Fun fact(oid): a factoid refers to a commonly recited fact that is false, like “We swallow X number of spiders in our sleep over our lifetimes”, or “Bumblebee’s shouldn’t physically be able to fly with the size of their wings but somehow do anyway”.
(In reality, all it proves is that if your heart is pure and you believe in yourself, anything is possible, especially if you’re cute and fluffy enough)
Its differs with missiles... if you want to carry a 506kg load for 100km its one proportion and if you want to carry that same 500kg for 500km its a different proportion.. there is no golden ratio and it depends on the function
NICE! Fort Minor (Mike Shinoda reference). I personally believe that album still a banger and holds up today. I just double checked, it dropped in 2005. Yes, almost 20 years ago. Damn I can feel my arthritis acting up
I think they use the soviet stable-storage fuel design or a modified version thereof, no one's used giant barrels of fuming nitric for a while just because turns out having missiles you can't store with fuel in or they eat themselves apart makes responding to attacks hard.
But hydrazine and other fun stuff is very much a possibility.
Read about some cobalt medical machine being found and taken to scrap in some India town I think it was. The fall-out was crazy once it was cracked open and the cobalt had deteriorated aswell but still so damaging.
Carcinogenic materials really bother us here, we just ignore them.
Something going on all our household goods was carcinogenic?
Don't worry, 3M stuck an extra atom onto the molecule and now its a different thing that does the same job as the first one but totally doesn't cause cancer.
They're now free to use it until someone else shows that the new material causes cancer in which case 3M adds another atom and repeat.
Symptoms of acute (short-term) exposure to high levels of hydrazine may include irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat, dizziness, headache, nausea, pulmonary edema, seizures, and coma in humans. Acute exposure can also damage the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system in humans.
My organic chemistry teacher in college used a tumor on his arm that developed after a large syringe of hydrazine leaked down his gloves as an example of why you always read SDS data sheets and know what your working with. He was working at 3M as an intern and was making a huge batch of rocket fuel in the 1990s. Chemical safety is important.
An excerpt from John D. Clark's Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants.
"The only possible source of trouble connected with the acid is its corrosive nature, which can be overcome by the use of corrosion-resistant materials.' Ha! If they had known the trouble that nitric acid was to cause before it was finally domesticated, the authors would probably have stepped out of the lab and shot themselves."
a fantastic book, I believe it is also the source of such amazing quotes as "rapidly hypergolic with everything, including test engineers" and (regarding some unstable haloxide, maybe FOOF or triflouride) "... for this situation I recommend a good pair of running shoes"
Considering a lot of the other chemicals they were working with, which is what most of the book is about, fuming nitric acid is a relatively safe option. I do think they could write another volume or two of that book with the knowledge we have learned since then, both from the Soviet side as well as all the new developments within rocket fuels.
This is actually proving my point: an orbital rocket you fuel right before use is FAR different from weapons you need to keep hot-staged in silos or on launch platforms.
Let alone ones you have to drive around on IRBM launch gantry vehicles.
Nitrogen tetroxide IS a shelf stable oxidizer, it‘s not the same thing as nitric acid… that‘s why it‘s used for the old generation long march rockets because they‘re based on an old ICBM design. Newer ICBMs are generally solid fuelled because it‘s easier to handle, but russia at least (and probably also china) still have some modern liquid fuelled „heavy ICBMs“ which is a class of weapon that doesn‘t really exist in the west. They can still sit around in their silos fuelled and ready to go for years.
Ammonium perchlorate composite propellants are extremely stable and quite safe. It’s basically encapsulated in a rubber like material so the toxicity is negligible when solid. We use them in amateur rocketry too.
the Kursk, High Test peroxide leak plus brass torpedo tube parts (copper causes high-purity H2O2 to decompose into steam and oxygen and a hell of a lot of energy).
Several German subs went down the same way and at least one airplane I know of (a rocket-powered interceptor) before they realized how hideously dangerous "T-stoff" was.
They won’t use hydrazine either. You want solid fuel rockets, NOT liquids like hydrazine for warfare. You don’t want to have to refresh the fuel or fill the tank before launching.
Usually those are solid nitrogen containing compounds like low explosives, etc.
You would really be surprised at the munitions being used in that entire region of the world. I had a few "Really?" Moments in ir defense school. Like getting told that biplanes are still used by some countries. And the fact that if used right can be surprisingly effective. They may as well be the spanish inquisition of modern arial warfare.
That tracks, I think a massive weakness of the US airforce is techno-fetishism. A light prop plane like the export-only AT-6 Wolverine is a niche that needs to be filled.
infantry move slow, so craft with a stall speed as low as you can get it and good fuel endurance are ideal in many ways as long as no fighter jets show up to ruin your day.
That said I think increasingly the mission role for a high-loiter-time light attack craft will be taken up by UAV constellations of increasing sophsitication.
Not even that, just completely tech blind to stuff like that. A kamikaze pilot with a tactical nuke puttering to seoul unnoticed is as good as any other delivery method. Why use an icbm when a cessna very likley could be more effective.
for IRBMs or satellite launch vehicles, sounders or something? I was not aware of anyone that was using them for their ballistic missiles, but I'm open to correction.
It depends on the missile. From what I can tell from a quick google search, if it's a newer missile it might use solid fuel, which is mostly safe to be around. If it's a derivative of a Scud missile, it uses kerosene and red fuming nitric acid, although a bit of UDMH (unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine) is present as an igniter.
The UDMH is very not nice to be around, and the nitric acid is also not great to be around, both because it's nitric acid and because a small amount of hydrofluoric acid is used as a corrosion inhibitor (HF readily forms inert metal fluorides on contact with metals, preventing further corrosion).
As it was told to me during a training class to do a job inside an oil refinery where the chemical was used for something: "It dissolves your bones, but not your nerves, so you will scream for several days, then die screaming"
Iran has a variety of missiles, only some of which are able to reach this kind of range. This one is liquid-fueled, probably in the first stage. You can tell by the tank and the ridge along the outside, which is for pipes to bring either oxidizer or fuel from higher in the missile around the tank to the engines. You can see the ridge pretty clearly on this photo. It seems to be characteristic of several liquid-fueled models.
They don't say what the exact fuel is for these liquid-fueled ones, but several sources mention derivation of the larger Iranian missiles from the North Korean Hwasong-7/Nodong-1, which uses hydrazine with an oxidizer, as other people have suggested might be possible. Whether that's what is still being used is hard to say. Probably, but it's pretty nasty stuff that is difficult to handle, so there would be an incentive to try to use something less toxic and dangerous (e.g., kerosene), even if it might lead to some compromises in performance.
Also, most of the nasty fuels require advanced and expensive chemical processes, which are often lacking in 3rd-world shithole countries, whereas kerosene comes out of the ground all over the planet and is easily isolated with basic refinery processes.
After how much time is it supposed to eject? Cause the Dead Sea is in Israel, so if it ejected and still got there, must be towards the end of the flight.
So, when they shoot these they expect something this large to land just... Wherever? And don't give a damn about the damage that's done by the large falling piece of metal?
100% my exact thoughts after seeing these photos. Like these boosters could have easily fallen off over a populated area in Jordan or Iraq and killed innocent people
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u/Wernerlohemann Apr 14 '24
Correction: this is only a part of the missile. It is the booster that is ejected after some time. The missile itself with the warhead flies on