Black moth vs Bomber dimensions?

I was having a shower when I noticed a trapped moth in the room, it was fluttering about until it settled on the white ceiling. The moth was all black and because of the shape of it I thought to myself that it looked like a Stealth Bomber, which then got me thinking that I was king Kong.

I was wondering then what its nuclear payload would look like at that size, of a 1½inch wingspan by 1inch body length (technical terms here), if a real Stealth Bomber were reduced down to that, keeping dimensions in check, then how many moths would fit into the blast radius of the nuke dropped from it and how big would that blast radius be? The size of my bathroom or house?

reply to post by Banjof


While a neat little daydream, you have to expand upon it a bit. Nukes come in all ranges these days, so you have to ask yourself, "What would a 1 Kiloton Tactical or 50 Megaton Stratigic Nuke do to me and my house?

The damage to the house?, I'm not to sure of, but either of the above would kill you. Of that I'm sure.

Thank God Moths aren't armed with Nukes, eh?

Yea, but come on, if a Stealth Bombers measurements (not sure what they are) were shrunk down to the size of a moth, then how much would a 1kt bomb explode?

The B-2 wingspan is roughly 50 meters. A good sized moth is roughly 0.05 meters. Assuming you could scale a nuclear weapon, the blast of a very small 1 kiloton weapon (ignoring the myriad of variables) at ground level is roughly 800m. The fireball much smaller. Moving the decimal gives you a rough area of 0.8 meters (over two and a half feet) of heavy blast damage.
A healthy 150 kiloton blast would feature a .fireball 1 foot in diameter, and heavy blast radius of over 4 (13 feet) meters.
The max known yield for a weapon carried by the B-2 is 1.2 Megatons would give 7.6 meters (25+ feet) of heavy damage.
An air blast would magnify this somewhat.

All this is very rough math. Anyone with more time on their hands is welcome to give better math (or point out errors in my own.

This thread amused me, thanks for making me smile.

To break DEL's calculations down in layman terms :-

With the 1.2 MT micro nuke dropped from a Black moth, would obliterate your house and severely damage all your neighbours, setting fire to all of them. At about 200 yards any combustable material would ignite and buildings would suffer moderate damage. At 300 yards buildings would suffer minor damage to roofs and windows and anyone looking at the blast would be blinded upto 500 yards away.

in real world terms its the equivalent of one of the Talibans big truck bombs they sometimes use in Afganistan.


hope that helps

Peace

The problem is, nuclear physics packages do not scale very well - up or down.

Basically, a scaled nuclear weapon of the type you are asking about would fizzle rather than explode - you would get a bunch of radiation, a bunch of heat, but thats it - no crater, no big boom, maybe a small fire.

Sorry if that dispels your musings

reply to post by Banjof


You couldn't construct one so small and light to work. They need an outside explosion to start the chain reaction. The weight of those charges would be way too much. Plus you would need enough nuclear material to actually work like a previous poster mentions.

reply to post by pavil


Well that's comforting because I read al the time how the military are making robots like birds and moths for surveillance, which could have a dual use.

But, really, it was just for curiosity. I brings it home to me more - the destructive force of a bomb - when that size. I mean a moth sized plane could blow up you entire house, it's tidily!

reply to post by Banjof
The better way to utilize that sized drone would be to get it into the house and act as a homing beacon for a few hellfire missiles. I'm sure the military is already working on that one.