Of course he did not tell me how in that post, that is ridiculous Loss Leader...
Patrick, don't tell people what I said or did not say. This is your final warning about putting words in my mouth. Stop it!
Back when you first raised this issue I described our test process briefly and the means for validating it. I described how the hypersonic wind tunnels we built for testing re-entry vehicles was used also to test TPS material for Apollo. I described how we validate thermal designs in vacuum chambers. I referred to that several times subsequently.
Go find it. I will not repeat myself. You don't get to ignore my posts and then arrogantly boast that I haven't addressed your claims, or that the people who
were paying attention are lying. You really need to get over yourself.
WHAT, Did they, in Jay's terrestrial lab, subject to near absolute zero and then heat up...
Asked and answered. I described the process and apparatus for testing thermal profiles in a vacuum. It's your fault you missed it. And ballistic projectiles never get down to near absolute zero.
The thermal profile is derived from theoretical models, validated by the singular test flight of the instrument package. Once that profile is derived and validated, it can be applied in any number of straightforward ways. I described the most common apparatus, which we have used since the mid-1950s. It isn't hard to build. Heat is heat, regardless of its source.
However, because ablative heat shield designs involve a fluid dynamics component, we use hypersonic wind tunnels to validate the outer shell. Unlike in an atmospheric test, we can train cameras on the test article and see exactly how it behaves. Density and velocity profiles are very straightforward; we've had accurate, precise, and detailed atmospheric models since the 1930s. But we don't need the rest of the warhead behind the heat shield in order to see whether the heat shield works. The heat-shield behavior that interest us in the wind tunnel is whether the boundary layer forms properly. If so, the temperature on the inside of the heat shield will stay within spec. We instrument the rear of the heat shield, instead of putting a warhead there. Why? Because the warhead doesn't tell us whether the heat shield is working. The instruments do.
The wind-tunnel tests validate the outer shell's mechanical and thermal designs. We program the wind tunnels to duplicate the loading we measure with our flown instrument packages. We now know what the mechanical and thermal loads look like from the warhead chassis' perspective. Since the chassis doesn't itself have any aerodynamic loading, we leave the wind tunnel behind and use other methods to apply the appropriate heat loads. And what we're really looking for is a validation of the heat conduction and radiation paths that were determined at the geometrical design phase. You see, engineers don't just build stuff blindly and then test it to see whether it meets the criteria. We compute the heat transfer paths as part of the design. At every point in the warhead chassis structure, the temperature can be determined using straightforward thermodynamics equations. Nevertheless we can apply the right amount of heat to the chassis-shield interfaces and instrument the chassis to make sure we got it right. We can't do that in a flight test, and we can't determine afterward what the thermal profile was.
In terms of thermal design, tritium isn't the critical item. To assume that the "magical" fusion reagent is also necessarily the critical design element across the board is a very layman thing to do. Tritium's fusion properties don't change until you get up to temperatures that would melt the chassis itself. Ditto the fissible material in the trigger. It is a very naive thing to suppose that these rare, important elements are thermally fragile. The implosion charges are thermally sensitive above a certain temperature -- easily tested in the lab. The mechanical arming mechanism has thermal tolerances as well -- again, easily bench-tested. There is simply no way to validate these components in a flight test.
So that's a summary of the thermal validation regimen. I also covered acoustic loading, but I'm not going to go over that again. You'll just have to pay attention.
The inability to imagine how experts in a field solve a problem is a consequence of ignorance of the field -- period. Just because you, Layman Patrick, can't imagine how an aerospace test regime is assembled and validated doesn't mean the rest of the world is similarly uninformed. As a non-expert, you don't get to say, "There's no way they could do this," and have anyone turn his head to listen to you.
Instruments are not the same thing as tritium, nor the same thing as plutonium nor uranium.
Correct; instruments are much, much better for engineering test purposes. They tell us so much more of what we want to know.
And you conceded this when you refined your claim to say that they used
instrumented live warheads, not just live warheads themselves. The fact that you had to move those goalposts proves that you recognize that the instruments are the
sine qua non. So please stop waffling back and forth; your equivocation grows tedious.
No instrument weapon material can substitute for the weapon material instruments.
FTFY.
Patrick, please try to understand something.
You are not an engineer.
No one believes that you are an engineer. You don't know what you're talking about, and this is apparent to everyone who has commented here.
Consequently the "requirements" you conjure up out of your layman's simplification of how aerospace test must work, simply do not apply in the real world. Your arguments all boil down to your repeated statement of belief that anything less than all-up testing is insufficiently faithful. Repeating your belief, no matter how elaborately worded, doesn't make it true. You can't tell me
what is unfaithful about it, you simply assert the infidelity.
What part of "I did this for a living" is unclear to you? Why do you think blatant arrogance constitutes any valid attempt to make a point? Why, after all these months, have you failed to research what "begging the question" is, why it's a failure in reasoning, and why you should remove it from your theory?
