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Doc Smith Lives!
In going over the current Department of Defense SBIR solicitation, I came across the following:
"A09-027 TITLE: Nanostructured High Performance Energetic Materials "
For the uninitiated, "energetic materials" is current techspeak for "explosives".
And under this topic, the specific energetic nanostructured materials they are interested in?
"stable polymeric nitrogen".
In "Spacehounds of IPC", Doc Smith wrote about an ultimate explosive, "crystallized pentavalent nitrogen", nitrogen bound to itself in a single diamondlike form that was inherently explosive at a tremendous level; today's estimates of the power of this "stable polymeric nitrogen" is that it would be FIVE TIMES more powerful than any conventional explosive in existence today, more than half a century after Doc first wrote of it.
Once more, Doc's there first.
"A09-027 TITLE: Nanostructured High Performance Energetic Materials "
For the uninitiated, "energetic materials" is current techspeak for "explosives".
And under this topic, the specific energetic nanostructured materials they are interested in?
"stable polymeric nitrogen".
In "Spacehounds of IPC", Doc Smith wrote about an ultimate explosive, "crystallized pentavalent nitrogen", nitrogen bound to itself in a single diamondlike form that was inherently explosive at a tremendous level; today's estimates of the power of this "stable polymeric nitrogen" is that it would be FIVE TIMES more powerful than any conventional explosive in existence today, more than half a century after Doc first wrote of it.
Once more, Doc's there first.
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I now feel a strange urge to go and see if any of my Doc Smith books are currently Not In Storage.
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I acquired more books in the US. Some of them duplicates, after it became clear that I wasn't seeing the originals any time soon.
When we moved back to the UK in 2007, we moved into a nice but small flat for somewhere to live for six months while we looked for a house. A flat with half the floor area of the one in California, and no garage. A large chunk of the accumulated bookage went into storage, along with various other stuff.
20 months later, there is some hope that the hurry-up-and-wait on the house we made an offer on some weeks ago will finally draw to a close next month, and the "it's in storage" saga will enter its final stages...
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