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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.
no subject
Doc just had the vision to see that just because it wasn't possible *then* it might not always be impossible.
no subject
Doc just had the vision to see that just because it wasn't possible *then* it might not always be impossible.
As he saw many things. He was the first sf writer to grasp the magnitude of energies involved in an interstellar civilization, and some of what that would imply. He missed some others, but give him credit -- he was the first.