Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
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I disagree about restaurants, since it is the next step in the value added chain for the food market. I expect high returns until we reach a saturation of demand which admittedly, since I don't know the extent of private sector restaurants, might be fairly quick. I think it is worth exploring the first level if just to check if we are ready for that level of value added in food distribution.
My skepticism is partially based off the project description, but also that we went hard on them during the Klim years, banging out several stages in a turn. In addition, I'm influenced by third gen food's profits being lacking. I could definitely be wrong, but depending on what new projects pop up I wouldn't prioritize this project unless we need a labor sink.
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[X]Next Generation Launch Vehicles
[X]Advance Conservative Solutions
[X]Advance Conservative Solutions
Nuclear engines aren't so useful in the deep solar system because they don't have enough specific impulse to really change the equation. 800-900 s is a lot more than any chemical rocket, but it's still not nearly enough to change the launch windows or make tug operations easy. Nuclear thermal rockets are in most ways just a chemical rocket, only moreso. You do all the same things, just with a smaller vehicle. Proper exploitation of the deep solar system is a matter for ion engines and maybe, at the outside, exotic core nuclear engines.
Doing math suggests Chelomei is missing something but not a whole lot. 8 RLA-1 cores = ~3000 tons first-stage booster, of which I'd guess about 2750 tons are propellant. The nuclear stage is 1500 tons with around 1200 tons of propellant. That gives first stage delta-v of about 2400 m/s, and second-stage of 8600 m/s. Saturn V required approximately 9000 m/s to reach LEO, but has a few hundred extra due to the lower latitude launch site. We're missing about 1.8 km/s or alternately, about 100 tons of extra mass to LEO.
My guess is that the difference is due to worse performance of the nuclear second stage, probably higher tank mass and engine mass.
I don't think it is impractical, everything about it should work as well as described or better.
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The other issue is that its a pure hydrogen tank with fairly heavy nuclear engines that massively add to the useless mass of the vehicle, especially with a two stage design that is somewhat required for the use of nuclear engines.
[X]Advance Conservative Solutions
27% chance of completion is so low that I don't think we can afford to rely on luck, tbh.
It would be a lot lot worse then that. Turning a substantially large nuclear reactor on and then having it come down in fire would not just contaminate some small village, you'd quite possibly outdo Chernobyl, it would kind of depend just how much nuclear materials are actually involved. But I wouldn't want to discount the possibility Chernobyl would look like a modest accident in comparison.
And rockets at times fail catastrophically...
Well that's because it is absolutely insane and the chance of a nuclear catastrophe is almost 100%. Even something as reliable and well tested as the RLA occasionally still has catastrophic failures as seen in the latest update. The last test with the nuclear engine had it emergency stop midburn in a system fault. Even if the immediate issues are fixed, there will be more and occasionally with rockets you just have bad luck and something will happen. And at that point you will have a nuclear reactor pushed to super high power output, in open and reacting mode so full of newly produced radioactives with an open path through the core, in an as light as possible shell because it has to drive a rocket, all possibly going 5-6 kilometers per second if it fails at a bad moment...
Well if that happened you would then have the now soon to be re-entering nuclear reactor that hopefully due to the fault isn't going in to a meltdown, but who knows for sure with new untested tech like this really. And then down it goes in to reentry and burning up in the atmosphere all while the channel through the reactor core is still open and fully exposed.
Man if that happened it would be an absolute cataclysm. Even Chernobyl caused major political fallout for the Soviet Union externally and internally. If something like the above scenario happened, or even something relatively 'milder', everyone responsible might be taken care of in a political show trial to try and take some of heat off from the level of international condemnation the Soviet Union would be getting for raining potentially literally on fire highly radioactive nuclear materials down over a hundred thousand square kilometers. Not to mention how much burned off highly radioactive materials would start circulating through the atmosphere to later rain down elsewhere.
Worst radiological disaster ever by far comes to mind. An environmental catastrophe at a truly astonishing level.
I'd agree, one of those two would be far better. I personally favor pushing for future capability rather then getting stuck on last generation.
Yeah that is because it is extremely bad idea. We rolled low and that's why we got this extremely dangerous option that will almost 100% chance go wrong at some point come up. There's a reason absolutely no one ever built a nuclear rocket that would go hot in the atmosphere, and that's because the failure modes are absolutely terrifying and can lead to massively widespread radioactive fallout.
But I guess it has this really nice siren song of, think of how much mass you could launch in to orbit. When has a Soviet Rocket program ever had a rocket had a catastrophic failure? Ignore the one a few months ago, it's fixed it will surely never go wrong again.
This is clearly the trap choice that would lead to a massive purge of the Ministry when it inevitably goes wrong. After all, some one has to pay for the massive international disaster. And the Ministries enemies will happily point out they pushed it through and take the knives out to divide much of its power and functions between themselves. The only way that doesn't happen is if you get 'lucky' and it explodes on the pad or so, thus merely polluting the entire space complex and possibly shutting down the space program for a year, thus having it get cancelled then and there. In which case the repercussions would be milder.
[X]Next Generation Launch Vehicles
[X]Advance Conservative Solutions
I'm trying to take that into account- my estimates are based on a nuclear engine TWR of 10:1 and a tank mass ratio of 9:1. I found something that suggested the pure hydrogen tank is much lower than that, about 3-4:1, which would bring things in-line.
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Its only approximately 650kg of highly enriched uranium which isn't comically worse then a cascade of high altitude nuclear tests. its a radiological disaster but not that much worse then a dozen atmospheric test shots.
The reactor component of the engines would likely survive a failure- much less likely to be an explosion once the engine is actually ignited as well, given no oxidizer on board. The issue with Chernobyl was the enormous physical size of the core and activated graphite fire. If you could get a Chernobyl level accident out of a nuclear motor, it'd have already happened, because the US test program involved excess criticality testing of a Kiwi core to destroy it(it physically exploded).
Fair enough, guess it's lighter then I feared. Though even open air nuclear tests got forbidden in the end due to nuclear cpollution issues and the exact radiological types from a nuclear reactor are a bit different from a nuclear explosion due to longer duration neutron bombardment. And of course nuclear shots are specifically chosen to stay very very far clear of any habitation.
Still there was once an accident with a nuclear shot test. The Castle Bravo thermonuclear shot test once killed one out of 23 Japanese fishers at well over a 100 kilometers down wind from the explosion. So not sure we should take it as all 'that' safe either. If you're anywhere near where it blanketed down, that could be pretty much it for you. Even if not, you'd have a fair chance of suffering from Acute Radiation syndrome, as all the fishers did and any long term problems that might cause you.
Considering the distance of over a 100 km, and that a rocket could pull a radiation cloud over 10s of kilometers easily enough, you could in a worst case scenario be able to cause radiation poisoning and death over several tens of thousands of square kilometers. In which case I can but pray that wasn't anywhere with a lot of population... If a substantial city was in that radius it would be seriously bad.
So while I'll grant that in sheer amount the radiological disaster scale would fall far short of Chernobyl, a bad outcome in landing zone though could have rather catastrophic outcomes never the less.
Yeah, granted. I over estimated how big the nuclear core would be. Though as per my point above it's still far from harmless if we're in one of the worst case scenarios and it came down anywhere populated or even worse a city.
Of course this assumes the core is outright breached, and if you were super safe about it maybe you could make pretty sure that was the case. But this is the Soviet Union in a space race, do you really believe they won't be cutting any corners and that they'll thoroughly test every step of the way in the safeties to make sure there is no way the core will be breached or left open during a disaster?
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There's just nowhere near enough fission products for that to be an issue. We're only running the core for a few minutes- it will only burn a tiny fraction of a percent of the uranium into fission products. Meanwhile the Castle Bravo test released many orders of magnitude more energy, and commensurately released orders of magnitude more fission products. Basically, we're wasting the uranium, which is a good thing in a radioactive contamination sense.
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Yeah, there's no comparison to a meltdown or anything like that. It would would break up the same way as any other rocket.
[X]Nuclear Upper Stages
Thinking it over...I think we can actually pull this off. We spent 25+ years steadily developing all the technology involved and getting practical experience with it.
[X]Nuclear Upper Stages
Thinking it over...I think we can actually pull this off. We spent 25+ years steadily developing all the technology involved and getting practical experience with it.
Sure, assuming it doesn't manage to go in to a meltdown of course, in which case the neutron flux will go way higher. Of course safeties should prevent that, but still, I'm dubious on trusting on those being completely foolproof, especially in a rushed project.
We haven't been experimenting with nuclear rockets for 25 years though, that's still a new branch of our technology. The last experiment on it actually was a partial failure.
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I think the Kiwi-TNT test resulted in a lethal distance of 600 ft and an injury radius of 2000 ft. So it would be bad, but the engine would have to fall near something in order to be more than an expensive cleanup operation.
EDIT: Also we've probably already done tests on questions like this as part of the development program. If there was any chance of a huge release as a result of a launch failure, we'd know already and Chelomei/Balakirev wouldn't okay it. As much fun as it is to make fun of him, Balakirev does actually know that poisoning people with heavy metals and smog is bad. He just thinks he knows how to mitigate that and doesn't care about nature or kicking people out of a whole region.
Go way higher, but nowhere near multiple kt of energy release over the span required for it to disassemble itself. That's just not possible for a reactor core.
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