4:20 - "To protect the rest of the ship from the almighty slap..." I hereby officially submit we rename The Orion Drive as the Discombobulator Drive.

Where could the Michael animation be found? For Footfall

Will there be a text ebook version? Listening to audiobooks takes too long.

@@greggv8There’s the transcripts, but it’s not the same as actually listening to it.

Honestly, why they haven't Them Boyz created such an engine? It's so their alley.

Bruh, if the Orks ever believed they could build a nuke the Galaxy would be doomed!

​@@mitwhitgaming7722The Orkz have been messing with weapons more dangerous than nukes. What's a little uranium for a funny joy ride around a star system?

​@@WolfeSaber9933Not suprised, now that I think about it. Honestly everything I know about Warhammer lore comes from watching KZfaq videos after the new Space Marine was announced. 😅

But they need the nukes to keep wannabe Hitlers Ego up- oh wir wrong type of Ork

Once in open space how fast could an Orion Drive accelerate and what would it's practical top speed be? And once in open space would radiation and fallout from the detonations be problematic?

fallout is nonexistent in space... fallout is radioactive debris and material kicked up by the explosion... no debris, no fallout! EZ PZ.... on the other hand.... @@ckl9390

@@ckl9390 According to a 1959 report on Orion, interplanetary 4000-ton design accelerates up to 2 g. Interstellar 10,000-ton version goes up to 4 g. Uncrewed version can go higher, the shock absorber is there mainly to keep the crew from being pancaked. Exhaust velocity for interplanetary design is 39 km/s, while the interstellar one is 120 km/s. For comparison, Starship's Raptor's exhaust velocity in vacuum is 3.56 km/s. Nuclear fallout is dust and dirt contaminated by fission products and "falling out" from sky, hence the term. There's no dirt in deep space, so there can't be fallout. The radiation can be problematic, however. As mentioned in the video, interaction between X-rays emanating from nuclear detonations and Earth's magnetosphere might create artificial Van Allen Belt that can fry satellites.

@@lazyremnant380 That is why you use conventional rockets to put the ship behind the far side of the moon, then use the nukes. Using the moon as a giant shield.

@@DarthRagnarok343 I don't think you have to go so far to the moon to avoid it. Going up to altitude slightly beyond GEO like, say, 40,000 km should be fine. It's a bit of a pity though, because Orion really is best used to lift huge payloads from Earth, with its gigantic Saturn V-like thrust to escape Earth's gravity well but 1000% more fuel efficient. Imagine lifting the entire ISS in just one launch! Using chemical rockets to park Orion far from Earth kinda defeats the point if you ask me. But on the other hand, that's also the most politically safe way.

and THAT right there is the true power of the atom. Not some piddly couple of gigawatts of steam turbines, you can move MOUNTAINS with the might of the atom (if you literally want to move mountains, go look up project plowshare).

nuke riding city ships are amazing

We could be on Mars if they'd kept an unlimited budget, i think.

Of course not, some dad finished welding it down, kicked it a little and said "That's not going anywhere." The outcome could never have been predicted.

That's why they put the high speed camera watching the plate at the top of the borehole. - hoojiwana from Spacedock

If I remember correctly, the idea of a nuclear powered cannon for yeeting spacecraft was called "Thunderwell."

@@hoojiwana I didn't read the name on this at first so I thought it was just someone doing an impression of Hoojiwana from Spacedock.

It'll just melt

The proposal was to do the launch from the arctic regions, since with this thing the inefficiencies from doing a polar launch can be considered a rounding error.

@@Shaun_Jones that really speaks to how OP the design is "Want to retrograde launch? Just ignore a couple of decimal points"

It is basically what some Terra Invicta players do, without the homeworld cracking part.

Space Force LETS GO!

Humanity first!

I saw a joke on a site about why aliens have never invaded Earth, Their scouts saw how many war memorials and museums dedicated to war we had and realized even with the advantage of ultimate high ground and better tech that they would still suffer extreme losses if they wanted to keep the biosphere of any use to themselves afterwards.

A species that can cross the interstellar void to fuck someone up on the other side isn't going to be impressed by a string of nuclear firecrackers.

We covered those in more detail in a nuclear weapons video last year! - hoojiwana from Spacedock

honestly a good all-around ship drive if you roll alot of fissiles on the moon/mars, but only in the case of H-Orion as it has insane thrust even comparable to late-game engines

Though you'd think the explosions would wreak havoc on the civilian satellite network given what happened when the US detonated a bomb in space

@@lachlanrobertson4825500-1000 bombs each with the energy of a single kiloton going off over the course of ten minutes is a lot less dangerous than the pulse from a single multimegaton strategic nuclear weapon.

Well, I usually stay low until I get torch drives then I doesn't really use orions, but once I build fleet of destroyers with orions and insane ammounts of armor, it was 200/20/50 if I recall correctly, alien dreadnoughts need like a dozen hits in the nose armor to even damage anything, and when I switched to H-orion I placed 300/20/80 armor, and then was this hilarious moment when xenos dreadnought was shoting entire battle its spinal mount kinetic on one of my destroyers nose and it did almost nothing XD. Extremely armored ships are so fun in this game, even if those destroyers have below 1g acceleration and cost me 300 fissiles each to have just 30 delta-V...

@@lachlanrobertson4825 Probably the ground, too. Modern electronics are more sensitive than they were 60 years ago.

The 4000 ton ground launch ships use 1/10kt bombs at launch, .3kt in space.

WHICH...you are welcome...

the one thing I didn't like in the documentary was that they built the orion ship in space. Considering that the orion is perfect for lifting large loads from the surface of the earth, and the earth was doomed anyways in the documentary, it would make way more sense for them to build the ship on the ground and then launch it.

I remember watching bits and pieces of that and thinking a neutron star was an oddly specific choice

​@@xb70valkyriech that wouldn't work. A generation ship like this would be too large to be constructed under surface gravity, let alone stand up vertically like a tower. It would have to be kilometres long and hundreds of meters in diameter. Nothing we've ever been able to build on earth

​​@@xb70valkyriechok i found it, the evacuation ark was roughly 24 kilometres (15 miles) long and 3.2kilometre (2 miles) wide. That's almost 3 times the height of the tallest mountain on earth. We are barely able to make a skyscraper as tall as a kilometre. Constructing in in space was the only option

Still my favorite series for the sheer amount of "Hey, can we (blank)?" As well as HFY.

I've read that book. If I remember correctly, the United States launched a naval vessel into space.

Also appears in Neal Stephenson's Anathem (worth reading) and the miniseries (ie, pilots of shows that weren't picked up) Ascension and Virtuality (both of which are fine, but I wouldn't go out of my way to watch either).

​@@jeff7.629IIRC they mounted naval guns to a space shuttle

@@jeff7.629 They took the guns off the USS New Jersey and used those as the ships main armament.

Wonderful book - still holds up.

That reminds me Ivr gotta see if there's any new updated in the series .

I think there were series that use them as a sort of long-range planetary strike superweapon (roughly equivalent to the use of ICBM/SLBM IRL) as well

Love those books. They got some really cool ideas, Orion KKV being one of the best.

A sci-fi book called footfall also used an oriondrive craft in the climax.

The Orion drive is used in a pretty depressing sci-fi series I read about a flooding Earth. Flood and Ark by Stephen Baxter. It was based around something about so much water under tectonic plates that once the poles melted and applied more pressure to the plate at the shores, it 'squeezed' the water out and flooded the world. It happened rapidly, as in within one generation, but slow enough that one Orion ship with an Alcubierre drive was built and launched from a high point in the Rocky Mountains with a seed population of humanity and sent to find a new world to continue the race upon. Meanwhile, nearly the entire world population dies as even ships and rafts fail, and the last vestiges of landbound humanity are finally washed off the peak of Everest. - It was so depressing that after one readthrough, I took the unusual step (for me) of donating the books to my town's library.

as a sci fi nerd that's true but even today this drive could still work!

@@koiyujo1543 I am not doubting you on that. I am sure the first human trip to Mars would be by atomic power just because our sy fy concept is far more advanced then available technology. But we are in a age where there are alternative sy fy concept for energy production where as back then no one thought of other way.

"That's pronounced 'siffy!'"

@@teax25 likely something more tame than an Orion drive though.

Its still, by far, the most efficient rocket engine we could make with today's technology. Nothing else we have today comes even close, not ion engines, not nuclear thermal rocket engines, nothing.

Created the fastest thing ever thrown by humanity. No one knows where it went.

I think those plates would be moving a bit faster than 100 km/h 😉

​@@mattmelton7389 : What, the nuclear manhole? We're pretty sure it just vaporized part way up, it's almost inevitable. By the time the blast got to the upper atmosphere, the entire thing was likely just akin to a burp, for the same reason that the Orion drive is supposed to last more than a few detonations.

Lasers are not currently viable weapon systems. And lasers are unlikely to EVER be a viable spaceship to spaceship weapon because any ship with enough radiation shielding to leave the magnetic field is going to laugh at lasers. The main update would be swapping out all the guns for VLS missile launchers, although the nature of space might make the guns more viable than they are currently considered to be for naval ships.

​@@TheAchilles26You clearly haven't read current paper about them lol

​@@TheAchilles26 : With decent sized reflectors, lasers dominate long-range space combat, with only Casbah howitzers, Orion drives, and surprise attacks posing any challenge to that dominance. Look up "Laser Star", or maybe "Laser Castle".

I love that concept so much. Far more civilized to ride to space on the Chernobyl express.

@@ARandomTroll exactly. Rather than a series of explosion...what if the exhaust were just one giant continuous eruption of nuclear explosions.

the orion drive, but even crazier

700 gigawatts (according to Scott Manley's calculations) of thrust power, maintained not for seconds, not for minutes, but for HOURS. Who doesn't love it? (I guess the ones that happens to be on the path of its extremely radioactive exhaust 😅)

@@lazyremnant380 The solar wind will take care of that.

Probably apocryphal . Naval gun designers do it all the time, with packages of a couple of tons.

"The Shiva Solution" - when you need to kill all the Arachnids in a system by giving them such a big headache

Ah, but it is perfect idea! You never have enough dakka...

i loved that book. i liked that Pournelle and Niven understood what lasers did - the idea that the shuttles could use their rentry surfaces as shields against them being one

The cold war? Russian autonomous supertorpedo armed with nuclear warheads, anyone? Let alone the idea of invading Ukraine... Believe it or not - the world has always been, is now and will always be full of people capable of coming up with insane nonsense and far too many of those are powerful enough to actually pull it off.

Well, as much as battleship have some common sense, exterminatus kamikaze is a bit too much even for cold war insane concepts.

Edward Teller wanted to make an even bigger bomb called Sundial, that would've been so large that it doesn't matter where on the planet it detonated, it still would've got the Soviets. - hoojiwana from Spacedock

The Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated why those kinds of people needs to be put on a leash by a civilian administration. Back then, those Air Force generals really were itching for a war, and they did almost everything within their power to make Kennedy think that there's no other option besides airstriking and invading Cuba which will certainly invite retaliation by the Soviet. If they were allowed to have their way, we probably wouldn't be here right now.

Military tech enthusiasts will know that the US Air Force is the kid on the playground who drew up an RPG statline and flavor text for their everything-proof shield

Any aliens that could get here would have far, far more energy at their disposal than a few Orion drives. Remember that they have to get here from a distant star system, and stop, and presumably return. Also Orion drives don't automatically protect against weapons. A hail of Tungsten bolts, or 4 missiles from different directions at the same time, should be able to take it out.

@@henryfleischer404I never claimed that it have any advantage, if aliens would have fusion torch drive, then orion would be pathetic in comparior in both efficiency and thrust, it is just this is so mad drive concept that they would stop and reconsider any plans they have, since to use orions humans had to be total madmens. And it was a joke by the way.

​@@marcelgrabowski5939Or they probably just teleport a Mercury worth of iron into the sun

@@rommdan2716Making nicoll dyson beam would be easier.

​@@marcelgrabowski5939 "oh look the apes just discovered how the atoms work-" >gets stunned by the indomitable human yeet

Yes

20 times the size of the czar bomb. Nukemap only goes up to 100 megatons (2x czar bomb). It could, roughly, one shot any U.S. state except Texas or Alaska, where it would only get most of the state. Edit: Misheard the video the first time. Multiple the above by 8.

If I heard the video right, it wasn't just one gigaton. It was EIGHT gigatons.

@@44R0Ndin Yep, you're right,. That thing would glass half a continent.

Unless the energy sphere reaches outside the atmosphere where you just wind up blowing the atmosphere away from Earth faster. The explosion will go in the path of least resistance, and the vacuum of space has lower resistance to the atmosphere. I don't know what the dividing line is where the explosion has to be that big though.

I'm not sure we even had the resources to build that one.

Much cleaner than the Nuclear Salt-Water rocket, a design that is actually legal to put into orbit today (but nobody wants to). Basic design is a uranium or plutonium salt suspended in water, with fuel tanks having moderator rods in it. The liquid is pumped behind the rocket until it forms a large enough 'glob', where the uranium/plutonium is large enough to detonate. As long as you keep spraying liquid it will continue to detonate. The problem is that it is a VERY dirty reaction, and trying to launch one from Earth would result in the launch pad glowing blue for the next several hundred (thousand?) years.

Ironically, while the pellet-zapper sounds the cleanest, it's the only one that's actually used to run tests to predict nuclear bomb performance today.

They also showed an antimatter ship, but it blew up - very optimistic in my opinion, so we have literally no idea how to keep larger than a few atoms portions of antimatter.

The orion drive they used in the show didnt use antimatter though. It used nukes

Very hard designs. They previously made the "TRIGA" (Training, Research, Isotopes: General Atomics) reactors, which sold many and versions are still being made. It was inherently safe: the "warm neuton" effect means that it's harder to split neutrons off as it heats up. This has to be worked around usually, but in TRIGA, means it can't overheat or melt.

considering the thousands of weapons we have pointed at each other while we are all stranded on a single rock, i think i think exactly the opposite to you man our failure to embrace nuclear propulsion despite embracing nuclear weaponry is probably the worst mistake our species has ever made

Nuclear cannons are fun. If the barrel is strong enough to survive, you can have a recoilless rifle as the spinal weapon of a spaceship. If it only survives a single shot, you have a perfect nuclear mine

Yeah, well, realistic spaceships are really boring, so... Yeah

We gotcha covered - hoojiwana from Spacedock

@@hoojiwana ♥️

@@hoojiwanaI wish you'd delved deeper into it. Those one-shot blast-pumped X-ray lasers they ejected into the fringe of the blasts to fire at the fithp ships were EPIC.

Read "Footfall."

And then the aliens teleport a mercury mass of iron inside the sun XD

@@colormedubious4747 who's the author?

@@warlock64cNiven & Pournelle.

@@rommdan2716 Teleportation doesn't exist. Problem solved.

That's basically Orion-Medusa. just, in front of the ship instead of behind it. The problem with a proper "combustion chamber" type rocket is that nuclear bombs are TOO powerful. It's easier to waste energy so you only collect what you can handle, then contain and use the whole thing.

Hinges are structural weak points. You don't want ANY weak points exposed to a series of nuclear detonations. Besides, if you detonate a bomb in a hemispherical chamber, some of that force will be reflected back into the center, and going out sideways instead of straight, making it less efficient. That's why the pusher plate design is flat, and the nuclear pulse unit uses shaped charge to focus the blast, not a conventional bomb design.

Since you can't smell in space, can you really determine who dealt it? 🤔

You mean the one that got used to propel Axis asteroid? It wasn't portrayed correctly though, it's more like a large continuous-thrust rocket, rather than pulsed like it should be.

@@lazyremnant380 LOL i swear ive remembered it having to do with nuclear pulses or whatever so cant help but assume. Also in Zeta, it was used to push a colony into von braun or whatever.

That's just an open cycle nuclear thermal engine. It's nothing special. A torch drive would be an open cycle fusion engine.

There's a particle accelerator approach that's likely a better option.

This thing is nowhere near as powerful as the Nova bomb. Which wouldn't work as described and wouldn't have that effect even if it did.

To be fair, I don't think anyone in the USAF wanted the gigaton bomb. It was proposed by Edwin Teller, the "father of the hydrogen bomb". The chair of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission apparently said, "It would have been a better world without Edwin Teller." (venera13 has a good video)

It's probably a fear weapon