Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957-1965 by George Dyson

Author:George Dyson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Published: 2002-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Cutaway view of 4,000-ton, 135-foot-diameter Orion Mark 2 vehicle, showing shock absorbers and storage of 1,400 bombs.

How do you store and eject all these bombs? "Each of them weighs half a ton and you have only half a second to get them down a hundred feet, so it's a major piece of engineering," says Freeman. "Roughly, there were two ways of doing that: either you shot them out of a gun straight down the middle, which meant you had to have an opening in the middle of the pusher plate, which was very troublesome, or else you had to go around the edge, which meant using a rocket with steering so it could zoom around and arrive in the right place. This rocket going around the edge was spectacular, you had to light the damn thing and within a quarter of a second or so it had to zoom out to the edge of the ship and then turn through 90 degrees and zoom back. That always seemed to me to be a very risky idea. I always said if you are serious you have to shoot straight down the middle. And then the trap door was a formidable problem. It has to open and close in a fraction of a second, under very rugged conditions with things going bang all the time. If the shutter jams shut then you're finished."

Launching from the periphery of the pusher is not quite as crazy as it sounds. Besides all the problems caused by having a hole in the center of the pusher plate, if you have only a single launcher its firing cycle has to be completed two to four times per second, and any serious mechanical problem is likely to be fatal to the entire ship. With multiple peripheral launchers, each individual subsystem has to fire only once every few seconds, and a failure is more likely to be survivable, the way a car can be kept running on 7 cylinders when one ignition wire goes bad.

"For the delivery system they hope to avoid the hole in the pusher by using a gun or bazooka," reported Mixson at the end of July 1958. Mixson's notes describe "a gun a meter in diameter, walls about 1.5 centimeters, 10 meters long, weighing 2.5 tons to project a 1.5-ton projectile at 200 g's. Obviously this can't be reloaded every quarter of a second so you need maybe 10 of them. Can be a bazooka but the gun is easier, you need about a hundred kilograms of propellant per shot. This will probably wind up as a battery of Gatling gun-type gadgets."[190] One early series of sketches show the gun barrels supported on angled pylons around the circumference of the ship. When the shock absorbers are fully compressed, the muzzles extend just beyond the edge of the pusher, allowing unimpeded ejection of a bomb, and then the muzzles are safely protected by the pusher when the shock absorbers have reextended just before the bomb goes off.

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