That all sounds entirely too plausible, yes! And at least the storables will deflagrate rather than detonate, giving most of
Gar's crew time to escape, albeit with elevated cancer risk. Plus, please don't take my nitpicking as implying I am anything but loving this yarn, and feel free to tell me to stuff it as appropriate.
Oh, I appreciate the feedback, because on the technical stuff and technical history I am an enthusiastic amateur at best. I am a lawyer by training and that shouldn't be a surprise given that my comfort zone thus far has very much been in the political wranglings of the services.
I mean, the economics of basically any LV come down to flight rate, no? Because the RnD needs to be amortized and the launch infrastructure is (broadly) a fixed cost, with a low marginal cost for extra flights. That's not going to be any different for Sea Dragon, and going from a STS-as-planned flight rate to a worse-than-STS flight rate is going to do about what you'd think it would to the cost-per-ton. Now, as for how to justify 3-500t in LEO per year...while you might well have that aggregate requirement (550t over 2 years is only about 2 Apollo lunar landings a year after all), those payloads are almost certainly not going to the same orbit at the same time. A propellant depot can go some distance to solving this problem--using Sea Dragon as a tanker to send up LH2 (or LCH4 if they realize that's better for NTRs, due to cooling and tank mass ratios) and using nuclear tugs to change plane and altitude of various other payloads lofted by the Big Dumb Booster--but it's still not going to make too much sense. A good OTL example is Ariane V, where SYLDA was used far less than hoped. AFAIK most actual ridesharing has been with tiny satellites that just need to be in orbit and aren't particular about their parameters.
What might be a stepping stone here is Tethys to something like Saturn C-3 (40t to LEO) but done Sea Dragon style as a big dumb booster--probably all-kerolox, too, so something like 2000-2500t all-up for that payload on pressure-fed kerolox. And then with that proved out (and launching the first set of real orbital infrastructure) scaling it up. But that's going to require either orbital forts, or a huge lunar complex, or manufacturing and colonization in the high frontier as justification for monthly-ish (and therefore affordable) Dragon launches. (Which you want, of course, but it's the selling that's the problem.)
Re: launchers and flight rates, absolutely. What I was really meaning to get at was: Might there be a curve to heavy/super-heavy launcher utility, where beyond a certain payload capacity even their low flight volumes and unamortizable expenses are outweighed by the gains in supportable missions via that enhanced throw-weight? I think it's an interesting debate for a space agency to have on the merits of such and that there really isn't a right answer, at least not within a more defined context. (Or, for a less extreme allohistorical example, what are the merits of a Saturn V-lofted moon base versus Project Horizon's stupid number of Saturn I launches.)
And I would love to find a use for either the 120- or 240-flight Sea Dragon launch schedules, but even I had to admit defeat, at least for the time being. When I got to the point where I was lobbing RP-1 and water into orbit, so they could be processed on-site into H2 via RP-1 cracking to produce methane which fueled a steam reformation cycle in positively rocketpunk orbital chemical refinery with variable spin-grav, I knew I had to give up the ghost. I still think Sea Dragon is justifiable as a commitment to lobbing remass for depoting, but because of the nature of the best, that remass needs to be storable for long periods of time and thus that precludes boosting LH2 or methane due to their active cooling needs. (And even, to a lesser degree, ammonia.) It's how I ended up at RP-1 and water, as they're not cryogenic, though water-as-remass really needs some Seventies alternative NTR proposals to gain traction
and institutional culture that's willing to trade performance for quality-of-life improvements that come with water versus LH2. As while running water through your NERVA isn't the end of the world, you might as well just use kerolox for all the utility it gives you.
Re: development of Truax's mad designs, in my mind's eye I'd envisioned it similarly, though with obviously different names. Life begins with the Li'l Kahuna, which is the inevitable sea-launched Tethys experiments that are just assumed to produce a viable launcher; this is followed by the Big Kahuna, something in the 40-50-ish tons boosting range and designed using the basic operating principles that made Sea Dragon infamous (simple pressure-fed kerolox engines; built in shipyards out of marine steels; reusable stages that are recovered via controlled sea impact with giant ballutes; and so on); and it culminates in the Titanic Kahuna, which is Sea Dragon that has a payload arbitrarily derived from its predecessors. ("The Titanic Kahuna's payload is equal to a dozen Big Kahunas!") Whether or not politics, international affairs, and the vagaries of actual engineering allow such naive dreams to take flight is another question entirely.
But I think we all want a rocket whose in-house development name is "Big Kahuna" to be a thing that works.
I'm doubtful that the memory will last in pop culture (vs fandom) almost a decade on? Since the galvanizing would be in the mid-50s unless she lies in pre-scrap, pre-museum limbo for a while? Given her OTL scrapping in '58 (and CNV-65 being laid down in 58).
If not Big E, though, Intrepid seems like the best name to go with? Although Yorktown has the better pedigree.
Intrepid is even worse, because that's the name of the ship from
Donald Duck, Atomic Midshipman. And at that point it seems like you're purposefully trying to copy it, even if
Star Trek and
Obviously Not Tom Corbett, Space Cadet are vastly different in their particulars. Which was why I just assumed it'd be
Yorktown due to that having been in the mix OTL. Not that it really matters, as there isn't much intersection between
Star Trek and the events of the TL, outside of one particular thing that can be characterized as "a bit" rather than anything of narrative substance.
No, the next cultural icon to go into a blender is probably going to be
2001: A Space Odyssey, where Stanley Kubrick's auturism is put to the ultimate test when there's (probably) actual locations to shoot at in orbit which he may or may not actually be able to get access to.
And above all, a precedent vital to the forthcoming WS-117L.
Fun conspiracy theory I've seen (IIRC there was a book on this?): Eisenhower intentionally sabotaged the US's IGY approach so the Soviets would be first, cementing the safety of WS-117L/CORONA.
That's what his clear-skies policy was. Though as conspiracy theory, that makes no sense, as from what I recall Ike was perfectly fine with the Soviets being first, as he'd previously proposed a clear-skies policy to the Soviets but they had refused. So long as it was anything but WS-117L, Ike considered it a win, because it legitimized flying WS-117L.
Hopefully at least some of the Viking engineers stay on for Vanguard, with Tethys not quite as pressing as Titan, and both being Navy. I'm sad for NRL/DoR/BuAstro/whatever without Milt Rosen, however, unless he gets poached back? Further, maybe I'm naïve, but I feel like anyone who's in the loop enough to know him for Vanguard also knows him for Delta (and his other spot-on LV choices for NASA)? Anyway I am so here for this.
You just want to bring on the Astronautical Service, which is fully self-contained Naval organization that takes its marching orders straight through the normal uniformed chain-of-command running down from the CNO, and dispense with the Department of Rocketry at the Naval Research Laboratory, right? Soon™. Oh so very Soon™.
Re: Milt Rosen, it's absolutely understood as a temporary work-sharing with NACA-Langley, because he has no real incentive leave the NRL. As while he may have lost the internal argument over Tethys vs. Viper 3, Tethys is a hell of a toy in and of itself, and he knows the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation means there'll inevitably be pressure for lower-mass payloads and a launcher to support them. What Delta looks like is a question-mark, however, due to the exact fate of Thor TTL. (Delta needs to be Differently Named, preferably a mythological titan, to fit with the theme of Atlas and Tethys. Preferably something overtones of being in the vanguard, as an homage, in its own way. Hyperion, maybe?)
The problem is like most of the 'good' concepts Orion had a shelf life that was arguably shorter than most people know. Never mind the test-ban treaty by the time it had 'matured' enough to get serious it was already past its prime unless there was an ELI headed out way.
You can tell it's still a favorite because it's still studied and referenced in current and ongoing actual work.
I'd vigorously contest that Orion had a shelf-life or that it has passed. Few rocket designs allow for "eh, our mass penalty isn't an issue, just use more steel" as a solution to engineering problems and none other than Orion was buildable using a Fifties technical base. NASA did a not-insubstantial study in 1964 on a 910-day manned mission to Callisto --
with 8 astronauts! -- using the 20m NASA Orion mark-up and thought it feasible with a launch date around 1978. (One of the great tragedies of the Internet is that, of the four volume NASA Orion study collection, one of them is missing. And it's the volume that has all of the 20m-diameter design information in it, with what we do know coming from references in other parts of study collection.) There's certainly some of that good ol' naive NASA optimism going on there, plus some Peak Apollo hubris to boot, but nothing on the drawing board's gotten close to those ambitions since then, at least nothing with any kind of institutional credibility. And while I can't be certain the 20m design was intended to be lofted due to lack of documentation, I assume it was, because that was the intention for the 10m design as well.
Which is to say I am a true believer on this subject and why I was saving up my authorium. So with that that being said, the Partial Test-Ban Treaty is, I think, a red-herring on this front. As by the time of its negotiation, Orion had no institutional home due to NASA's dedication to the Moonshot and the USAF having no use for it other than as the Mother of All Atomic Holocausts. (Props to the Air Force for having multiple flavors of that description, between the Space Battleship Orion and the Doomsday Orion.) And while the USAF certainly wanted it as the Mother of All Atomic Holocausts, Kennedy was allegedly disgusted by the Space Battleship Orion model he was shown, and so the USAF had no idea what to do with after that. My point being that, if you've got different people in different places when those decisions were made, you might have a different outcome, as it's not hard to envision small changes to the language of the PTBT to allow the use of pulse-units.
Not that there aren't oodles of practical problems -- engineering and geopolitical alike -- with flying Orion. But the PTBT is not some insurmountable issue, especially if you're lofting Orion-powered ships rather than ground-launching them, and doubly especially when you're playing with allohistorical scenarios.
Ever heard of the "GABRIELE" (yes it's in all caps in the reports for some reason never clarified) concept? No? Understandable as it only gets mentioned in places like reports on "Externally Pulsed Plasma Propulsion" (EPPP, Orion's "technical" name btw) ideas and concepts.
It's a 'we just found an ELI and we've only got months to do something.
GABRIELE uses an Orion drive as both propulsion and mitigation method. Power your way out to the object and then use pulse units to steer it or break it up.
I was aware of an alphabet soup of EPPP projects that remain below the radar, surface just long enough to publish something, and then skitter back into the shadows before the deluge descends upon them for proposing using atomic cherry bombs under a proverbial tin-cup. NASA keeps coming back to it because the numbers don't lie: The concepts and physics are well understood, the engineering is complex but does not require any breakthroughs, and its first iteration in Orion -- with Fifties-era pulse-unit technology -- yielded anticipated performance that is quasi-torchship, let alone what modern designs might yield.
@NotaHint but "hint" there Juumanistra
What's that, Little Timmy? The best revenge against the Air Force's hubris is an SLBM that's obscenely potent as a weapons delivery system?
I think I concur with that sentiment, yes.