When my mother was a kid, her father was working on building the computers used for the tomahawk cruise missile guidance system. Due to the work being classified, every time someone asked him about what he was working on. He always gave them the same answer "I'm working on a new way to make toast"
Churchill would have been proud. Aircraft carriers made of ice, exploding rats, giant rocket powered wheels to fire up beaches - he gave the go-ahead for research into all sorts of crazy stuff.
point masses too, which are basically the same but infinitely small, yet don't make black holes and manage to hit each other despite being infinitely small targets.
And now you know what actually happened at the end of _Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark;_ the government just lost the Ark and it got parked in a government warehouse, never to be seen again.
It seems very very likely that after someone suggested they use chickens as part of the timer for their nuclear mine... ...that everyone felt a little peckish afterwards. 😜😂
I think you might be mistaken about the lack of fallout on the moon. There is no permanent atmosphere, but if you blasted a bunch of lunar regolith up into the sky, some of it would indeed fall back to the ground, and some of that would fall back to the ground very far away from the original spot.
Intended to deal with the Maginot line, but as it happened it wasn't needed. It was used in the German siege if Sevastopol, taking out deep bunkers and ammo stores. After that it transported to Leningrad, but didn't get used. Then the same for Warzawa, during the uprising. So big it could only be transported disassembled by train. Then it needed a specially created stretch of curved (for aiming/direction) double/parallel railroad tracks to be built.
@@michaeltempsch5282I wish they hadn't destroyed that thing as they were having to retreat cause that would be an absolutely amazing piece of machinery to be able to see in person even one of the smaller ones would have been cool but the Gustav was pretty much the ultimate gun lol
Chickens were used to keep a constant internal temperature, as they convert easy to store food into body heat, keeping the internal countdown timer at operating constant temperature, without needing to have a massive battery to provide heat for a week. Lights do not need much, 1W of incandescent light would provide light equal to a torch, enough for the unfortunate chickens to survive and eat, and the clock on end of count would provide them with a very sterile coop, a shake before it became plasma and a burst of gamma radiation. Done because the original digital counters were made with not terribly reliable transistors, that both consumed a lot of power (all diode transistor logic, which needed around 1A of current to operate, and thus would make any battery that could power them not fit in the housing. So the clock used was a mechanical clock, which could operate with a self winding mechanism off a small battery for at least a week, and which also would have no problem operating right next to a poorly shielded nuke, as it would have to be in the housing, as the whole lot has to fit in the bomb housing. Thus the chickens, also there to provide heat to keep the explosives, and the clock and electrics, warm, so they would reliably detonate correctly. Actually 2 clocks, back up in case one failed, and 2 batteries to wind them up. Remember the standard nuclear weapon of that time had a 6 month service schedule, mostly due to the Tritium initiator decaying, and also the electronics suffering from neutron absorption, which makes transistors fail and become leaky, as the radiation converts silicon in the die into dopant, leading to increased leakage. This is the reason space based electronics almost exclusively relies, for those on long term missions, and those in high radiation environments, on silicon on sapphire based IC's, which are more immune. That is why the Mars Rovers, as well as almost all communications satellites in GEO, use very old processors, mostly based on Motorola 68000 and Intel 80386 chips, as well as the odd one using IBM RAD6000 processors, as those are available off the shelf as SOS parts, and are also available as space rated versions, even though the production lines were shut down a decade or two ago, and they are end of life. But you pay Rochester, and they will take a wafer they have had in CA storage for 30 years, and slice it, place in a ceramic low alpha emitter package, wire bond it, and cap it, then test it in shake and bake for a month, then send you the order, along with the bill, roughly $200k per chip, minimum order 10. You smile and pay. NASA has a lot in storage somewhere.
What's much _more_ impressive about Explorer One is that it had a full suite of (for the time) cutting edge scientific instruments that gathered a whole bunch of information from space that nobody had done before. Sputnik, on the other hand, had a radio that went "beep". Literally that's all. Also Sputnik had already fallen out the sky by the time Explorer One was launched, four months later. How long did Explorer One last? By the time _it_ fell out of orbit, Neil Armstrong had already walked on the Moon. As had Pete Conrad. It stayed up until 1970, over _twenty years later._
Yeah, a lot of Soviet accomplishments have the caviot of being a rush job that reached the bare minimum, and maybe some cut safety and/or unethical stuff...
They were buried on the border in West Germany's eastern border on likely approach routes. There were fancy holes in the streets with standard manhole covers or inside small bridges. Some more remote places still have them, but most got filled in or otherwise decommissioned over the last 30 years.
This really reminds me of the pigeon guided bomb. The pigeons were trained to peck at video of enemy ships to guide the crosshair and fly the bomb into the ship and they would associate a food reward during training for keeping the crosshair on target. This was before guided munitions and was to replace having to dive bomb which had extreme risk. Instead the bomb would be dropped from high altitude with the pigeon inside pecking the controls flying it into the ship and it was proved to work but I don’t think it ever saw battle.
I think at that time the nuclear cannon would be expected to fire at incoming Soviet armored columns from a very enclosed and fortified position, mitigating danger close concerns and overall vulnerability of the artillery piece itself. The Fulda Gap wasn't that wide, several artillery pieces would cover it completely, especially using defense in depth.
They've got one of these nuke canons at the Ordnance Museum at Fort Gregg-Addams. It's freaking huge. The Davey Crockett sitting next to it is kinda funny looking in comparison.
What was missed was that the battleship carried (for a time) nuclear shells for its 16" guns. A little over one salvo. Probably didn't have a forward observer for that salvo. Then there is the infamous Davey Crocket fired from a recoiless rifle. The good idea fairy told the army that being in the blast radius of round you just fired will probably be ok.
Don’t forget to watch the videos about the bat bomb, pigeon missiles, and the Davey Crockett nuclear recoiless rifle that the fat electrician has done as well! Oh and the video about the uss Nevada the ship that wouldn’t sink and survived two nuclear detonations!
Not really, the mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell, yeah yeah) are incredibly amazing at converting all kinds of chemical energy to heat, far more than any single industrial chemical process. However they can't do that quickly, so you can't make a living engine that would be useful. Only nuclear fission comes close efficiency wise.
This was Britain in the 50s A lot of the tech we have today (RTGs especially) wasn't used because they were too new. And there was a lot of secrecy in anything to do with nuclear anything.
The reason they were able to make these things so quickly is that it's a Cold War mentality-- there were more resources dedicated to these projects. If you hadn't lived through the period, you don't really understand the mindset.
The detonation on the moon. Would it be a big spherical umbrella type cloud for the expansion and then eventual fall back?.... It would likely end up (all the dust and regalith) orbiting the moon in part. So while it had no atmosphere to start with, after the nuke it might have one temporarily.
I first heard about the Davy Crocket canon on modern marvels I was like are you kidding me... though a part of me was like wonder if anyone had made a nuclear rifle.
Feels like the nuclear cannon ought to have been designed for a range of 100ish miles. Or at least 50. But maybe there were limits regarding g-load when fired thus limited muzzle velocity.
I imagine there would be a mushroom cloud to a degree though obviously not as big as the one in the picture cause the moon does have an atmosphere, it's not a dense one by any means but it's still about 100x more dense than the atmosphere of actual space so there will be some heat movement cauing mushrooming though very slight. And there would absolutely still be fallout, it might not spread as far without wind but the thinner atmosphere means less air resistance to slow the particles being thrown away from the explosion down meaning they're going to travel further under their own power than they would on earth because here on earth air resistance and gravity ends up dropping stuff out of the atmosphere way faster than would happen on the moon.
Youve gotta check iut his newer one about operation plumbob about the man hole cover being yeeted by a nuke. Unless youve already done that, then cheers!
Basically some smart dude was like... " well it seems we would need a chicken to sit on our egg " and the room of stupid people said.. "well thats bloody brillaint now innit" and the rest is history.
is there anything Thunderf00t related he could react to? i dont think Thunderf00t made video that specificly focuses on nuclear, just mentions here and there related to his job eh ex job if i am not mistaken
14:30 you were mentioning destroying the moon entirely and the gravity being a problem, you should watch huggbee's video on destroying the moon, it's funny and somewhat relevant
Why chickens and not a plutonium powered RTG or something? Ah, because plutonium is expensive and they didn’t have much and chickens were cheap and plentiful. And really it probably wasn’t even the first time British scientists gave the military a stupid way to make a stupid project work while they waited for someone to do the sensible thing and bin the whole idea.
Had RTGs been invented yet? I didn't catch when this was, and RTGs are a mid-to-late 60s invention IIRC. This whole thing sounds like a Monty Python skit.
Both in the 1950s, I think, so it is possible that the people planning the chicken nuke didn’t know about RTGs yet or knew about them but the UK didn’t have them available yet.
@@Canthus13 I’m sure someone clever could combine the two and cook the chickens. Probably not for use in a nuclear land mine though. I don’t think any amount of roast chicken is going to make a nuclear land mine a good idea.
He isn't being particularly honest here for the sake of being funny. The chickens were simply there to provide body heat to stop the timer from freezing, their deaths had nothing to do with actually setting it off otherwise.
