Added 1 new A* page:This is probably the farthest-out stuff I'm going to throw at you in this episode--or even for a while after that--as far as names and things you haven't heard of yet go, so don't-- Hrm well I was going to say "don't worry," but nah, you should be worried. VERRRRRRY worried! :D
Following up on the humiliation of producing just a single page today, it's looking like my crazy Monday party group is getting up to steam again, so Monday might be a very late one-page affair as well. Yes what a wild lifestyle I have, phew.
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I could have sworn I posted this before but I can't find it in searching my own forum or news, so I guess I just *thought* about posting it before, but then got too busy with just the strip itself to post it. Hopefully? Anyway
photo by Minatom (source)
^ Nearly fifty years ago, the northern part of our planet had a day with a second sunrise: the Tsar Bomba, detonating four kilometers over a Russian island in the Arctic Ocean in a fireball some estimates place at nearly eight kilometers in diameter. With a yield of 50 megatons, this October 30th, 1961 test by the USSR was over three times as powerful as the next most powerful detonation in human history--the US's Castle Bravo test, which I've talked about before--and for its brief flare matched 1.4% of the power output of the Sun.
Bombs that powerful proved too dangerous and impractical for actual war use--the plane that dropped it could barely get out of the way of the blast, for instance, and anyway most of the energy would deflect out into space--so, probably fortunately, they aren't around anymore. The Tsar Bomba was actually reduced in power from its original design, which might have yielded 100 Mt, but was considered too likely to produce fallout that would have drifted over populated areas of the USSR. So it was toned down, and--unusually for a nuclear test--most of the blast power came from nuclear fusion, rather than fission, making it a remarkably "clean" nuclear bomb, meaning it produced relatively little radioactive fallout.
So uh yeah really I just find this idea of a man-made star within our own atmosphere fascinating. Bombs and war bad.
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