Mk21 Fuze Thunderpipe Explosive Blast Testing in Slow Motion

sferrin

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One can't help but wonder what this is for:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM0oRPcEO6c
 
https://www.sandia.gov/news/publications/labnews/articles/2017/18-08/weapons.html
 
They are publicly demonstrating that you had better have a direct hit on the warhead or that nuke is still going to go off.
 
sublight is back said:
They are publicly demonstrating that you had better have a direct hit on the warhead or that nuke is still going to go off.

What I was alluding to.

"Curt Nilsen (8250), senior manager of the Mk21 Fuze and Science Enabled Engineering group, says Sandia is responsible for designing the components of the Mk21 replacement fuze that must survive against adversarial defenses and a variety of other challenging environments."
 
sublight is back said:
They are publicly demonstrating that you had better have a direct hit on the warhead or that nuke is still going to go off.

It seems that the blast tore the RV apart. Note that just as the blast hits the region of the RV gets censor-blurred, and when it clears up again the RV ain't there. If the RV had been simply blown away, it'd be no biggie, but if it got splayed open and the innards were briefly on display, they might want to hide that.
 
Orionblamblam said:
sublight is back said:
They are publicly demonstrating that you had better have a direct hit on the warhead or that nuke is still going to go off.

It seems that the blast tore the RV apart. Note that just as the blast hits the region of the RV gets censor-blurred, and when it clears up again the RV ain't there. If the RV had been simply blown away, it'd be no biggie, but if it got splayed open and the innards were briefly on display, they might want to hide that.

Sure, but how much time did it take to tear it apart vs a self-destruct mechanism setting off a hypothetical nuke? One of the Mk21s settings is to go off on impact. Wouldn't an RV at impact would be going faster than that blast wave in the video? ???
 
What I understand is that they are testing the Fuze, not the RV. So, it makes sense to have a mockup that won 't sustain the blast exposing the fuze to the most critical situation but still being aerodinamically representative (waves).
 
TomcatViP said:
What I understand is that they are testing the Fuze, not the RV. So, it makes sense to have a mockup that won 't sustain the blast exposing the fuze to the most critical situation but still being aerodinamically representative (waves).

They'd want the fuse to be exposed to a representative environment, which almost certainly means a representative RV... and all the stuff in it. I suspect the RV shell itself is no great shakes, but all the RV-stuffin' is probably terribly interesting. Even if all the bits were replaced with mockups - the D-cell batteries that power the Nixie tubes were replaced with sawed-off lengths of aluminum rod, say - it would still be of interest to see what goes where.
 
at 00:30s you can see the RV palletized with a simple double bracing made of 2inches wood support that is lifted with a hydraulic mechanism actioned by hand and then pushed by a single person.
It looks like quite light weight for a fully representative device IMOHO.
 
TomcatViP said:
at 00:30s you can see the RV palletized with a simple double bracing made of 2inches wood support that is lifted with a hydraulic mechanism actioned by hand and then pushed by a single person.

That isn't necessarily as enlightening at you might think... a few inches of wood can hold a *lot* of weight, as can a simple hydraulic jack like that. Many long years ago I worked at a Kmart and would regularly load half a ton of concrete bags onto a jack not unlike that and shove it around by myself.

Note that the video doesn't show the RV being lifted from the platform and hung from the wires...there's an important jump cut there that cuts out showing if the RV was picked up by just a few workers or if it was a major production.
 
yes, my reply was irrelevant. I checked the mass of a typical RV like the W87 (Peacekeeper) and it seems to be much less than what I could have guessed ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W87 ). So the way they are handling it in the video is fully compatible to what it could be with a fully representative model (weight)l. Sorry for misleading the reader.
 
TomcatViP said:
Sorry for misleading the reader.

I would insert a bad joke here about "fake news" and how you'll get deplatformed... but let's face it, that's not so much of a joke anymore.

Anyway, nukes don't need to weigh so much anymore. No more than a sno-cone maker.
 
Wonder if, back when they launched the Fuze Replacement program in 2011, they imagined they'd be putting test videos on YouTube one day.
 

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