The bit about the Air Force design reminded me of an apocryphal anecdote from the book on Project Orion written by Freeman Dyson's son. Best I can remember was that when presenting the project to an Air Force general, the general said "I've got guys coming in here every week proposing to use big rockets to send up tiny payloads, and here you are telling me you want to put an entire goddamn spaceship up there?" "Sir," the Project Orion presenter replied, "We're using nuclear bombs for propulsion. We can put something roughly the mass of downtown Chicago into orbit."
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).
Everytime I think of the Orion Space Battleship, my first thought is always "The USAF made plans for a real-life MCRN Donnager from the Expanse, and they could've built it in the 70s." It honestly boggles my mind.
@@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?
@@WolfeSaberNot suprised, now that I think about it. Honestly everything I know about Warhammer lore comes from watching TH-cam videos after the new Space Marine was announced. 😅
Kinda disappointed you didn't point out just how great at interstellar propulsion Orion is. Going to Alpha Centauri in a single human lifetime is a fucking achievement.
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.
did nobody at the pascal test think to consider they were making a nuclear-powered cannon until it went off? Though if we weren't afraid of the side effects, the Pascal cannon might make a ~=~ cost effective launch system.
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.
The Orion Drive in Terra Invicta is a really interesting drive, costing lots of fissile materials but being exceedingly good at moving high speed low range interceptors. In the early game, they represent a good way to move high-tonnage ships within Earth's orbit as early game interceptors.
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
@@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...
Before I watch this video, I'm looking for: Project Orion came up with a technique for building nuclear shaped charges! This is key to how they achieved higher theoretical efficiencies, and is one of the most shocking developments of the project! EDIT: 3:40 -- YES! Okay, you guys pass!
OK an Orion Drive Battleship would be amazing in a sci fi, a fleet of them even better! Like sure the aliens attacking us would have more advanced tech but theyd be shocked to see human ships using nuclear bombs to move, shooting more nuclear bombs at them, using nuclear howitzers and then using the Doomsday Orion to just crack their homeworld apart. Humanity really is insane xD
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.
For aiding imagination, each Orion pulse units (the bombs) supposedly has around 1 to 5-kiloton charge. If you're wondering what a 1 KT explosion looks like, just look up 2020 Beirut explosion.
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.
There was also project Daedalus. Basically using a dome shaped assembly using inertial confinement fusion [fuel pellet launched into position, lasers compress/"ignite" fusion pellet, pellet goes boom]
I remember first being introduced to the Orion Drive in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's novel 'Footfall'. A great novel if you've never read it. Larry Niven has a tendancy to pull in actual scientists to add a touch of realism to his sci-fi novels. Edit: I just reached the part of the video where he mentions it.
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).
The one time I saw this was in the documentary “Evacuate Earth”, which as I recall, was the idea of how humanity would escape Earth if there was an apocalyptic threat incoming. (In that case, a neutron star)
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.
@@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
This reminds me of actually one of the old sci-fi series I read some time ago which actually had an application of the Orion Drive. I believe is was Books 4 or 5 into the series (the Frontlines series by Marko Kloos), but the humans in there created "Orion Missiles" as a last-ditch effort, which seemed to use an Orion Drive to propel a really, REALLY big kinetic projectile through deep space to annihilate other spacecraft.
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.
Glad you mentioned Michael from Footfall! I remember reading that as a teenager and when I got to the launch I just couldn't put the book down until I was finished. That thing had naval cannons, X-Ray pulse lasers and space shuttles for auxiliary fighters. Very cool!
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
They used the Orion Drive for the space stations in John Ringos' The Hot Gate series. Essentially an iron/nickle asteroid heated and rotated so that it melts and becomes a sphere. Then it is blown up to a larger size using ice shoved into a hole cut into one end. They decided to move a station through the gate to secure the other side and to do this, they mounted a thick steel plate onto huge springs and detonated the bombs on the plate. It was not fast and it was not maneuverable, but it got through the gate.
This concept was from a time when people couldn't imagine anything more powerful then Atomic power. People of that era would imagine is as the base for Sy Fy. Today it would be consider retro, but back then it was the pinnacle of energy production.
@@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.
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.
I both can't believe and am not surprised the USAF wanted to make a nuclear space battleship. I am completely stunned by the giga-kill suicide bomber, however. The Cold War really let the most insane people ever propose things they should have been thrown off a bridge for even thinking.
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.
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
For anyone who has actually looked into the Orion Project, they know that it is an astonishing peice of work, that makes a lot of sense and is in fact still an option in the future of human space travel.
My favorite thing about Operation Plumbbon is that a weapon derived from the Pascal B test is called a Thunderwell. Imagine obliteration a giant spaceship with a bunch of steel plates launched at nearly 100 kmh!
@@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.
The Awesome thing about the Orion Battleship concept and design is that it can be created and built with current technology. Although its weapons systems likely needs to be updated with lasers and other similar tech but for the most part it would probably be a viable ship tha can be used for more peaceful endeavors than the one that had massive battleship guns and more nukes that would make a Russian Typhoon Sub jealous.
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.
@@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".
The best thing is that, with modern tech, there is no better drive to build, sure, many torch drive concepts are amazing, but we are incapable to build them, and will be incapable for a time, but this thing is fully buildable with modern tech, if we would dedicate resources and break those treaties about nuclear tests in space, we could have ship hanging around Jupiter in just a few years. And an colony in decades. With that drive, Mars could be considered short trip. Plus when the aliens show up, they would freak out and hold they invasion plans to a stop on the sight of it.
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.
Coca Cola was consulted on the design of the pulse units, storage and dispensing. The cylindrical shape of the units made the design have similar considerations as drink vending machines.
I liked the use of an Orion drive in one of the later Weber/White Starfire books. To not take horrible losses against a fortified system, the protagonists rig up nukes and plates (along with point defense) on a number of BIG asteroids. The results were… spectacular. Took a while, because this is a star system we’re talking about. But enough of the rocks got through to make some of the smaller ones superfluous.
For an excellent novel featuring this propulsion system, check out author Jerry Pournelle's King David's Spaceship. King David's Spaceship is part of the extended universe of Falkenberg's Legion/Co-Dominium/WarWorld/Mote in God's Eye, the Gripping Hand. Jerry Pournelle is co-author of Footfall with Larry Niven.
It is probably a good thing that JFK was president at the time. They showed him a model of the battleship, and it supposedly he said "The world really doesn't need this right now." The orion drive becomes a lot more efficient the bigger you go, and the issues with the massive shock absorbers become less of a problem. So if you need to send off a city sized craft and do not care about coming back, it really is the best option.
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.
"You could be crazy and try to make a containment device for the nuclear blast." Well, strt doing some research for the next video in the series, because that's what the Aldebaran Spaceplane was. Not surprisingly it did not get very far in terms of development, but it's still a fun idea.
This is actually the first mention of the Doomsday Orion proposal that I’ve heard. A gigaton explosion is….yeah…That’ll wipe out an entire continent or hemisphere. That’s insane.
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.
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.
The design did use tungsten plates to produce the plasma plume but it was also hypothesized that lighter materials such as polyethylene and household trash might be more effective, the idea being that an interstellar version could make more bomblets on the way from the Uranium 233 from Thorium breeder reactors used for power and of course trash for the propellent, though keep in mind they might carry portions of an asteroid or comet along for resources and hence have regolith as propellent as well, there really isn't any limit as to how much cargo is taken as larger pusher plates simply catch more of the propulsive force and indeed the original Star Trek had the Enterprise visit a hollow asteroid propelled by "Orion Drive tubes", the dialog about the Orion Drive Tubed was edited out in the new CGI remastered version.
The Medusa variant drags the crew compartment through the radioactive plasma plume... In general, intercepting more of the plume can best be achieved by making the ship larger with a larger pusher plate and as the plume is a plasma, a magnetic field van also intercept more of the force. The calculations showed that no matter how large and massive they made the spaceship, the number of nuclear pulse units and the frequency remained the same.
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.
A very powerful version (and its rip offs) of this is successfully deployed to save humanity in "Vakuum" by Phillip P. Peterson. Unfortunately I dont think it has been translated yet but the reason why it is built (and the politics behind building it) are told masterfully.
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 😅)
the nice thing about the Orion Drive is that it easely enable Interplanetary and limited interstellar spaceflight with quite a low techlevel if in a hurry to get somewhere, like if 2001 Space Odyssee wasn't written in the 60s but plays in the 60s or early 70s and that an Apollo Mission discovered TMA-1
Just finished listening to all of season 1 today, The Sojourn team did a fantastic job at making an immersive and very entertaining audio drama and I can't wait for season 2!
I'm delighted to see you expand on the variants instead of just focusing on the test ban and why it failed. There was some truly great engineering here. That rendering of the USAF model was epic. You far exceeded my expectations.
Simplest way I can explain the Orion Drive to someone that has no knowledge of it is this: What happens when you put a lit firecracker under an upside-down tin can? The can goes flying when the firecracker goes off. Now replace the tin can with an entire several-thousand-ton spacecraft, and replace the firecracker with a thermonuclear warhead. That's the Orion Drive.
George Dyson, son of Freeman Dyson, wrote a book about Project Orion imaginatively titled "Project Orion". It sadly seems to be out of print but I think there's a digital copy in the internet archive library. A lot of the work was originally done by a company called general atomics which was basically set up as an artist's commune for some of the scientists that worked on the Manhattan project.
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.
Always great choices of background music, mass effect, Deus ex ( in this case). That really add to the quality. Also : wait what 66 km/s... daaaaamnn. Maybe a chunk of that cap will hit a Alien walking down the street on his home planet in a couple of millennia. Always check your firing solutions!
You didn't mention the 400m diameter, 8 million ton, space ark version of Orion, able to carry a city of 100,000 people away from a doomed and dying planet. Unless that was the 8 Gigaton one you mentioned.
It was also the basis of a ship design in King David's Spaceship. No nukes, but totes explosives. I hesitate to ask what the most insane concept was. O.K., my mind is boggling. I should go.
In the TV show ‘ ‘For All Mankind’, they have a nuclear powered shuttle but it doesn’t appear to use the Orion method. Perhaps it’ll be seen in a future season…
If i ever wrote a sci-fi story that involved an Orion drive having someone say that "They have a bomb, they stole a bomb from your engine." Would be a pants wetting moment and would be pretty clear who was responsible for the giant hole.
The guerilla fighting humans used that exact drive to get into orbit to fight the elephant like aliens that had attacked earth in the 1985 novel Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Now we only need a video on a nuclear salt water rocket, which is even more insane, to cap it off. Imagine instead of riding pulses from small bombs, riding a continuous nuclear blast. Like a non-stop chernobyl, with the only thing that keeps the rocket from being detonated being the mass flow that supplies the reaction. If that clogs or slows, the reaction would travel up the nozzle and detonate all the fuel, and the ship with it, all at once.
If I recall correctly (I don't have time to google it), the Orion drive was the propulsion method they used on The Messiah in Deep Impact, even though it did not really look like an Orion drive when they fired it up. Also, I remember seeing the Orion drive on a documentary about having to abandon the planet and go to another star system, so they built a massive generational ship to take as many people as possible (the premise was basically "what could we build with the tech we have now") and they use an Orion drive to power it.
You can use rice grain sized uranium pellets if you daisy chain the explosions, being that the previous rice grain pellet explosion compresses the next rice grain pellet into a near critical mass, and the radiation pushes it over the edge a second or so later. This would let you get away with very small explosions and way better efficiency. You'd need a massive laser to set off the first one though, too large for the craft to have on board. Basically a 'lets light this sucker up and run' kind of propellant, but way more efficient then using actual nuclear bombs.
Speaking of Footfall and the good ship Michael, Niven and Pournelle very pithily described what it would be like to ride the damn thing. "God was knocking, and He wanted in BAD."
5:49 : no worse than trying to use Warp Drive to try and take off or land a ship (Sulu warping the shuttle in the backside of the Enterprise doesn't count). Like taking a nuke to a chestnut to get it open. Of course, smaller engines would be used, for Trek it is not even the Impulse drive but thrusters for first and last stages of landing (heh Kirk doing 1/4 impulse inside Spacedock 😛 ) . I think even the Venture Star used chemical rockets in first and final stages of its trip though Avatar 2 using the Antimatter drive to land on Pandora? You freaking nuts?
yes knowledge of the nuclear potato canon is spreading. Just the idea of it is hilarious the a steal man hole cover was briefly one of the fastest things ever made by man. As for the Orion Battleship I believe in the book Footfall one is used to defeat the alien fleet.
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
I always wondered if hinges would allow for petals to create a spherical cavity to capture all the energy of the blast and convert it into forward momentum. But, I don't know enough physics to know if that would work or if I'm missing something.
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.
Interesting concept, I see too many flaws and "Wait a moment" things with this though. In a Sci-Fi Setting I can see some ships having a booster with this explicitly for LONG distance travel. At which point your basically firing your ship out of a gun that is missing the barrel.
@@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.
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
My favorite fictional use of the Orion system is from the Troy Rising novel series. It was the only way to get a 2.2 TRILLION ton nickel-iron battlestation to move. The scale was gigantic, but I think it was a pusher plate that was 1km across, sitting on four or six of the biggest orbitally-crafted stainless steel SPRINGS ever, using 25 megaton nukes to 'gently' nudge the station (10km across with a skin 1.5km thick) at approximately 1G or so of thrust. Which while it might not seem like much, is VERY impressive for something the size of a little moon.
At one point during the fighting, the plate took some direct hits with nukes, causing the springs to bend a little. But all that did was mean the navigation of the station has the slightest drift to one side while they puzzled out why they weren't flying straight. Because they didn't feel the impacts because the weapons fired at them were lower yield than the pusher bombs they were ejecting every 10 seconds or something. Lol.
I think this would work great in a drone going to another solar system. Probably the cheapest/dirtiest way to accomomish that mission in a reasonable timeframe
one problem with the nuclear pulse design, the fuel is scarce unless they are using fusion bombs, if they were using fission bombs then the supply of uranium and such would deplete quite quickly.
I read a book about the Orion some time ago. A large part of the research was into developing the smallest possible nukes - the blast effect of which was still classified at the time of publication. Based on that, it seems that they did a good job of downsizing nukes into manageable explosions. While the concept isn't terribly efficient in absolute terms, the huge energy of a nuclear detonation made it feasible - much like the energy in petrol. Petrol-powered cars can produce fantastic power despite poor thermal efficiency. Getting it off the ground without nuclear power would be near-impossible however. Realistically, this would have to be constructed in space - and to do that, you would need a space elevator to carry the vast amounts of materials.
Fission and fusion technology was the shiny new toy as a result of WW 2. Every facet of politics, economics, religions, science, and technology was seeking new way to use or "spin" fission/fusion. For example, civil engineers contemplated using nuclear warheads to blast through mountain ranges to build a path for expressways. DoD still had the most farfetched ideas like the atomic mortar (the blast radius was larger than the range of the projectile) and the "earthquake" bombs for West Germany (buried nukes to prevent invasion routes of the Warsaw Pact).
@@absalomdraconis It does the job and more, much more, than any propulsion system we currently have. And it's the only practical use for atomic weaponry I can think of. Oh, and it's really cool.
Doomsday Orion reminds me of that meme about Scientists wanting to build a rocket to Mars and a Senator saying no, not sexy enough, until they say it's going to nuke Mars, then he's all aboard. Then scientists land on it and he's disappointed so the scientists convince him to send a more heavily armed group to get the job done.
The thing is, we could actually make an Orion-drive spacecraft. We could in the 50s. We have the technology. If, for example, there was an unavoidable disaster due to hit earth, we could construct city-size spaceships and blast ourselves off, and to hell with anyone not on board because they're dead anyway. Also, is there any chance of a breakdown on the Michael?
I love this thing, and how wild west american is using nukes as propulsion. And a few things 1. EMP's are only an issue for detonations high in the atmosphere (nagasaki and hiroshima were air burst detonations and did not produce any emps) any orion style ship (really any spacecraft) will have hardened elcteonics 2. Making nukes small hasnt been an issue for decades. The davey crocket shoulder fired nuclear bazooka was a thing, as was atomic annie which was a nuclear artillery piece that fired an 11 inch diameter - 15 kiloton yield shell (a gun similar to a battleship's, and a hiroshima level yield). 3. Assembly on or near the moon, and an initail push from conventional rockets to get it out past where the bombs would damage any infrastructure would make this thing a lot more sane 4. The radiation from the nukes isnt contaminating outer space (i cant believe some people dont know this) as space is a radiation soaked hell-scape what with cosmic rays and the big old unshielded fusion reactor in the center of our solar system that we call the sun pumping out charged particles, and radiation of all kinds. Which renders our contributions not even noticeable. 5. Interstellar journeys uhhh no, but it could open up the solar system and thats a better use for our nukes than anything else
we also can control the fission/fusion ratio very finely now...to something like 98% fusion...and on a 1kt device thats really not much fallout at all...this Orion drive is the best weve got to really explore our solar system and even the nearest star...if ppl just got over this fear of nuclear power...ik it got a bad start but if handled correctly its perfectly safe...if we are ever going to advance as a species then nuclear is the only way...
You might check out the new nuclear-thermal propulsion NASA's working on. It's got two modes, one for long slow burns like an ion drive and another for short hard burns. Best of both worlds! Project DRACO, woo-hoo!
Get The Sojourn - The Complete First Season here!
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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.
The bit about the Air Force design reminded me of an apocryphal anecdote from the book on Project Orion written by Freeman Dyson's son. Best I can remember was that when presenting the project to an Air Force general, the general said "I've got guys coming in here every week proposing to use big rockets to send up tiny payloads, and here you are telling me you want to put an entire goddamn spaceship up there?"
"Sir," the Project Orion presenter replied, "We're using nuclear bombs for propulsion. We can put something roughly the mass of downtown Chicago into orbit."
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
@@ez_theta_z9317 Launching a city sounds great, but imagine all the spilled drinks!
Everytime I think of the Orion Space Battleship, my first thought is always "The USAF made plans for a real-life MCRN Donnager from the Expanse, and they could've built it in the 70s." It honestly boggles my mind.
Orks approve of this 'splodey fing.
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?
@@WolfeSaberNot suprised, now that I think about it. Honestly everything I know about Warhammer lore comes from watching TH-cam 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
Kinda disappointed you didn't point out just how great at interstellar propulsion Orion is. Going to Alpha Centauri in a single human lifetime is a fucking achievement.
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.
did nobody at the pascal test think to consider they were making a nuclear-powered cannon until it went off?
Though if we weren't afraid of the side effects, the Pascal cannon might make a ~=~ cost effective launch system.
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 Orion Drive in Terra Invicta is a really interesting drive, costing lots of fissile materials but being exceedingly good at moving high speed low range interceptors. In the early game, they represent a good way to move high-tonnage ships within Earth's orbit as early game interceptors.
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.
Before I watch this video, I'm looking for: Project Orion came up with a technique for building nuclear shaped charges! This is key to how they achieved higher theoretical efficiencies, and is one of the most shocking developments of the project! EDIT: 3:40 -- YES! Okay, you guys pass!
We covered those in more detail in a nuclear weapons video last year!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
OK an Orion Drive Battleship would be amazing in a sci fi, a fleet of them even better!
Like sure the aliens attacking us would have more advanced tech but theyd be shocked to see human ships using nuclear bombs to move, shooting more nuclear bombs at them, using nuclear howitzers and then using the Doomsday Orion to just crack their homeworld apart. Humanity really is insane xD
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.
For aiding imagination, each Orion pulse units (the bombs) supposedly has around 1 to 5-kiloton charge. If you're wondering what a 1 KT explosion looks like, just look up 2020 Beirut explosion.
The 4000 ton ground launch ships use 1/10kt bombs at launch, .3kt in space.
My favourite part of the whole proposal was the bit where it launches itself _from the ground_
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"
Realistically I wouldn't want to launch anything like this closer than the moon/lunar orbit, but I'm glad the military didn't get the funding to try
There was also project Daedalus. Basically using a dome shaped assembly using inertial confinement fusion [fuel pellet launched into position, lasers compress/"ignite" fusion pellet, pellet goes boom]
I remember first being introduced to the Orion Drive in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's novel 'Footfall'.
A great novel if you've never read it. Larry Niven has a tendancy to pull in actual scientists to add a touch of realism to his sci-fi novels.
Edit: I just reached the part of the video where he mentions it.
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.
The one time I saw this was in the documentary “Evacuate Earth”, which as I recall, was the idea of how humanity would escape Earth if there was an apocalyptic threat incoming. (In that case, a neutron star)
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
This reminds me of actually one of the old sci-fi series I read some time ago which actually had an application of the Orion Drive. I believe is was Books 4 or 5 into the series (the Frontlines series by Marko Kloos), but the humans in there created "Orion Missiles" as a last-ditch effort, which seemed to use an Orion Drive to propel a really, REALLY big kinetic projectile through deep space to annihilate other spacecraft.
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.
Glad you mentioned Michael from Footfall! I remember reading that as a teenager and when I got to the launch I just couldn't put the book down until I was finished. That thing had naval cannons, X-Ray pulse lasers and space shuttles for auxiliary fighters. Very cool!
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
They used the Orion Drive for the space stations in John Ringos' The Hot Gate series. Essentially an iron/nickle asteroid heated and rotated so that it melts and becomes a sphere. Then it is blown up to a larger size using ice shoved into a hole cut into one end. They decided to move a station through the gate to secure the other side and to do this, they mounted a thick steel plate onto huge springs and detonated the bombs on the plate. It was not fast and it was not maneuverable, but it got through the gate.
Still my favorite series for the sheer amount of "Hey, can we (blank)?" As well as HFY.
This concept was from a time when people couldn't imagine anything more powerful then Atomic power. People of that era would imagine is as the base for Sy Fy. Today it would be consider retro, but back then it was the pinnacle of energy production.
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.
I both can't believe and am not surprised the USAF wanted to make a nuclear space battleship. I am completely stunned by the giga-kill suicide bomber, however. The Cold War really let the most insane people ever propose things they should have been thrown off a bridge for even thinking.
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
For anyone who has actually looked into the Orion Project, they know that it is an astonishing peice of work, that makes a lot of sense and is in fact still an option in the future of human space travel.
My favorite thing about Operation Plumbbon is that a weapon derived from the Pascal B test is called a Thunderwell. Imagine obliteration a giant spaceship with a bunch of steel plates launched at nearly 100 kmh!
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.
“If you don’t happen to have antimatter to spare…” *shows a scene from Voyager*
Well played
The Awesome thing about the Orion Battleship concept and design is that it can be created and built with current technology. Although its weapons systems likely needs to be updated with lasers and other similar tech but for the most part it would probably be a viable ship tha can be used for more peaceful endeavors than the one that had massive battleship guns and more nukes that would make a Russian Typhoon Sub jealous.
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".
The best thing is that, with modern tech, there is no better drive to build, sure, many torch drive concepts are amazing, but we are incapable to build them, and will be incapable for a time, but this thing is fully buildable with modern tech, if we would dedicate resources and break those treaties about nuclear tests in space, we could have ship hanging around Jupiter in just a few years. And an colony in decades. With that drive, Mars could be considered short trip. Plus when the aliens show up, they would freak out and hold they invasion plans to a stop on the sight of it.
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
Coca Cola was consulted on the design of the pulse units, storage and dispensing. The cylindrical shape of the units made the design have similar considerations as drink vending machines.
Probably apocryphal . Naval gun designers do it all the time, with packages of a couple of tons.
I liked the use of an Orion drive in one of the later Weber/White Starfire books. To not take horrible losses against a fortified system, the protagonists rig up nukes and plates (along with point defense) on a number of BIG asteroids.
The results were… spectacular. Took a while, because this is a star system we’re talking about. But enough of the rocks got through to make some of the smaller ones superfluous.
"The Shiva Solution" - when you need to kill all the Arachnids in a system by giving them such a big headache
Ah, yes. "Sledgehammer Three, when it arrived, was sheer redundancy."
@@Harrier42861 But the engineering officer overseeing it was quite happy.
truely the most kerbal form of space travel
For an excellent novel featuring this propulsion system, check out author Jerry Pournelle's King David's Spaceship.
King David's Spaceship is part of the extended universe of Falkenberg's Legion/Co-Dominium/WarWorld/Mote in God's Eye, the Gripping Hand.
Jerry Pournelle is co-author of Footfall with Larry Niven.
It is probably a good thing that JFK was president at the time. They showed him a model of the battleship, and it supposedly he said "The world really doesn't need this right now."
The orion drive becomes a lot more efficient the bigger you go, and the issues with the massive shock absorbers become less of a problem. So if you need to send off a city sized craft and do not care about coming back, it really is the best option.
I remember a old documentary show called evacuate earth that talked alot about the orion drive and actually said that it would be the ideal drive
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
Its very cool that we seriously considered Orion drive based exterminatus devices. N-nothing scary at all...
Ah, but it is perfect idea! You never have enough dakka...
"You could be crazy and try to make a containment device for the nuclear blast." Well, strt doing some research for the next video in the series, because that's what the Aldebaran Spaceplane was.
Not surprisingly it did not get very far in terms of development, but it's still a fun idea.
This is actually the first mention of the Doomsday Orion proposal that I’ve heard. A gigaton explosion is….yeah…That’ll wipe out an entire continent or hemisphere. That’s insane.
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.
The design did use tungsten plates to produce the plasma plume but it was also hypothesized that lighter materials such as polyethylene and household trash might be more effective, the idea being that an interstellar version could make more bomblets on the way from the Uranium 233 from Thorium breeder reactors used for power and of course trash for the propellent, though keep in mind they might carry portions of an asteroid or comet along for resources and hence have regolith as propellent as well, there really isn't any limit as to how much cargo is taken as larger pusher plates simply catch more of the propulsive force and indeed the original Star Trek had the Enterprise visit a hollow asteroid propelled by "Orion Drive tubes", the dialog about the Orion Drive Tubed was edited out in the new CGI remastered version.
Orion Battleship looks a lot like BattleTech dropships. Wonder if that is where the design for the Dropship originated from.
Oppenheimer thought that he created a weapon that can destroy the world and yet we have found ways for it to better humanity.
The Medusa variant drags the crew compartment through the radioactive plasma plume... In general, intercepting more of the plume can best be achieved by making the ship larger with a larger pusher plate and as the plume is a plasma, a magnetic field van also intercept more of the force. The calculations showed that no matter how large and massive they made the spaceship, the number of nuclear pulse units and the frequency remained the same.
I like the pellet zapping concept the most, seems to be the cleanest of them all
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.
A very powerful version (and its rip offs) of this is successfully deployed to save humanity in "Vakuum" by Phillip P. Peterson.
Unfortunately I dont think it has been translated yet but the reason why it is built (and the politics behind building it) are told masterfully.
I'm begging for a nuclear salt water rocket now.
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.
It's rocket-jumping for spaceships!
Yes
the nice thing about the Orion Drive is that it easely enable Interplanetary and limited interstellar spaceflight with quite a low techlevel if in a hurry to get somewhere, like if 2001 Space Odyssee wasn't written in the 60s but plays in the 60s or early 70s and that an Apollo Mission discovered TMA-1
Just finished listening to all of season 1 today, The Sojourn team did a fantastic job at making an immersive and very entertaining audio drama and I can't wait for season 2!
I'm delighted to see you expand on the variants instead of just focusing on the test ban and why it failed. There was some truly great engineering here. That rendering of the USAF model was epic. You far exceeded my expectations.
Simplest way I can explain the Orion Drive to someone that has no knowledge of it is this:
What happens when you put a lit firecracker under an upside-down tin can? The can goes flying when the firecracker goes off.
Now replace the tin can with an entire several-thousand-ton spacecraft, and replace the firecracker with a thermonuclear warhead.
That's the Orion Drive.
George Dyson, son of Freeman Dyson, wrote a book about Project Orion imaginatively titled "Project Orion". It sadly seems to be out of print but I think there's a digital copy in the internet archive library. A lot of the work was originally done by a company called general atomics which was basically set up as an artist's commune for some of the scientists that worked on the Manhattan project.
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.
Always great choices of background music, mass effect, Deus ex ( in this case). That really add to the quality. Also : wait what 66 km/s... daaaaamnn. Maybe a chunk of that cap will hit a Alien walking down the street on his home planet in a couple of millennia. Always check your firing solutions!
Marko Kloos in his Frontlines series utilises the Orion engine for some crazy solid shot kinetic space missiles.
The movie Deep Impact is where I first learned of this drive system.
You didn't mention the 400m diameter, 8 million ton, space ark version of Orion, able to carry a city of 100,000 people away from a doomed and dying planet. Unless that was the 8 Gigaton one you mentioned.
Thanks for doing this. I read about it in Omni magazine back in the 70's and it's always intrigued me
It was also the basis of a ship design in King David's Spaceship. No nukes, but totes explosives.
I hesitate to ask what the most insane concept was.
O.K., my mind is boggling. I should go.
Love the thumbnail for this video, "thermonuclear yeet" is too good
9:34 ok people, is this seriously humanity’s first design of a space warship?
Yeah, well, realistic spaceships are really boring, so... Yeah
We need to ask Alternate History Hub to do "what if they had built the Orion Battleship"
In the TV show ‘ ‘For All Mankind’, they have a nuclear powered shuttle but it doesn’t appear to use the Orion method. Perhaps it’ll be seen in a future season…
the orion drive is my favorite brute force drive to get through space
Well the Warhammer 40k Orks would love it. "Da boom boom boom drive."
If i ever wrote a sci-fi story that involved an Orion drive having someone say that "They have a bomb, they stole a bomb from your engine." Would be a pants wetting moment and would be pretty clear who was responsible for the giant hole.
The guerilla fighting humans used that exact drive to get into orbit to fight the elephant like aliens that had attacked earth in the 1985 novel Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Now we only need a video on a nuclear salt water rocket, which is even more insane, to cap it off.
Imagine instead of riding pulses from small bombs, riding a continuous nuclear blast. Like a non-stop chernobyl, with the only thing that keeps the rocket from being detonated being the mass flow that supplies the reaction. If that clogs or slows, the reaction would travel up the nozzle and detonate all the fuel, and the ship with it, all at once.
So glad you mentioned Footfall! Maybe you'd want to look at Project Deadelus for a future video These are awesome. Thankyou.
If I recall correctly (I don't have time to google it), the Orion drive was the propulsion method they used on The Messiah in Deep Impact, even though it did not really look like an Orion drive when they fired it up. Also, I remember seeing the Orion drive on a documentary about having to abandon the planet and go to another star system, so they built a massive generational ship to take as many people as possible (the premise was basically "what could we build with the tech we have now") and they use an Orion drive to power it.
👍👍👍Been amazed by the Orion since Carl Sagan mentioned it in the original Cosmos series.
The late 50s and early 60s US DoD was completely unhinged.
You can use rice grain sized uranium pellets if you daisy chain the explosions, being that the previous rice grain pellet explosion compresses the next rice grain pellet into a near critical mass, and the radiation pushes it over the edge a second or so later. This would let you get away with very small explosions and way better efficiency. You'd need a massive laser to set off the first one though, too large for the craft to have on board.
Basically a 'lets light this sucker up and run' kind of propellant, but way more efficient then using actual nuclear bombs.
There's a particle accelerator approach that's likely a better option.
The saddest part of the video is learning that the man hole cover isn't sailing merrily through space on a grand cosmic adventure
Troy Rising is the best use of the Orion drive in fiction.
Let's combine the subterranean rail-gun launch tube with Orion Nuke propulsion. 🎉🎉🎉
Speaking of Footfall and the good ship Michael, Niven and Pournelle very pithily described what it would be like to ride the damn thing.
"God was knocking, and He wanted in BAD."
Really hoping for a video on NSWRs now
I freaking love this channel. Where else ya gonna find out how many miles per nuke a suicide rocket can get?
Thermonuclear YEET 😂
9:59 The USAF of 1961 _wanted_ it, but the engineering (which by definition includes cost) would _quickly_ have proven it totally infeasible.
5:49 : no worse than trying to use Warp Drive to try and take off or land a ship (Sulu warping the shuttle in the backside of the Enterprise doesn't count). Like taking a nuke to a chestnut to get it open. Of course, smaller engines would be used, for Trek it is not even the Impulse drive but thrusters for first and last stages of landing (heh Kirk doing 1/4 impulse inside Spacedock 😛 ) . I think even the Venture Star used chemical rockets in first and final stages of its trip though Avatar 2 using the Antimatter drive to land on Pandora? You freaking nuts?
yes knowledge of the nuclear potato canon is spreading. Just the idea of it is hilarious the a steal man hole cover was briefly one of the fastest things ever made by man. As for the Orion Battleship I believe in the book Footfall one is used to defeat the alien fleet.
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
I always wondered if hinges would allow for petals to create a spherical cavity to capture all the energy of the blast and convert it into forward momentum. But, I don't know enough physics to know if that would work or if I'm missing something.
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.
Interesting concept, I see too many flaws and "Wait a moment" things with this though. In a Sci-Fi Setting I can see some ships having a booster with this explicitly for LONG distance travel. At which point your basically firing your ship out of a gun that is missing the barrel.
The Michael from Footfall better be in this video.
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.
Project Orion: why it's probably for the best that Atompunk never became real.
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
Also known among engineering community as fart drive.
Since you can't smell in space, can you really determine who dealt it? 🤔
My favorite fictional use of the Orion system is from the Troy Rising novel series. It was the only way to get a 2.2 TRILLION ton nickel-iron battlestation to move. The scale was gigantic, but I think it was a pusher plate that was 1km across, sitting on four or six of the biggest orbitally-crafted stainless steel SPRINGS ever, using 25 megaton nukes to 'gently' nudge the station (10km across with a skin 1.5km thick) at approximately 1G or so of thrust. Which while it might not seem like much, is VERY impressive for something the size of a little moon.
At one point during the fighting, the plate took some direct hits with nukes, causing the springs to bend a little.
But all that did was mean the navigation of the station has the slightest drift to one side while they puzzled out why they weren't flying straight.
Because they didn't feel the impacts because the weapons fired at them were lower yield than the pusher bombs they were ejecting every 10 seconds or something. Lol.
Waiting to see if the Medusa is mentioned, Yes!
Space ship literally rocket jumping on nukes
The best idea mankind ever created
I think this would work great in a drone going to another solar system. Probably the cheapest/dirtiest way to accomomish that mission in a reasonable timeframe
one problem with the nuclear pulse design, the fuel is scarce unless they are using fusion bombs, if they were using fission bombs then the supply of uranium and such would deplete quite quickly.
I wanna see a good alien invasion scifi with that general atomics battleship defending earth. Imagine the lightshow from that battle.
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.
I read a book about the Orion some time ago. A large part of the research was into developing the smallest possible nukes - the blast effect of which was still classified at the time of publication. Based on that, it seems that they did a good job of downsizing nukes into manageable explosions. While the concept isn't terribly efficient in absolute terms, the huge energy of a nuclear detonation made it feasible - much like the energy in petrol. Petrol-powered cars can produce fantastic power despite poor thermal efficiency.
Getting it off the ground without nuclear power would be near-impossible however. Realistically, this would have to be constructed in space - and to do that, you would need a space elevator to carry the vast amounts of materials.
Fission and fusion technology was the shiny new toy as a result of WW 2. Every facet of politics, economics, religions, science, and technology was seeking new way to use or "spin" fission/fusion. For example, civil engineers contemplated using nuclear warheads to blast through mountain ranges to build a path for expressways. DoD still had the most farfetched ideas like the atomic mortar (the blast radius was larger than the range of the projectile) and the "earthquake" bombs for West Germany (buried nukes to prevent invasion routes of the Warsaw Pact).
First learned of Project Orion from 'Cosmos.' Always fascinated me. This segment? Very interesting, especially the drawbacks vs. the virtues of Orion.
Drawbacks go away, with ships only used in space.
@@JFrazer4303 Yes, this ship should never be launched from the Earth.
@@evalramman7502 : Ironically, some of the designs _wouldn't_ have produced much fallout. The trick is- why even launch one in the first place?
@@absalomdraconis It does the job and more, much more, than any propulsion system we currently have. And it's the only practical use for atomic weaponry I can think of. Oh, and it's really cool.
Doomsday Orion reminds me of that meme about Scientists wanting to build a rocket to Mars and a Senator saying no, not sexy enough, until they say it's going to nuke Mars, then he's all aboard. Then scientists land on it and he's disappointed so the scientists convince him to send a more heavily armed group to get the job done.
There was an Orion prototype built, called Project Nerva. It was shut down when an accident occurred. Details are scant, but it's worth looking into
The thing is, we could actually make an Orion-drive spacecraft. We could in the 50s. We have the technology.
If, for example, there was an unavoidable disaster due to hit earth, we could construct city-size spaceships and blast ourselves off, and to hell with anyone not on board because they're dead anyway.
Also, is there any chance of a breakdown on the Michael?
I love this thing, and how wild west american is using nukes as propulsion. And a few things
1. EMP's are only an issue for detonations high in the atmosphere (nagasaki and hiroshima were air burst detonations and did not produce any emps) any orion style ship (really any spacecraft) will have hardened elcteonics
2. Making nukes small hasnt been an issue for decades. The davey crocket shoulder fired nuclear bazooka was a thing, as was atomic annie which was a nuclear artillery piece that fired an 11 inch diameter - 15 kiloton yield shell (a gun similar to a battleship's, and a hiroshima level yield).
3. Assembly on or near the moon, and an initail push from conventional rockets to get it out past where the bombs would damage any infrastructure would make this thing a lot more sane
4. The radiation from the nukes isnt contaminating outer space (i cant believe some people dont know this) as space is a radiation soaked hell-scape what with cosmic rays and the big old unshielded fusion reactor in the center of our solar system that we call the sun pumping out charged particles, and radiation of all kinds. Which renders our contributions not even noticeable.
5. Interstellar journeys uhhh no, but it could open up the solar system and thats a better use for our nukes than anything else
we also can control the fission/fusion ratio very finely now...to something like 98% fusion...and on a 1kt device thats really not much fallout at all...this Orion drive is the best weve got to really explore our solar system and even the nearest star...if ppl just got over this fear of nuclear power...ik it got a bad start but if handled correctly its perfectly safe...if we are ever going to advance as a species then nuclear is the only way...
I loved your previous Avatar videos, particularly on the ISV, thanks for doing a follow-up(soon-ish)👍
The Orion Drive: So Human It Makes Your Teeth Hurt (and fall out due to radiation exposure.)
Spacedock please breakdown the Jellyfish from Star Trek 2009 its such an amazing little ship
He mentions in a side of a spaceship Michael in a novel called Footfall.
That was written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell
A classic activity to stave off weekend boredom.
You might check out the new nuclear-thermal propulsion NASA's working on. It's got two modes, one for long slow burns like an ion drive and another for short hard burns. Best of both worlds! Project DRACO, woo-hoo!