1. What's the smallest nuclear explosion possible? 2. What's

1. my farts
2. your're mum lol

>>8861932
Don't extremely small nuclear explosions occur almost all the time? Almost everywhere?

Project orion was an external nuclear piston "engine"

>>8861932
The thing is, the minimum amount of critical mass required almost always guarantees that man-made nuclear explosions are relatively large.

You can scale down nukes a lot

But it's still going to be something gigantic like 500 tons of TNT equivalent

Plus you are wasting the potential of the plutonium/uranium to make a nuke that small, a minimum critical mass bomb can produce an explosion over 15 kilotons

>>8861957
While there's tremendous energy available in the fuel required to form a critical mass, the detonation can be arbitrarily inefficient. Indeed, it's difficult to prevent it from being very inefficient (fizzling), by blowing itself apart into a subcritical mass after releasing an amount of energy comparable to a chemical explosive.

For an internal nuclear detonation engine, this may be seen as a desirable quality, since the unreacted fuel is not necessarily lost, but may be captured and reformed into a new critical mass.

>>8861932
you don't want detonation in an ICE

>>8861932
There are far better ways of getting work out of fission than via explosions.

>>8861932
You just took simple words with complex contexts and ideas behind them and then asked a juvenile question that demands a generalization for the answer.

this board is for 18+, not teenagers with unhinged ego's.

>>8861943

Underrated

>>8861932
>2. What's the largest combustion engine possible?

Fucking huge; barge engines have over one hundred thousand horsepower.

>>8861950
project orion?

>>8861932
>1. What's the smallest nuclear explosion possible?
>The M-28 or M-29 Davy Crockett Weapon System was the tactical nuclear recoilless gun (smoothbore) for firing the M-388 nuclear projectile that was deployed by the United States during the Cold War. It was one of the smallest nuclear weapon systems ever built, with a yield between 10 and 20 tons TNT equivalent (40–80 Gigajoules)

>2. What's the largest combustion engine possible?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwvS8_H5rKs

>>8862155

I wish we lived in a world where we built mega machines that needed building sized engines.

>>8862221
We do.

>>8862037
>>8861957
Can't they just collide two atoms of Pu/U in the LHC?

>>8862246
fission is splitting..

>>8862251
You think they split it with a knife? They literally just smash the atoms together to break the nucleus apart. That's what makes them split into smaller elements.

>>8862246
You can easily induce detectable fission with a particle accelerator or by using radioisotopes to generate neutrons (that's how it was discovered: through Enrico Fermi's experiments using a polonium-beryllium neutron source on uranium samples), but you won't get net work out of it.

>>8862260
Mostly they collide protons to cause a spray of matter-antimatter pairs generated from the energy of the collision. Knocking atomic nuclei apart is rather boring at this point compared to observing the short-lived exotic particles generated by high-energy collisions.

>>8861944
No. Chemical reactions just separate atoms within molecules from one another. Nuclear fission separates protons within atoms from another.

>>8861932
You can make a nuclear bomb arbitrarily small (atomi size limited) if you have a near perfect neutron mirror. Near perfect neutron mirrors do not currently exists and probably require exotic matter

Internal combustion nuclear engine?


HAHAHAHAHA my sides.

File: Project-Orion_propulsion-module_section.png (136KB, 877x877px) Image search: [Google]

136KB, 877x877px

>>8862139
excuse me sir, do you have a moment to talk about our lord and saviour lmgtfy?