“Well, you see you design your widget up in this special CAD software. I use SolidWorks. Then you upload the file into this machine. The machine sprays a layer of this ceramic dust onto a hard steel surface and a laser beam is focused onto the powder. Wherever the part is supposed to be solid, the powder is solidified. The first solid layer is about ten microns thick. Then another layer of dust is sprayed on and the laser solidifies the next layer to the already solid layer. This is done until the complete part is finished. It takes about ten seconds per round.”
“I’ve never heard of anything like that,” Gries said.
“Actually, sir, I have,” Cady interrupted.
“Yeah?”
“Back about ten years ago I saw this thing on the Speed channel where these fellows were building a race-car engine the exact same way. They started out with a blueprint in a computer and some ceramic dust and ended up with an engine block a few minutes later. They put in pistons and hooked up a distributor and all to it and cranked the thing right up. I remember thinking then that if this technology ever got big it would put a lot of folks out of jobs,” the sergeant explained.
“You got that right, Master Sergeant,” Alan said, chuckling. “The rapid prototyping technology has been around about fifteen years or so, maybe longer, but is just now getting developed to a useful level of application. I imagine that show you saw was a state-of-the-art system back then.”
“Hey y’all, let’s go inside the hangar here. I’ve got more to show you.” Alan locked up the van and led them to the hangar just down the footpath from the range.
“Now here’s one that I think might be useful during the ground occupation phase of an ET attack.” Alan Davis showed Major Gries the small missile launcher system attached to the back of a Humvee. “The system implements the miniature nuclear bomb called the W54 warhead, which was designed to fire from the Davy Crockett launcher. It was deployed by the United States during the Cold War and was to be used on advancing Soviet troops if the need were to arise. This missile isn’t actually a nuke here, but we should make as many real ones as we can, I think.”
“Nukes,” Shane said tonelessly. “Nuclear weapons.”
“Hydrogen bombs,” Cady added. “Teller tea.”
“What?” Gries and Alan both asked, confused.
“Sorry,” the master sergeant replied, grinning. “Beverly Hillbillies moment.”
“Right,” Alan said, still obviously confused. “More like hydrogen bomblets. The W-54 weighed about twenty-five kilograms, could be launched from the man-portable or jeep-portable, Davy Crockett launcher. The mini-nuke warhead would cause an explosion about two hundred times smaller than the Hiroshima bomb or about 5x1011 joules. Still, it’s a hefty bang from such a small weapon. And we think that we can update the launcher, rocket motor, and even the warhead to make it single-man portable to a total mass of about thirty-three kilograms.”
“Alan, how much is thirty-three kilograms in pounds?” Shane asked sarcastically.
“Let’s see… uh… about seventy-five pounds.”
“And, a single troop is going to carry that, his armor, comm gear, ammo, and so on?” Shane smiled. “Ground pounders are tough, but that might be asking a little much.”
“Oh, I see. Uh, perhaps there would be a dedicated person to carry it and maybe a few others to carry extra warheads?” Alan raised his eyebrows and shrugged.
“Well, the weapon looks good. Your CONOPS needs work. I’ll get Top to brief you better on what all the troops have to carry and how they do it.”
“Uh, yeah, that would be good,” Alan said. “Now, I have some more ideas about this. And, actually Alice’s comment about the redneck demonstration of, hey y’all watch this, is what gave me the idea.”
Shane laughed.
“All right, now this sounds promising.”
“Well, you see, I really think that these smaller nuclear bombs might prove useful as the active warhead on the antistarfighter, antihovertank, and antibattleoid, anti-alien-whatever missiles that we should equip our fighter aircraft and ground vehicles with. It’s possible that such compact but high yield explosives may affect the smaller ET crafts’ armor. These antistarfighter missiles most closely resemble the AIM-26A Falcon class of air-to-air missiles, some of which were tipped with the W-54 warhead. Now we’ll update and modernize the sensor and missile designs so that they will be more effective.”
“Are we going somewhere with this?” Shane asked. “Last I heard, we didn’t have starfighters.”
“Well, here is the fun part. I was thinking about those Saturn missile batteries that I get at the fireworks stands every Independence Day. You know, the little yellow boxes that have ten, twenty-five, fifty, or a hundred little screaming missiles in them?” Alan explained.
“Not sure, but keep going.” The major was beginning to see the redneck smile shine through on Alan’s professional face.
“Oh, well I’m sure you’ve seen them. They come screaming out of the little box one right after the other, yeeeeeaaaak, yeeeeeeaaak, yeeeaaaak,” Alan made screeching sounds as he moved his hands up and down demonstrating how the missiles launch out of the firework.
“You mean sort of like Katyushas?” Cady asked, smiling.
Alan frowned.
“What are those?”
“Lord he’p me,” the master sergeant replied in his thickest accent. “Ah’s surrounded by ivory tahr intellectuals!”
“Katyushas are a type of box missile launchers,” Shane said.
“Oh, you mean like the Multiple Launch Rocket System?”
“Yeah, MLRS is another example,” Shane agreed.
“Got that then. We designed most of that system right here in Huntsville at the Missile Command. And the ATACMS before that. In fact, if you go down the road you came in on and turn back north for a few miles you cross ATACMS Road. But, Katyushas? Why does that ring a bell?”
“They’re the Russian equivalent, sort of.” Shane was thinking he needed to steer Alan back on topic.
“Oh yeah! Katyushas! Those are the little rockets we shot down with the Tactical High Energy Laser back in the 1990s. I remember seeing the videos.”
“Uh, Alan, back to the fireworks and the little nuke, how’s that help us?” Shane shook his head, trying not to grin. He thought of Katyushas as “those damned missiles the insurgents keep firing at us.” But Alan’s referent was “those missiles we’re figuring out how to shoot down.” It was times like this that he realized just how sheltered Alan and the rest were.
“Oh, sure, sorry. I think we could take something like a Bradley and put a battery of a hundred of these modernized W-54 warheads in the back of it. If you set this thing off all at once, you have a distributed discrete explosion the order of the Hiroshima blast. Hoo-weee! Helluva firework!”
“Uh, yeah,” Shane said, sighing. “First of all, the range of the Davy Crockett was within the blast radius—”
“That’s an urban legend, sir,” Cady interrupted. “I had a sergeant major when I was a wee lad who’d actually dealt with the system. It wasn’t that bad. But it was pretty damned close. You wanted to duck and cover after you fired.”
“And the Davy Crockett launcher was pretty big,” Shane pointed out. “I couldn’t see putting more than one or two—”
“Not the actual missile,” Alan said, sighing in turn. “Smaller missiles, maybe based on Stingers. And the W-54 is old tech; there are much smaller and more powerful warheads now. I was thinking a pack about a meter or two on a side and maybe two meters long.”