relays

No. It doesn't obey a proportional-control law. It's strictly a bang-bang control.

Most, maybe all, nukes have a finite probability of a fizzle of various partial yields. It has to do with nanosecond timing, initiator performance, and stray neutron density. North Korea's 2006 test may have been a fizzle.

The initiator seeds the fission reaction with a very few neutrons, as few as 10 by some references. That makes the chain reaction statistically dicey.

John

Countercase: denominator = 0.1

Besides, infinity * K = infinity, for any K > 0.

John

The denominator is the one on the bottom. The numerator is the gadget on top. We's better agree on that before trying any hard stuff.

And we were discussion power gain, and power isn't measured in colombs.

John

Sure--limiting I.F. amplifiers have gain.

Cheers, James Arthur

But it does sort of conflict with the paragraph above. Division can make things bigger, not just smaller. 250 microjoules is a nice small number.

By waiting a long time.

I don't want to argue about the meaning of "infinity", given that mathematicians and philosophers have been haggling over it for centuries. You aren't a mathematician or a philosopher, so you might not expect to add much to the discourse.

The average power gain of a latching relay is arbitrarily large, unbounded, "infinite" to this working engineer, and that fact can be very useful in actual designs. And very nice, surface-mount, fast, reliable latching relays are affordable nowadays and are worth considering.

John

Sorry, I'm an engineer, and engineering units are important to me. I can't discuss power gain when the equation is in units of charge.

Loser? Business is holding up pretty nicely, so far.

John

Most people work with amp-hours in battery design.

But he would not have considered you to be a smart-ass if you's used that line. Something else entirely.

Do you ever drive latching relays?

John

Yes. I've even used "delay" relays ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Some have volume (a.k.a. yield knobs. Is that "gain"?

Wasn't NK's a U bomb? There are no tricky timings with them.

Modern weapons, but fancy isn't necessary to make a bang.

This advice comes from a guy who doesn't know a numerator from a denominator, thinks a coulomb is a unit of power, declared that division can only make things smaller, and missed the fact that K*1 = K.

John

No, everything's fine, except for the nose surgery maybe. Or maybe I've been writing too much code; programming does make me a little testy.

What's interesting about such threads is how many presumed electronic designers really have a terrible grasp on fundamentals. And worse, they are willing to take preposterous positions just to oppose someone that they don't like, which is letting their emotions dominate their reason. It's too temping to lead them on, into flat absurdity.

I suppose I should get back to hardware design. We're playing with the idea of a credit-card-sized digital delay generator, which ought to be fun.

John