Mt Whitney Zone Forums The Chat Room What In The World Happened Here?

Wish I knew what we were looking at.

By the way, I reset the subject line back to #54.

AlanK is on track. Thought you folks would never get it.

Now that we know there is a pit on a Pacific island, and another in the Californian desert, what is the connection? What events?

Again;

B## + P = B## + U = B## + X# = (BIG/P), # is 1 or 2 or 9.

We were obviously having trouble making progress on this one. The maps showing the locations obviously helped.

Enola Gay visited the first site. There had to be a pit to load the little guy. A lot of things happened in the vicinity of the second site. How about Glamorous Glennis? She needed a pit to be attached to a B-29.

the X-1 was stubby-winged, so the cross shaped pit in the Nevada desert fits.

Was the driver Slick, or Chuck?

That second picture is from Edwards Air Force Base in California.

oops, my bad. I knew that.
Hey, deserts look alike to Easterners.

X-1 loading pit

So, we have the Little Boy loading pit on Tinian and the X-1 loading pit at Edwards.

But it is not over. There is the equation:

My crack at it is: B29 + P = B29 + U = B29 + X1 = (BIG/P)

I am still in the dark about P and U. The Fat Man bomb was Pu, but Little Boy was U-235. i think that our picture is the Little Boy loading pit. Maybe I am on the wrong track about P and U.

P is the deliberate error - Pu would have been too easy.
U is Uranium, and all three events included a big overpressure.
And the jungle picture has both loading pits.

All three? Fair enough. I was tacitly assuming two events. One needs to be careful in assuming anything around you!

Anyway, Tinian, A-bobms, Edwards AFB, and the sound barrier -- the right stuff?

duh, now I get it.
The "greenhouses" are just covers over the pit
Tinian pits

and as for Glamorous Glennis
"hey Ridley, lend me a stick of Beeman's, will ya?"

This one was interesting. I quickly determined that we were probably dealing with missile silos, maybe missile silo explosions. I found an area in Arkansas where there had been an explosion in a Titan II silo. It looked reasonably similar to the Tinian picture.

Answer: What In The World Happened Here? LIV: (54)


Should we have saved that for a future WITWHH? SaraC missed a good one with Hadrian's Wall, too.

Picture found here.

Click to Load

Here is one place I found.

Yet another bomber loading pit here.

For extra credit: Why did they test the Plutonium bomb (at Trinity) but not the Uranium bomb?

didn't have enough pure plutonium for test shot and Japan, too
and
they KNEW the untested uranium gun bomb would work

The uranium bomb was a canon. Fire a U-235-righ projectile into a U-235-rich target, reach critical mass, and boom. They figured out early on that the Pu equivalent would fizzle. Fission would commence before the projectile was close enough to the target to reach critical mass. The thing would make a modest explosion and prevent the desired big boom.

Okay, I will be very non-PC with this next bit:
Some years ago, I visited the Enola Gay restoration at Garber/Smithsonian. Not in the gift shop, but under the counter, one of the guys was selling hats with this:
Made in America, tested in Japan.

What In The World Happened Here? LV (55):

let's start with the basics:
Google Mercury, Google Moon, or Google Earth?

It looks more like Google Mars. Could those lines be canals?