Real World Kerbal Space Program - Gun Launched Space Missions
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- Опубліковано 16 жов 2024
- Real World Kerbal Space Program - Gun Launched Space Missions
After the intro to Martian Dreams people asked for a video on what it would take to launch space missions from a giant gun, so, I spent 15 minutes explaining the history, technology and current initiatives and threw together some pictures on the subject.
quicklaunchinc....
www.startram.com/
You have come along way while still staying true to your roots - well done!
The Hydrogen Gun concept has to be from an American.
"How do we make this gun more powerful?"
"Let's use ANOTHER gun!"
'Murrrica!!!
I studied and worked in astrophysics for a decade.
Is the United Kingdom real?
Out of 336 comments, I have no idea if someone pointed this out already, but in the interest of Internet pedantry: technically, propellant in a gun doesn't explode, it burns. The primer is a high explosive, but its purpose is only to start the powder burning.
Given your depth of knowledge on this topic, you probably already know this, and it was likely just a slip of the tongue. But far be it from me to miss a chance to sound like a smartey-pants and soothe my fragile ego.
It's more accurate to say that it deflagrates.
True, it's just an incredibly aggressive burn.
I knew this. Bombs explode because the pressure is contained. Loose powder just burns.
Not exactly; bombs do NOT require pressure to explode. An explosive will explode no matter what situation it is in. The reason a bomb needs to be contained is so that the energy is dispersed and doesn't disperse in all directions. Gunpowder, however, will only explode if contained, otherwise it simply burns.
Technically, it _does_ explode, it just doesn't _detonate._ (Some gun propellants _do_ detonate, however, such as the early smokeless propellant ballistite.)
A lot of people forget that the rocket equation works for you in reverse. Yes, it's tyrannical when you need more. But if you reduce the delta v required? It gives you so much in return. Enough, even, to let an extended 16 inch naval gun launch a launcher.
It doesn't get weaker quickly enough to matter in that sense, but being higher up puts you above more of the atmosphere which is a bigger help.
I truly admire you scott, you have to be the only person that can make me happy by saying "Let's do some math!"
It's a fuel dump, one of the best candidates for gun launching is fuel supplies for other space missions.
This just popped up in my feed. Made me briefly think about SpinLaunch...and laugh.😂
Would love to see a video on alternative space techs, IE Railguns, Space fountains, ect.
"You can't launch things with guns to space" said my science teacher. *throws papers at teacher's face* FACTS
What teacher would say that, everyone knows it is theoretically possible, no law of physics contradicts it, we just may not have the tech yet?????
Perhaps your teacher said you can't launch things into orbit, rather than just into space.
Are you talking about the light gas guns that pre-heat the hydrogen prior to firing?
We greatly appreciate all of the time and effort you put into this Scott. Keep up the good work. Science!!!
What about a Gauß-gun (Gauss-gun) or coilgun that uses electromagnets to propel the projectile without requiring chemical explosive propellants? That could at the VERY-least bring the vehicle to hypersonic airspeed, which could allow for staged air-breathing engines (ramjets at first, and then scramjets for higher altitude and higher airspeeds) to continue accelerating the vehicle AFTER it emerges from the "barrel" of the "gun" and by being air-breathing engines they would eliminate the need to carry oxidizer, allowing a bipropellant rocket-engine to be reserved solely for circularizing the orbit after one has managed to get out of the atmosphere, yes?
Not necessary, but it would be neat. Now, we can actually use gunpowder, or rather guncotton. Look up Project HARP and Martlet 4.
"The blast wave accelerator wasn't your favorite?!" -me
"THAT'S SO COOL! alright, I agree." -also me after I see the scram jet.
Very good! This is something I'd like to see more regularly. Listening to you explain these things that at first seem bizarre and obscure is really interesting.
What makes you think I work for a space agency?
The fastest man made object in space is a 4 inch tick manhole cover. It was launched by an atomic explosion from nevada during early atomic underground testing. The man hole cover was launched by the blowout in the shaft which was inadequately plugged for the detonation!
So fascinating how many ways humans have come up with to get thing going faster and faster! Wonderfully informative Scott, thanks 🤘
I now know what the definition of rocket science is! This video was very detailed and got the cogs in my mind turning! I'm going to show this to a couple of my friends:) how long did it take u to make/research this video?
This would be great for sending cargo and satellites into orbit. Now we just have to find a cheep easy way to clean up all the space junk that's out there.
shoot them down using a gun
bruis That would just cause more space junk, similar to the problem in the movie gravity. The gun used would need to somehow disintegrate the object into micro pieces or pull it downwards out of orbit rather than break it up into smaller shrapnel like debris.
Timothy Tenery
Maybe putting a giant, sponge-like thing in a re-entering orbit, it would catch everything and disintegrate on re-entry!
VAOS would need super super durable cargo
In 1942-43 Germany made a huge cannon that was on a large hill in France, and it was designed to fire massive shells at Britain, this thing was so huge that it dwarfs the Gustav and Dora rail cannons. The US also did strategic bombing on it, but there was so much cement on top that it was useless. So they devised an unmanned kamikaze aircraft, which was a B-24 Liberator, with a TV camera, this camera, was wirelessly connected to a B-17 acting as a mothership, with the copilot flying the B-24. They intended to fly the B-24, packed with explosives, wirelessly into the lower portion of the V-3 (that massive hillside cannon), and somewhere over France, the B-24 inexplicably exploded mid-air, and the shock wave was large enough that it knocked the fighter escort that was half a kilometer away, back by about 300 meters. The largest piece of the B-24 found was about 3 cm in diameter. As for the V-3, its crew abandoned it a long time ago due to the heavy strategic bombing and fear of the cement armor collapsing. That was just a little interesting story from WWII that sort of tied in with the topic.
Wikipedia differs from your version (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-3_cannon). Might not be the ultimate authority but at least does not talk about TV-guided airplanes in the 40's.
I don't believe the technology for Wireless video feed was available at the time... At least not enough to be effective
Josh Repavich It was absolutely usable! not that hard.
It was tv guided, it had cameras pointed at the instruments and the signal was relayed to one of the chaseplanes with a guy flying it via rf remote control, bit like a primative fpv. It took off with a pilot at the controls who was supposed to bail out after arming the bomb. It blew up just before he bailed out. Germany had proper tv guided anti-ship missiles, although they were wire controlled for the most part.
*by tv guided I mean tv signals relayed to a remote operator, not image recognition tech like a tomahawk or whatever.
The plane in question was flown by JFK's older brother.
Watch Stargazing Live tomorrow (the 10th) there's a good chance they'll be using some of my asteroid videos.
Love that series, hope it continues!
@ 7:27: haven't gone throuhg the hundreds of comments, maybe someone already pointed out...
speed of sound in an (ideal) gas doesn't depend on pressure, but only on temperature and the gas properies: a=sqrt(kappa*R*T). it's clear, as for the propagation of the sound wave not the distance between the atoms/molecules is important, but the mean velocity of the atoms/molecules, which transports the wave. and the speed is only depending on the velocity of the atoms/modelcules, which is related to the temperature (or - with other words: the temperature is meter for the velocity of the atoms/molecules), but NOT on the distance from one atom/molecule to the next one (which is a meter for pressure and temperatue and density: p=mRT/V)
beside this error, great video.
All right, as soon as you said the railgun designs were for another video, you got me very interested indeed.
YAY SPLOSIONS!!! Thanks Scott! I'm always amazed and fascinated by the content of your channel.
I recently did a project on electromagnetic weapons, specifically rail- and coilguns. Now, coilguns have a way too low efficiency (20% would be extremely high), but railguns do have quite decent efficiencies (60-70%, at least in some designs). A railgun was tested in 2010 that could fire a 10kg projectile at 2,5km/s!
So Scott, please do make a video about them blastin' railguns! :D
Your everest figure may be right, but you've got your ISS number backwards. i.e. at the altitude of the ISS the acceleration due to gravity is 90% of what it is at the Sea Level
Scott actually is a DJ I believe. He used to study astrophysics and then went to music later on.
Scott can correct me if I'm wrong.
Very interesting video Scott, really enjoy your stuff.
Excellent idea for a video! How did you manage to come up with it? ;) lol
Did you make a replica in kerbal space program? If you didn't, could you?
Inversely proportional to the square of it's distance from the center of the gravitating body.
Gerrald Bull was a genius. He did build a small satelite delivery system using two 16" naval gun riffes welded together and riffling borred out using standard propelants. Politics got involved and the research was abandoned. He did most of his work outside Canada where he was from, and USA, where he received honorary citizenship for his contributions to balistics and artillery development.
I wished this vid would never end.
Could you do a video on railguns? To me those seem more viable, but I'm sure you are more knowledgeable on it. From what I understand you could have a system similar to the LHC, in that you could have a circular device that you could use to accelerate your projectile up to the desired speed. From there you could switch the channel into a barrel and just use the projectile's kinetic energy to just drive it out the barrel. Obviously this wouldn't be a viable option for people, but for satellites, or even dumb projectiles it may work. But again, you know more than I do.
Light gas gun = "I heard you like guns so I made you a gun powered by another gun." ;)
Great video, informative and entertaining. Come back to the UK and get a show on the Beeb!
Thanks for doing this, these videos are extremely interesting and educational. You are teaching people rocket science when they come to watch a video game. Excellent work
In theory these sound great, but the construction cost and, above all, risk issues are phenomenal. We're talking near orbital velocities at ground altitude. Any mishap and your entire launch system, including large sections of track, blows to smithereens.
I have an idea. What if you took a gun barrel that had a rail channel for the shell, but had the actual barrel cover outside of it. Then, the farther down the barrel you go, the closer the barrel cover squezes the rail channel. What happens is as the gun is fired the expanding gases pushes the bullet, but gas also is pushed up the sides, and then the pressure lowers, which keeps them behind the shell. Then, the barrel constricts the gases, putting them behind the shell, and the pressure increases. The speed increases, and voila. You have a gun with a much higher velocity.
"assuming you can keep air in those lungs" This is true, but there are liquids in which oxygen is soluble enough that animals can breathe these liquids and not die. These are usually liquid fluorocarbons. I assume it's quite painful though.
I loved the crazy idea of using a cable with oscillating magnets along the length to lift it up into space kind of like turning a garden hose on full and it can move and stand up.
I wrote a story in which a cannon was vertical in Mt Chimborazo in Ecuador. It was about 2000 feet long although it could have been longer if slanted or extended downwards. The point was that it was not to achieve Escape Velocity. It was the "1st stage" & what went out would be a manned rocket as the 2nd, & maybe 3rd stage plus the payload. The muzzle was at about 20,000 feet elevation.
Holy crap - Ultima Worlds Martian Dreams. That game was so cool, and I thought nobody remembered it. I recognized it within 2 seconds of the video starting.
After watching the ET3 (Evacuated Tube Transport Technology) videos, I wondered if it would be possible to build a circular evacuated tube track that acts sort of like a particle accelerator to bring a payload up to super high velocity then redirect it out of a long barrel where a series of shutters open in front of it and close behind it. I don't know how aerodynamic you could make the payload, so I don't know how that part would work. I like the idea of deploying a big rectena array once it's out of the atmosphere and beaming power to it so that it can course correct.
Wow there mr. Manly, I'd just like to say that you brought me along a highly interesting physics/science/math adventure in this video, and I enjoyed every second of it. Makes me wish you were my physics teacher back in the schooldays. I'm certain anyone without fear of math or science would enjoy more of these crazy physics adventures into the madder realms of science :) Whatever you are doing, keep doing it, because it's great :D
While I like the idea of a railgun, for spaceflight I'm sure firing a scramjet via light gas gun into the propellant mixture would be more viable.
If youre going to shoot it into orbital velocity the "projectile" would be in the barrel for (ca.1 min) to not be crushed by the gforces, and the air resistans would destroy the ship instantly. (Sorry for bad english)
Scott, I know this video is quite old and I’ve seen it before. But I had it on in the background while I was tinkering with something totally unrelated. when you mentioned the “scramcannon” and EM rail guns a thought hit me. Could the two be combined? The rail gun to create a nearly frictionless projectile and impart acceleration and combine it with the scramcannon to increase the acceleration even more? Basically it would be a hybrid with both operating at the same time.
Well done Scott! Enjoyed it immensely.......one of my favorite unconventional ideas.
for the gas gun, they made something similar in myth busters to shoot a ping pong ball straight through a paddle. instead of compressing helium with a piston they used compressed air behind the ball, and made a vacuum in front of it.
One of my favorite concepts the super gun/launcher...it has gone from being the stuff of sci-fi, to a madmans fancy, then evolved into a seriously considered bit of engineering.
At one point a prototype battery of cannons using a sequential detonation system was in development by the all time craziest super weapon fan.. The"V-3" cannon was supposed to be able to shell London with multiple shells, from multiple tubes, at once from the french coastline.
Fortunately for everyone the site was bombed to rubble before the Allies were sure what it was being built for. They simply saw a large complex being assembled and what looked like gun components being shipped in and went..Hmm, perhaps we should put a stop to this."
The gun was a tube with inlets connected to secondary firing chambers that would fire as the shell passed the inlet.it was fixed so in theory the charges would be tailored to adjust the point of impact by altering the muzzle velocity of the round. and once again fortunately this process and the timing of detonations were a bit beyond analog switches, and slide rule calculations.
I am happy to let you know I ad not heard of the ram/Scram Guns. But that's a brilliant idea. Instead of the gas int eh tube being a hindrance it's transformed into an asset.
I kind of like the idea of a hybrid system. A self propelled projectile getting it's initial velocity from the gun, while a rocket system maintains the velocity after launch. this would also allow for in flight maneuvering. It adds the option of adjusting the trajectory by means more precise than simply altering the muzzle velocity of the round.
Love this series! thanks for bringing it back!
your huge knowledge of space travel and the physics included
Scram Cannon sounds so COOL, that is totally gonna end up in a video game some where
How about if we load the barrel like so: explosive, piston, explosive, projectile. Would it accelerate twice as fast? Is the piston necessary for that?
No it would in general be much slower. Among many problems with that idea, the main one is your projectile is still being pushed by combustion products (of the explosive). So the maximum velocity easily attainable by that is much lower because combustion products are always heavier (they consist of multiple atoms in a molecule). The point of the light gas gun is you a really light molecule like hydrogen, which has a really high speed of sound. So the projectile can be pushed far faster before you run into problems. You make the energy with the explosives, and then use a medium (the hydrogen) to impart the energy into the projectile far more efficiently. Project SHARP (Super High Altitude Research Project) actually used natural gas and oxygen as their "explosive" to power the piston. The piston compressed the hydrogen, which broke a burst disk once the gas reached a certain pressure.
cool stuff. when you discussed the several hundred km long barrel requirements i couldn't stop thinking about space elevator concepts ;)
I would love to see a little vid explaining more about eg. hyperloops, spacefountains and spaceelevators and how those compaire to these. :)
On the bright size, if you want to launch jelly into orbit, this is a great method!
you just taught me more maths in 15 minutes than my teachers did in 10 years. thanks :)
I have QDragon to thank for sending me here. This has answered a tonne of questions I've had. Thanks!
Outstanding, Scott. That was great.
Thanks for talking about this, I just was trying to figure out if rail gun tech could somehow be exploited as a means of launch for space missions. Given the G's involved that doesn't seem possible to this laymen. Onward and upward.
Scott, velocity is speed in a specific direction such as 45 m/s east. Not speed over time, that is considered acceleration.
So Scott, I'm in a High School physics class. Right now we are learning about friction... so it's only natural for me to ask if Friction would stop the capsule/launched object before it got out of such a large cannon? I mean... it just seems like the friction would get to be too much and either it would loose control inside the barrel due to overheating and damage or just slow it down to a grind, just sliding out of the end, falling all those kilometers... Or would this be solved by lift of RAM?
4:14 - And assuming that the person's bodily cavities are also filled with said fluid, to keep their organs from playing mosh pit with each other.
Like they did in the (fiction) movie The Abyss. They were breathing liquid.
"If you can't stand ten thousand gees, you will not go to space today..."
Hey Scott! What if we wanted to launch vitrified nuclear waste into the sun using something like a MAC cannon? Would we still have to be concerned with sending the projectile into orbit around the sun before deorbiting it or, since the MAC cannon would be shooting the projectile close to the speed of light, could we effectively lead the target and just let it impact into the sun?
The problem with your proposal comes not from launch method, but from what could potentially go wrong with launching nuclear waste out of our atmosphere, and the implications of this being accidentally(or otherwise) deorbited, or disintegrating on the way up. Hope I helped :)
Why would you want to? You can reuse "waist" to generate power to launch more practical things into space. Things like plutonium only really come from "waist". If your just trying to brake physics with super dense materials I'd suggest aiming at the nearest (known) black hole in the center of the galaxy.
The Space Programs of the world: The only place where "explosions" are a viable, respected answer to every possible problem.
Hey Scott, amazing video. Could you do a video about the Oberth-Effect? I get what it does but I just can't wrap my head around the mathematics of it.
do you do this for fun or educational purpose?
That Ram Accelerator just blew my mind!
what about a coil gun (rail gun) of the same size? would that fix the Speed of sound trouble since it's not driven by chemical explosions?
Firing huge guns with huge projectiles into space?
I approve of this science.
Thank you, Scott. I love your videos so much, man!
Gravity does not get weaker the higher up you go, it is constant. Astronauts on the ISS have the same amount of gravity working on them as we do on earth, they are constantly falling towards the earth but due to its rotation around earth the ISS stays in place.
You have mentioned rail guns and from what I understand these could be the best solution (despite the energy you have to put into the "gun" itself). I think the main advantage of such a solution would be the fact that you could make a rounded barrel (think LHC size) that would essentially cover less ground, accelerate the projectile in it magnetically and than lead it into a section that would do the actual firing. I don't think you could do that with combustion based models.
Scott, would you take a look at Leik Myrabo's Laser Light Craft technology?
To me, a 1-gigawatt pulsed laser seems like a reasonable launch method for a 1-tonne vehicle containing nothing but mass-to-orbit at a few dollars per pound.
A pulsed Gigawatt laser has also got a LOT of other possible uses; some of them very good, and some of them very bad. It's a great "Hello!" message sender. It could be focused back to the ground from mirrors in space, as a weapon. or as a lightsail engine...
There are proposals out there for vacuum maglev launch systems that have serious merit. StarTram is a good example (check it out on wikipedia). One of the better ideas is to run it up the side of the tallest mountain near the equator(at the end of the 1000+km acceleration tunnel). You'd need a slight rocket boost to achieve proper orbit, but this would lower the cost of sending things to orbit by almost 3 orders of magnitude.
Not exactly, electrothermal guns use a large electrical discharge to super-heat a propellant (in some cases hydrogen). The power source is outside of the gun, which allows you to have much more control of the rate that the propellant expands inside the barrel. So by controlling the rate of expansion you can make the rate of acceleration much more linear.
11 people were looking forward to space travel by Howitzer before seeing this video.
24
Please start an educational series. I don't care what just enlighten me some more!
Great video Scott; interesting, informative, and entertaining. Thanks!
A large problem I see with projectile launch is something not talked about in your video is that modern guns have rifling inside the barrel to ensure the projectile flies in a stable and (mostly) predictable manner. Applying rifling to a barrel launching space ships means you are not only going to have high linear g forces, but also high centripetal g forces.
Math... in my UA-cam? It's more likely than you think. Awesome video, love it.
No deceleration isn't a word, acceleration means change in velocity, whether the velocity is increasing or decreasing, it's still acceleration.
no, my point being, if you have a 100km long barrel to shoot your rocket, the end of the barrel will be in space, making the initial 11km/s in correct. Simply, you don't need to be travelling at 11km/s at any point in a rocket, which is basically what this 100km long barrel does (think of it as being a rocket inside of the barrel)
I wish you were my year 12 physics teacher it would actually make physics bearable
If we're talking international cooperation, how would the size of a 500km space rail gun compare to the LHC physically ... or either that or ITER in price tag?
Scott, any chance you can do a video on the aerospike? (linear or toroidal.) Naturally I am speaking in terms of real life, not KSP. I am very intrigued as to why it isn't being used for ascent while in the atmosphere even though it has been proven to have a significantly higher ISP. They have been tested on the ground and some on aerial platforms, but the design seems to simply be neglected. Also, thank you for the videos!
Side note, have you seen the NERVA petition to the white house?
Awesome video. If you are doing any more on speculative launch tech, I'd love to see something about microwave or laser thermal rockets. On paper the idea looks great, I keep wondering why no one has gotten behind them.
Launch loops are the way to go.
Cheaper to lauch things into space and people can use it too.
Okay, brilliant idea.
So the classic problem with rockets is the diminishing return of packing on more fuel, because that fuel needs yet more fuel to carry it.
Solution: use space guns to shoot extra rocket stages *at* the rocket. The stages attach to the rocket and transfer fuel only when the fuel is needed, not before, so there is no waste in having to carry it all the way up there.
It's incredibly dangerous, likely much less efficient, but totally cool beans.
I hope I'll get to say that backwards someday :P But not having studied astronomy nor astrophysics isn't a good starting point for now!
Awesome videos, Scott. Thank you.
the 500km gun barrel as a railgun would work very well and accelerate the projectile easily to escape velocity, although the power requirements could be obsurd to the point where you need a powerplant just to keep it charged
Better line of thinking would be to do away with long straight tubes of combustible gasses and have either a centrifuge style launch (Arm pushing the capsule up the spiral from a central column,) Or have the tube filled with a light gas and use the "Rail Gun" method of propulsion.
Construct a spiral launch tube starting 3km under ground 20 km in diameter giving you around 125km of tube to accelerate through.the last 10-15 Km would end up straight.
I could be wrong, but i think one makes the projectile itself a electromagnet that repels the barrel, and the other has a series of electromagnets being activated in sequence to accelerate the projectile.
Sure you could, with the ramjet-cannon design.
It's harder to do it with a coil/rail-cannon since the curvature would be harder to manage with electromagnetic forces alone.
Now if you combined the two designs.....
Scramjet-speed detonations combined with electromagnetic acceleration would be dreamlike in execution.
Your Technical videos are fucking amazing I think we going backwards in time although I don't have a TARDIS keep up the good work
did u do a video on the rail gun thing with magnets? sounds like a good idea to me
You got it wrong , Mr Manley. The first technical problem you get in making a cannon that shoots things to space apparently is to keep your lead designer alive :p Making a cannon that shoots things to space = making a cannon that can shoot anywhere in the world and no matter who hires you, there will be a lot of people wanting you dead :/
Anyway, I'm still very skeptical of cannons as delivery devices. I'm still rooting for some kind of elevated plataform, though ...