Patrick McLanahan 10 - Wings of Fire by Dale Brown

Author:Dale Brown [Brown, Dale]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780425190654
Publisher: Berkley Pub Group
Published: 2003-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

trol the heat buildup and keep it away from the magnetrons.” “That’s a problem I never had to contend with,” Jon admitted. “With the plasma-yield warhead, I wanted to let the heat build up-we got a bigger plasma field and we could do more damage. Here, we want to control it.” It took an incredible amount of heat to create a plasma field-a hundred million degrees Fahrenheit, ten times hotter-than the sun. The heat only lasted for a tiny fraction of a second, but it was still devastating to ordinary manmade materials. Further, cooling the sphere or magnetrons was not an option-the only way to do away with the heat was to build the heat up enough to create a plasma field, at which instant it would cool to safe limits and the plasma field would disappear. Even if the creation of the plasma fields were pulsed, excess heat eventually built up to the point where even the strongest materials would begin to corrode and weaken. “What’s the pulse interval looking like?” “The optimum safe range is between ten and twenty-five milliseconds,” Kelsey replied, “but I only get a yield of point four one megawatts-almost half the level of the chemical laser we’re replacing. Not good.” Kelsey had been experimenting with trying to vary the spacing between plasma pulses. Spacing the pulses out farther resulted in manageable levels of heat but decreased the power available to the laser generators. “If I can go to five to ten milliseconds I can get to one megawatt of power. I’m shooting for one millisecond-then I can beat TRW’s chemical laser output by twenty-five percent. But at that power level, I can get maybe ten ten-second shots off before the magnetrons let go.” “Letting go” was a nice way of saying “exploding.” The magnetrons in the confinement chamber served two purposes: they squeezed the plasma energy down to a smaller size to increase the power of the plasma field, and it then channeled the plasma stream into the laser generator. The magnetrons signaled imminent failure by vibrating rapidly as the magnetic material began to disintegrate molecularly and the magnetic fields began alternately attracting, then repelling one another at incredible speed. If the magnetrons failed and the plasma reaction wasn’t stopped in time, the plasma field would grow uncontrollably, unleashing one hundred million degrees of destruction on anything within one or two miles. Building two smaller confinement chambers instead of one large one was an option, but there wasn’t enough room for two of the right size in the B-52’s fuselage; besides, Jon’s and Kelsey’s initial computations suggested that one large confinement chamber would do the trick, so they went for it, and now it would take weeks, maybe months, to redesign everything for two chambers. “I don’t think we have any choice-we drop back ten, punt, and go for two confinement chambers,” Jon said. “We need to build a little more safety into the system too, or else we can’t market to the Pentagon.

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