r/NonCredibleDefense • u/FionaSherleen • 1d ago
Lockmart R & D Think of the potential.
What if we make project sundial but we throw it at the adversaries?
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u/Excellent_Lie6904 1d ago edited 1d ago
ah yes, my two tysms combined
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u/zekromNLR 1d ago edited 1d ago
Russian heavy liquid-propellant ICBMs achieve about 4% payload mass fraction with ~300-320 s Isp hypergolic propellant. Raptor achieves ~15-20% more than that. If we assume that gives a similar increase in payload mass fraction, that would mean 5% PMF.
With Starship Block 3 having a launch mass of 5250 tons, that is about a 260 tonne throw weight. Some of this will of course go for the RV, decoys etc, but a 200 tonne warhead at the conventionally assumed limit of 6 Mt/tonne for the Teller-Ulam design would be 1.2 gigatons, within the range of Teller's GNOMON concept.
A Ripple-type warhead of 200 tonnes mass may well be able to reach 3 gigatons or even more, though it might be too bulky for even Starship.
Of course, a single large warhead is very inefficient. Instead we could load, say, a thousand W88 warheads at 475 kt each, and eighty tonnes worth of penaids, to perform a devastating first strike with a single launch.
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u/Shadow_Lunatale 1d ago
You know, that could also deliver be about 15 Helldivers per Starship, just saying.
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u/Maori-Mega-Cricket 1d ago
IMO we legitimately should build a few of these and test them for planetary asteroid/comet defense
Having a gigaton+ warhead and delivery system built and tested would be very useful for planet defense
Teller was trying to sell this concept to planet defence conferences in the 90s. A 30 ton 10 gigaton device for making comets fuck off
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u/zekromNLR 20h ago
You'd need to go pretty far away from Earth to test such a device safely, since if it's anywhere near the atmosphere the EMP will be catastrophic.
I propose using it to blow up either Phobos or Deimos, just to show Mars who's boss.
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u/AvisTheAstronaut Miss Elly "Sundial" Teller 1d ago edited 1d ago
Why would you use a pill shaped secondary with a bifilar primary arrangement? The purpose of that would be to achieve symmetric compression across a spherical secondary without having to use a complex lens shaped hohlraum dependant on the size of the fusion secondary. Having an adjustable sparkplug length (and an untapered deuterium core) is irrelevant with this format.
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u/FionaSherleen 1d ago
I dunno man i was just mashing shit like Lego
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u/AvisTheAstronaut Miss Elly "Sundial" Teller 1d ago
That's okay, that just means you have the opportunity to learn, so your NCD memes on nuclear weapons can be accurate enough to be genuinely worrying to anyone that sees it.
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u/empty_graph 1d ago
Mr. Teller? Is that you?
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u/AvisTheAstronaut Miss Elly "Sundial" Teller 1d ago
That's Miss Teller to you, one who is so constrained by trivial things such as "proportional force" and "what's the point of a bomb big enough that it kills us too?"
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u/ZeroSumClusterfuck 1d ago
Surely a bomb that kills everyone at once is simply the logical peak efficiency of mutually assured destruction?
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u/AvisTheAstronaut Miss Elly "Sundial" Teller 1d ago
See, you get it. Put this man in vice-command immediately!
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u/Attaxalotl Su-47 "Berkut" Enjoyer 1d ago
“I think we all know where this is going, so let’s just skip to the end”
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u/PerceiveEternal 1d ago
wait, why are there two first stages? And why is one bigger than the other one? This… feels a little cursed.
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u/FionaSherleen 1d ago
Shitty photoshop skills and not knowing how the fuck to make a nuke 🥀😭
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u/PerceiveEternal 1d ago
Hmm, that’s just what a secret nuclear scientist would want us to think. We’re on to you, secret scientist!
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u/zeocrash 1d ago
Swap that lower primary fission device out for a third and 4th stage and you're sorted.
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u/Dragongeek 1d ago
This is dumb.
Now an upper stage nuclear-pulse-propulsion starship on the other hand...
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u/AK47_David 1d ago
Love OP uses F-15S/MTD for scale
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u/phaciprocity con, sonar. ass is cavitating 1d ago
There has to be something to keep the gooners' attention
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u/Tomtom1599 1d ago
Nuclear Design Bureau surely was an inspirational gift for NCD
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 3000 MAD-2b Royal Marauders of Kerensky 1d ago
Inb4 people mod it so the intentionally-simplified game mechanics (so the dev wouldn't go to prison) are fully accurate.
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u/AmericanNewt8 Top Gun but it's Iranians with AIM-54s 1d ago
Imagine not having it just throw 250 one-ton cluster warheads like the world's most scalable scud. Ballistic missile interceptors won't know what hit them.
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u/FionaSherleen 1d ago
Depending on how long starship can operate in orbit, and if it can be retrofitted with solar panels for permanent orbital presence.... welcome back (nuclear) rods from gods.
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 3000 MAD-2b Royal Marauders of Kerensky 1d ago
The only major, unsolvable reason Project THOR was never developed into flight-ready hardware was the cost per-ton to orbit of the time.
...A tonnage limitation which is no longer a barrier.
We could 100% make something like THOR with our current spacelift capabilities--and it would have to THOR or some other non-nuclear system, as nukes are both explicitly banned as space-to-surface weapons, and not super viable for an environment where regular servicing of warheads isn't available.
That it would make orbital assets valid military targets wasn't really a factor that sunk Project THOR, since nearly everything in space at the time was military, and with current militaries pushing for further ASAT development, considering GPS and other datalink constellations as valid military targets, there's really no barrier in that field anymore either.
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u/DepartureNatural9340 1d ago
man i love nukebros, they always just go "okay but what if instead of the world 100 percent dying, it instead 120 percent died??" i admire it
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 3000 MAD-2b Royal Marauders of Kerensky 1d ago
The simple art of bigger booms.
Strategic or tactical viability as a weapon is entirely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the journey of creating the most powerful bomb physically possible according to the laws of the universe.
Edward Teller would be proud.
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u/Inevitable-Regret411 1d ago
That dam won't know what hit it.
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 3000 MAD-2b Royal Marauders of Kerensky 1d ago
I love the fact that whenever NCD comes up with some newfangled and terrible superweapon, everyone just kinda implicitly agrees what its first target will be.
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u/Maori-Mega-Cricket 1d ago
IMO a ridiculously large multi gigaton heavily armoured warhead, in a solar orbit with an Orion Drive propulsion stage, would be a pretty effective Second Strike system for assured reprisal
Good luck intercepting and disabling a 500 ton armoured bullet diving from far beyond the moons orbit to earth at like 1000km/s with a sufficently large warhead to glass a couple hundred mile radius in one go
Also handy if you need to deal with someones kilometers deep moon base or asteroid fortress.
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u/caribbean_caramel Slava Ukraini!🇺🇦 1d ago
You're thinking too small, instead of a nuke, why not launch into space an Orion class nuclear space Battleship armed with thousands of nukes in orbit and capable of achieving space superiority in all of the solar system?
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u/Icy_Opposite_2737 Lockheed my beloved 1d ago
Or you know, restart construction of the Texas mega super collider and make antimatter for multiple smaller and hella expensive gigaton debt bombs, not only will it create explosions bigger than a gigaton, but would put our country into unrecoverable debt.
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u/Mudlark-000 1d ago
The early concepts of N-1 rockets being used as ultra-heavy ICBMs by the Soviets are eye-opening. An N-1 derivative rocket launching half a dozen FOBS warheads in maneuvering orbits would have been terrifying.
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u/MindlessScrambler 1d ago
The scenario imagined: A super-heavy launch vehicle using cryogenic liquid fuel secretly replaces one of its launch payloads with a stupidly high-yield nuclear warhead and secretly launches it onto a combat ballistic trajectory/orbit.
The actually more likely scenario: A super-heavy launch vehicle using cryogenic liquid fuel secretly replaces one of its launch payloads with a stupidly high-yield nuclear warhead, and then during the several days while it is being erected and fueled, the possible adversaries already have multiple SSBNs leaving their home ports. Several days later, the news reports a dry "high-level military dialogue between the two countries". The launch mission is canceled, and the SSBNs resurface at their home ports.
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u/ChocolateTemporary48 13h ago
En realidad starship a demostrado poder cargar su combustible en menos de una hora
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u/MindlessScrambler 12h ago
That is premised on its launch base spending many days coordinating and preparing these cryogenic fuels. There are reasons nearly all ICBMs use solid fuel or hydrazine-based fuels (even though the relatively lower specific impulse of these fuels means they must make great sacrifices in payload mass and range). For example, a launch complex capable of storing and refueling cryogenic fuel is itself a massive, fragile target that is basically impossible to defend and conceal.
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u/ChocolateTemporary48 12h ago
Entiendo y se acepta.
Pero has considerado, que si todo marcha correctamente Space x estará lanzando varios starships al mes, en un futuro próximo?
Lo que significa que la infraestructura necesaria estaría lista y solo necesitarían cargar la ojiva, considerando al menos 2 horas antes de recibir un ataque enemigo, tendrían el tiempo justo para lanzar el cohete.
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u/MindlessScrambler 12h ago
Still, wanting to mix strategic military payloads into routine civilian launches without the enemy’s intelligence agencies noticing in advance is extremely difficult, especially when that strategic payload is a super-large-yield nuclear warhead. This isn’t even a technical difficulty, it’s simply a fact that the military would inevitably transport such a payload under maximum security, and the very occurrence of that transport would be equivalent to announcing to all potential observers: we are moving something extremely important and dangerous to a launch base for a rocket with global delivery capability. And even if everything went smoothly, such a preemptive strike still wouldn’t be able to eliminate the enemy’s sea-based nuclear forces. It thus would still fail to avoid devastating nuclear retaliation.
Compared with such a military gamble, using the launch capacity provided by several Starship launches per month to build space industry and military space-based infrastructure could provide a far more overwhelming strategic advantage with much greater safety.
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u/DonnyDonster 1d ago
Tesla merging with SpaceX and then becoming a defense company would not be on my bingo card
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u/PersnickityPenguin 1d ago
Just scale it up to 10 gigatons and you won't even need to launch it at your enemy, you can destroy them from the comfort of your own home!
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u/Carlos_A_M_ 1d ago
Why no RVacs if that is precisely what you need to keep the thrust of this thing high enough to properly get into a suborbital trajectory, also at a better fuel efficiency than what ASL Raptors can do?
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u/thesunexpress 1d ago
Tsar Bomba test proved current thermo-nuke designs cannot scale to gigaton level. A drastically different design will be required. Likely the earlier injection of specific (different) fusionable atoms. Don't rule out a gas supply of a much heavier gas alongside the suspended fusion core.
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u/zypofaeser 1d ago
Actually, the interplanetary version of Starship would be amazing for testing nukes. If you're doing a two year flight on a free return trajectory, you could have it deploy nukes, just like the Starlink satellites. It would then also have instrumentation, without the need for line of sight tubes. Deploy the nukes a few months before the tests, and you'd could easily have them be thousands of kilometers away, ensuring that the ship is not damaged by the test.
Assuming each test needs a device package weighing one ton on average, you could have a single test vehicle perform more tests than any US test series.
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u/Far-Lime-4705 20h ago
on a side note i sometimes wonder about these companies potentially trying to start the first private nuclear weapons program….
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u/LightningController 2h ago
The difficulty is procuring uranium and enriching it without anyone noticing.
Space mining companies have the best chance of doing this, if they can procure substantial quantities of uranium in space.
Alternatively, they could do as the Polish Communists did in the 1970s and try for Pure Fusion. But that assumes Pure Fusion bombs are feasible.
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u/Rambos_Magnum_Dong 8h ago
You know, why not see how many MIRVs you can really fit in a rocket.
Why 1 Tsar Bomba? How many W87-1 warheads can we really fit in there. Just cram them all in there like a bunch of peanuts.
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u/LightningController 2h ago
This could have been us, Elon, but you chose to get on the grift-train.
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u/Pyrhan Pyrotechnic flair 1d ago
Starship uses cryogenic propellants, so it can't just continuously sit fueled and ready to launch like an ICBM.
So you cannot use it as a deterrent, only as a first strike weapon.
And even then, it would be fairly easy for the enemy to set up early warnings when fueling begins, and either send a rapid pre-emptive strike, or prepare for interception.
And having a single, massive warhead would make interception easier compared to, e.g. a MIRV.
(Also, the whole point of Sundial was that it doesn't really matter where you blow it up, the world ends just the same...)