The Mad Scientists Thread Of Things To Make And Do

hmmm, solar furnace, ive heard of it . . . wut b that?

Well, sun can be around 1kw/m^2 in midday, although there are many factors. Not only weather, but latitude. And of course time of day other than peak hours is less. Solar cell efficiency has gone as high as 30%, in practice, 25% for the best of the best.

Space-based solar cells get more sun. I don't recall exactly, I think it was maybe 30%.

The costs of putting it into space and microwaving it down are pretty ridiculous, compared to just putting them on the ground. Ground stuff faces problems of dirt and hail, but that's nothing compared to space debris and charged particles. It's like 100k times cheaper to replace cells on the ground.

Many web pages dedicated to power a house with solar. Big problem is storing power for the night or cloudy days. A single lead-acid deep cycle battery is only around 1.2kw-hr, and lasts maybe 5 yrs at best. If you have very low consumption, this can work. If you keep a desktop computer (300w) or lights on all the time, or use an air conditioner, it becomes impractical.

tansis said:

Thankfully the idea of using a nuclear bomb(s) to launch payloads into space and further afield never got very far.

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In the 50's there was a plan to make a nuclear powered long range bomber aircraft. The idea was it could loiter in a "ready" state indefinitely, always ready for a quick first or retaliatory strike. It was killed partially because it's incredibly dangerous and partly because missile technology made the concept of first strike nuclear bombers obsolete entirely.

Recently the discovery of halfnium-178's alleged capacity to decay in a fully controllable, non-self-sustaining reaction when x-rays are pointed at it gave rise to the plan for a nuclear UAV, it releases enough gamma rays to heat the air so it would need a second lauch engine to get it to an altitude to operate without nuking people.
**broken link removed**

There are also people who say this is the perfect "Death Ray" gun. Do we really NEED a death ray??

Funny, looking up the halfnium-178 issue, I found a web page which said the effect was unsubstantiated, not from a credible source, couldn't be reproduced. Look, it's a govt coverup in action!

Oznog said:

In the 50's there was a plan to make a nuclear powered long range bomber aircraft.

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Indeed , this is very true. Both the Americans and Russians had manned flying expermental aircraft, as did the French.

Both Pratt and Whitney in the US (open cycle - radiactive exhaust) and Rolls Royce in the UK (closed loop - akin to a conventional reactor system..odd because at the time Britains first fission pile at Sellafield was direct air cooled) were involved but hard facts are scarce due to company takeovers, PR guru's .. both P&W and RR are less than talkative about this episode.. one would suspect a whole lot of document shredding...

Still the idea lived on for a while thanks to Gerry Anderson's nuclear fuelled vision of the future , yeah.. thats right ...THUNDERBIRDS! (Stingray-Joe90-Captain Scarlett)...all of the craft were/are nuclear powered..even the first epsisode of "Thunderbirds" features the world first nuclear powered civilain airliner - Fireflash

useless fact - only one episode ever featured Solar Power, and in that the giant mirror of a solar furnace/ power station had tipped over thanks to an earthquake and was going to fry a nearby town at noon

Anyhow back to reality.. details regarding halfnium-178's properties may be sketchy however the work done with Polonium can be found without any problems. Polonium was deemed to be of particular interest, highly energetic yet only emitting alpha particles and therefore requireing little in the way of shielding for the crew.. how energetic tou ask.. well dropping a single gram into a five gallon bucket of water is not a good experiment to perform by hand :wink:

A recent Issue of " The Bullitin of Atomic Scientists" talked about the possibility of using halfnium to create low yeild nuclear weapons. A .5KTon warhead would be quite useful on the battlefield - though the implication of say a shoulder mounted rocket nuclear device are rather frightening in this age of terrorism.

Isotopes have often been suggested for use , though high production costs and short half life's have thankfully hindred research in this area.
Californium has also been hinted at as a contender for the nuclear bullet.

In May, the US congress approved further research on a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons: so-called mini-nukes with explosive yields of less than five kilotons. This new generation of gamma ray weapons neatly side step the existing Spratt-Fuse law that prohibits the military developing such devices, basically on the technicality that if fission or fusion does not take place it's not a nuclear bomb..

and on a darker note..
The existing generation of 5 Kiloton devices and the large volume of work done on smaller artillery shells is now under revision with the discovery of Polymeric Nitrogen explosive..five times the power of conventional chemical reactions


Meanwhile back at the old school, meet " Davy Crockett "
The lightest ever warhead deployed by the US, with a minimum mass of about 23 kg and had yields ranging from 10 tons up to 1 Kt in various versions. The warhead was basically egg-shaped with the minor axis of 27.3 cm and a major axis of 40 cm. The test devices for this design fired in Hardtack Phase II weighed only 16 kg, impressively close to the minimum mass estimated above. These devices were 28 cm by 30 cm. This was back in 1958!

:twisted: Cybernetics Primer : A brief history in fact and fiction :lol:

With good help being hard to enslave, every EG must have a rudimentary knowledge of Cybernetics in order to become master of the world in these enlightened times. Whilst founding your own religion/cult or becoming leader of an existing faction of the gullible, still remains a viable option. It's still pretty much a hit and miss affair.

Zombie potions ,even slow poisons have been used with great success in the past to ensure obedience, sadly the required ingredients are becoming harder to obtain these days. In more recent times even habit forming alkaloids have also been tried. Despite all attempts so far,and some heady potions coupled with ruthless villainy, the end results have met only with limited success. Students of evil whom wish to learn more about these "older" methods are advised to study the exploits of the arch villain "Fu Manchu" and the lesser known works of one "L Ron Hubbard" , not to be confused with the villain "100% Hubbard" whose frozen remains can still be found scattered around Spectacle crater on the darkside of Earth's moon.

The use of electronics to subdue and control human minds is not the discovery of some Earthly mad scientist, in fact the honour goes to a Martian scientist whose unpronounceable name has thankfully been lost over the centuries. News of the Martian mind control helmets escaped off planet and reached Earth in the slave uprising of 1924. Documented and thinly disguised as fiction in the movie "Aelita - Queen of Mars" made that same year in Russia. What little is known suggests that the helmets were crude affairs, the electronics bulky and easily damaged by accident.

(excerpt from the classified Martian archives Vol: MCXVIV ch 5)
When order was finally restored, work began in earnest upon a better version. Field trials of the new implantable devices using the new semi conductor circuit technology were eventually slated to take place during the long overdue culling of the earth humans set for 1953.