CollectionDX Network
CollectionDX - Toy Reviews, Toy News, Japanese Toys and Action Figures

Destroy All Podcasts DX Episode 226 - Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Comments

2 comments posted
yeeesh

Good episode, I wouldn't watch this movie normally, but I might skip through it to see the sky on fire.

maddmaxx's picture
Posted by maddmaxx on 6 March, 2012 - 11:02
Oh MAN I should have been there for this one

I haven't got to the end yet, but the Seaview submarine is a popular subject for sci-fi modelers. (Irwin Allen in general, along with Gerry Anderson, are a fertile ground.)

BOMBS: It's actually possible for a ballistic-missile submarine to have "more explosive power than was used in all of World War II". Those MIRVs you were talking about could have up to five RV's (Reentry Vehicles, the "warheads") and each RV could have up to a nine-megaton nuclear warhead. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that a single ballistic-missile submarine could destroy all of the populated land in Russia (although the plan was to fire them all at the command centers in the Ural mountains and hope that nuclear weapons delivered from space could excavate granite)

They actually did do experiments where they exploded nuclear bombs in space to see what would happen; one of these experiments was called "STARFISH PRIME". What it does is make a cloud of charged particles in the upper atmosphere; sort of a miniature, temporary Van Allen Belt. This messes with radio communications, and also satellites that fly through the cloud get messed up. Some people talk about an "EMP attack", where you detonate a nuclear weapon outside the atmosphere and the pulse of electromagnetic energy wrecks all the electronic devices on the ground underneath it (this is what they were doing in Goldeneye.)

VAN ALLEN BELT: No, there's no way for it to "catch on fire". It is possible, though, that a massive solar flare or coronal mass ejection (CME, aka "the sun freaking exploded and some of it hit the Earth") could significantly increase the number of charged particles flying around in the belt, and that would be a problem for satellites moving through the belt. However, if one of these events put out enough particles that the Van Allen belts were visible from the ground, we'd have bigger problems than the particles because all our atmosphere would have been exploded off the planet.

MARIANAS TRENCH: Do they ever explain why they have to go hang out with Cthulu in order to launch a rocket into space? Usually they go up near the surface to launch the rockets. (Apparently there used to be a gigantic pool where I work where they'd test-launch these missiles; the pool was fifty feet deep and the room went up another hundred feet or so, and they'd shoot the missile out of the tube and catch it in a net. The idea being that they wanted to test how well the launch system worked.)

RobotBastard's picture
Posted by RobotBastard on 7 March, 2012 - 14:22