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Real Life "Kerbalisms"

Lisias

By Lisias
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DDE

DDE

Posted
Posted

Aerosani is a very exotic kind of propeller-powered ski sled that enjoyed a brief heyday on the Eastern Front of WWII.

00.jpg

They had a notorious difficulty getting unstuck from snow, and would get frozen to the ice at near-zero temperatures. Because the transition of power via propeller was pretty inefficient, this meant an engine many, many times heavier than a normal snowmobile was required.

But we're in this thread, so you know what the Soviets tried instead!

scale_1200

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Jacob Kerman

Jacob Kerman

Posted
Posted
On 3/19/2019 at 10:35 PM, Lisias said:

I could not had done better. :D 

And, yes… It's a real patent! :) The guy even strapped a solid booster! I LOVE IT! :D 

https://patents.google.com/patent/US6817579

D1TAgvXU8AEJLc7.jpg

20190319screenshot-19_03_2019-18_12_30.j

(tweet to the image author: https://twitter.com/Zephyr164/status/1104719928081276929)

 

 

 

I remember reading about this!

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steve9728

steve9728

Posted
Posted

Those IL-76 reminds me some kind 'joke': in around 2015 there had a typhoon was going to hit the Shanghai directly. All airlines were either delayed or landed somewhere else nearby. But Aeroflot... they just landed on Shanghai and couple hours later took off departure three hours later.

I checked and there was more than one, it was two Aeroflot planes: SU208 and SU209

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steve9728

steve9728

Posted
Posted (edited)

In January 2008, China was hit by an unexpected cold wave. Many roads and railways were affected by the ice storm as the southern region was generally unprepared for such natural disasters. Then a local emergency response agency (probably was Guangzhou I can't remember) contacted the force department (You can understand it as a communication and consultation department between Chinese civil and military institutions) seeking help from the troops: What they wanted was for the troops' tracked vehicles to go out on the streets and grind over the ice, so that the follow-up work could be carried out much easier.

What they unexpected was the force department made a phone called to the air force because they have some airport runway clearing vehicles which mounted jet engines of decommissioned fighters.

Edited by steve9728
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TheSaint

TheSaint

Posted
Posted
8 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/21217944/nuclear-security-alert-botched-repair-trident-submarine-super-glue/

A gluonic nuclear powerplant.

True Kerbal.

P.S.
@TheSaint

Did I ever tell you folks about the time I saved the underway with Copaltite?

So, there we were, having just started up the engineroom to get underway, and this steam valve started leaking. It was a gauge isolation valve way up in the overhead above Engineroom Upper Level. Apparently it had developed a steam cut across its body-bonnet gasket, it was emitting a steady drizzle of hot condensed steam on the deckplates starboard and aft of Maneuvering. Normally, with such a development, we would cancel the underway and fix the issue. However, this was a bigger problem than usual, because this was no ordinary underway. This was, how shall I say, a politically-sensitive underway. If we didn't make this underway, then the captain was going to have to make some very awkward long-distance phone calls.

So almost the entire Engineering Department was gathered starboard and aft of Maneuvering watching hot water drizzle out of the overhead. I was fairly senior in M-Division at this point, and I was the head Quality Assurance guy, so I was right there with the M-Division Junior Officer, Chief, Leading First, the Engineering Chief Petty Officer (aka The Bull Nuke), the Chief Engineer, and a bunch of other senior folks. We discussed a lot of options, and finally my chief says to the Engineer, "Well, Eng, really we have two options: We can fix it, or we can make it stop leaking."

The Eng considers this for a second, and says, "We need to fix it."

The chief says, "Okay, so then we need to shut down and cool down the reactor. We need to cut the entire valve body out and weld in a new one. Then we need to hydrostatically test the valve header to full pressure. Then bring the reactor back up to temperature. The entire process will take three or four days at least, if nothing goes wrong."

The Eng considers this for a couple more seconds, and asks, "So, what was that other option?"

Chief and I shooed everyone else out of the area. He grabbed me because I was his goto guy for stuff like this. We grabbed a new gasket and a can of Copaltite. I climbed up into the overhead, shut the upstream isolation valve for the leaking valve, pulled the bonnet off, took the new gasket and smeared a nice thick layer of Copaltite on each side of it before I put it in. Torqued that sucker in tight. Opened up the upstream valve: no leaks. Never leaked again, actually, not for as long as I was on the boat. I feel very sorry for the next guy who tried to take that bonnet off.

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magnemoe

magnemoe

Posted
Posted
On 1/28/2023 at 1:26 PM, kerbiloid said:

We know and like the chicken-warmed nuke mine project.

The Pigeon project. A homing glide bomb using a pigeon as an internal homing device.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

Pigeon_(project).jpg

The chicken warmed nuke was stupid, just use some chemical generate heat and is activated with the timer. 
This however might had worked, but I don't see it work well outside of anti ship or perhaps anti air use, hard to train them to aim for an bridge or worse an factory in a city. 
Well at the end 1944 US was running low on enemy warships and bombers and  this thing would not be effective intercepting an fighter plane and it still needed work.  
5 year before it might has been very useful, even if it miss you kill 3 pigeons who many see an an benefit. More than thinking that nuking chicken is better than grilling them

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DDE

DDE

Posted
Posted
9 hours ago, magnemoe said:

The chicken warmed nuke was stupid, just use some chemical generate heat and is activated with the timer. 

Chemical wouldn't last long enough - you need a thermally controlled environment for a nuke at all times, hence why nuclear-armed missiles tend to have HVAC for the tip of the missile where possible. RTG would've probably been the way to go instead.

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magnemoe

magnemoe

Posted
Posted
16 hours ago, DDE said:

Chemical wouldn't last long enough - you need a thermally controlled environment for a nuke at all times, hence why nuclear-armed missiles tend to have HVAC for the tip of the missile where possible. RTG would've probably been the way to go instead.

The chickens was something you would add then deploying the bomb and it would not last for more than an week. Pretty sure you could get something like an heat pack at the weight and size of some chickens to put out more energy. more so if you did not care that the chemicals was very safe. As the chickens would need air anyway why not use an simple propane burner, or you could  Benefit of the heat pack is that it would work dug deep or underwater, but you could also add an oxidizer but then things get complex but still integrated. 

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