen on ebay and such. It sounds like you worked in a higher quality area of the industry, or at least well upstream from those kind of shenanigans.
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If it's coming out of China I wouldn't be surprised.
The Chinese almost destroyed the jade carving industry in their country.
All the jade carvers were sent out to do 'useful' things like farm.
It's only been in the past 10 or 20 years that they realized their mistake and began to train up
a new generation of jade carvers. A LOT of it - is Communist propaganda stuff (what a waste of good jade)
but there are some very fine artists doing it. So, that they'd found or got a way to make lesser quality jade
a viable thing would not surprise me at all.
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Not exactly what you are talking about, but close enough to be interesting: A LunarX startup to send your DNA to the moon.
http://www.parabolicarc.com/2012/07/06/gxlp-update-omega-envoy-launches-kickstarter-campaign/
EDIT: Also a truly crazy idea about an theoretically possible crystal based computer that would be symetrical in 4 dimensions, allowing it to survive even the heat death of the universe...
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Err... I don't understand. Why can't you use a Gerald Bull-type supergun? NOT nuclear?
And why can't you use the original bullet as a deceleration-sabot for records coded onto a kinetic penetrator?
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Err... I don't understand. Why can't you use a Gerald Bull-type supergun? NOT nuclear?
They don't really scale well to a hundred-thousand-tonne shell by my back of the envelope calculations. (Also, the folks making this have a certain weakness for the grandiose.)
And why can't you use the original bullet as a deceleration-sabot for records coded onto a kinetic penetrator?
I'm not seeing a way of doing that that does not again fall foul of too many people knowing about it.
Basically, the existence of the hidden object has to not be deducible from the shell's design, by someone who has access to most of the records and many of the people involved, or from examination of the impact site.
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Here is my suggestion, and it came out of the idea of solving your guidance problem as well:
The designers of the “bullet” realized they needed to be able to control the center of mass in-flight. To do that , they designed a simple guidance mechanism. It is a pressurized, fluid filled series of tubes criss-crossing through an open sphere. Syspended in the fluid are small ball bearings. A gyroscope/magnet system can make the ball baerings move/clump about the device, altering the center of mass enough to make small adjustments.
The spy could have encoded the data onto a series of ball bearings. The system would be big enough that the bearings could be in multiple sets of the data. Thus if one or more was damaged, the possibility of redundency still maintains data integrity. All the spy would have to do is swap out their ball bearings for the ones in the guidance package sometime before launch.
Add in somewhere that the bearings and fluid would be put together just before launch, and put into the system just before launch, so as to avoid contamination.
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The designers of the “bullet” realized they needed to be able to control the center of mass in-flight. To do that , they designed a simple guidance mechanism. It is a pressurized, fluid filled series of tubes criss-crossing through an open sphere. Syspended in the fluid are small ball bearings. A gyroscope/magnet system can make the ball baerings move/clump about the device, altering the center of mass enough to make small adjustments.
Remember that no matter what you do, in a closed system the center of mass should will still end up moving in the exact same trajectory.
Thus, unless you are positing secondary explosions (blowing off chunks of the bullet), or thrusters (fast moving gas particles in a perpendicular direction), "moving around the center of mass" inside the shell will not really help change the course of the bullet.
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Basically, the existence of the hidden object has to not be deducible from the shell's design, by someone who has access to most of the records and many of the people involved, or from examination of the impact site.
Give it a logical overt reason for existence? I mean if you're delivering resources as disparate as uranium and copper at the same time it would be somewhat logical to attempt to keep /some/ heavier resources closer to the surface, so it would be natural to attempt to randomize the energy of those heavier resources? One way to do the randomizing might be to have collisions amongst several heavy-resource bodies within the bullet? Essentially, the bullet turns into a dead-blow hammer?
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They don't really scale well to a hundred-thousand-tonne shell by my back of the envelope calculations. (Also, the folks making this have a certain weakness for the grandiose.)
Ah, 'k. Volume vs. area bites us on the bottom /again/.
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With regards to the Bullet Shape, that is only actually a benefit is you expect to impart an axial spin on the slug, as the rifling inside a gun barrel would do. It doesnt sound like you expect to have that kind of control at the launch (though it could be theoretically possible with well timed magnets or some such).
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). Without that spin, a sphere is far more efficient. Specifically, a sphere with golf-ball style divets. Believe it or not, the divets actually decrease that drag forces from the atmosphere, which increases range. In this case that would decrease the force required to make orbit.
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With regards to the Bullet Shape, that is only actually a benefit is you expect to impart an axial spin on the slug, as the rifling inside a gun barrel would do. It doesnt sound like you expect to have that kind of control at the launch (though it could be theoretically possible with well timed magnets or some such).
I'd been thinking roughly bullet shaped rather than sphere because of wanting fairly even impetus across the bottom of the thing for the launch - it's kind of a limit case of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29 , really.
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I'd been thinking roughly bullet shaped rather than sphere because of wanting fairly even impetus across the bottom of the thing for the launch - it's kind of a limit case of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29 , really.
Unless I am reading this wrong, that is a completely different case from what I thought you were intending. Are you expecting to launch an innert slug from Nuclear launching platform (a gun+bullet design), or launch an actual craft with an on-board nuclear thrust system (Missiles, Orion Craft)?
If we are talking a craft with on-board systems rather than a solid slug fired from a ground-based platform, then it opens up several other avenues to explore.
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Unless I am reading this wrong, that is a completely different case from what I thought you were intending. Are you expecting to launch an innert slug from Nuclear launching platform (a gun+bullet design), or launch an actual craft with an on-board nuclear thrust system (Missiles, Orion Craft)?
An inert slug; I was just using the information about pusher plates from that project as of relevance to not destroying my slug during launch.
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An inert slug; I was just using the information about pusher plates from that project as of relevance to not destroying my slug during launch.
OK, then the point remains. Without maintained thrust at the rear, a slug is being carried on pure momentum, resisted by aerodynamic drag. The turbulence effects will eventually cause it to tumble without an axial spin or some sort of air-foil geometry. The first would just be difficult without a "barrel" of some kind, and the latter would only be worth the effort for the first part of the trip, and would complicate everything on the latter end. Especially if we are talking about something where all the math is done by hand. In those circumstances you typically look to simplify the math as much as possible, since the smallest variance can push your aim waaay off.
What would you think about a two-stage launch? Like a ground-based blast to get the material into orbit (possibly in a relatively re-useable launch module, a station to catch it as it begins to fall back to earth, then a secondary blast to push it off to the moon (possibly after separating the payload from the more durable launch casing. The data could be concealed in any number of stages, especially if there is any module separation in orbit. And that would widen the list of materials that they could launch, since softer things like copper would behave far differently than your irons, titaniums, and tugstens.
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What would you think about a two-stage launch? Like a ground-based blast to get the material into orbit (possibly in a relatively re-useable launch module, a station to catch it as it begins to fall back to earth, then a secondary blast to push it off to the moon (possibly after separating the payload from the more durable launch casing. The data could be concealed in any number of stages, especially if there is any module separation in orbit. And that would widen the list of materials that they could launch, since softer things like copper would behave far differently than your irons, titaniums, and tugstens.
I thought about that but the 'grandiose' predisposition would seem to preclude orbital assembly.
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I thought about that but the 'grandiose' predisposition would seem to preclude orbital assembly.
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.
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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).
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
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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.
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.
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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 )?