[time-nuts] He is a Time-Nut Troublemaker....

[Mark Sims]

Nope, definietly not a legend...  TDR/coax based systems are rather common for measuring blasts (nuke and otherwise,  but not using Ethernet cards).  Basically the shock wave crushes the coax and messes up the impedance as it propogates.  Results are monitored by TDRs.  And a fun time is had by all...Another system uses high speed photography to record the mayhem and work out the blast effects.  Million+ frames per second can be achieved. I saw some great video of a very large boulder being obliterated.  Cracks that formed in well under a millisecond took ages to appear and spread.  The full recording took about 15 minutes to play back.  They also had a video of a pipe bomb in action.  Such things are like Medusa...  best to watch them a mirror.-------------I've heard stories that the TDR feature was used to collect timing data on 
some A-bomb tests.  The bomb was at the bottom of a hole.  An ethernet cable 
went down the hole.  I can't remember or reconstruct the details.  I assume 
there was a PDP-11 at the top of the hole.  The idea is something like you 
send a packet to trigger the bomb, and when the bomb goes off, the cable 
vaporizes and is no longer terminated so packets turn into collisions and the 
TDR grabs the time.

It sounds like an urban legend, but it's a fun one.


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