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From what I remember reading, the directed nuclear energy weapon (whatever you want to call it) was an offshoot of Project Orion and originally was much less tightly directed. The idea being instead of a spherical detonation, the device would produce a cone-shaped burst directed at the pusher plate of an Orion ship to achieve better efficiency per blast pulse.Okay, that's...I think there's a few layers of confusion there. The concept for the Orion propulsion device generated a cone of approximately 22.5°. CASABA-HOWITZER is the hypervelocity gas/plasma design (I'm seeing references to a dispersion angle of 0.057°). Now here's where it gets headache-inducing, per that link. You're right that Casaba and Howitzer may have been separate programs. But what's being described with the solid projectile kinetic design sounds a lot more like something SDI cooked up called PROMETHEUS. There's very little known about that and going off that link, it sounds fairly different from the plasma lance idea.
From what I remember reading, the directed nuclear energy weapon (whatever you want to call it) was an offshoot of Project Orion and originally was much less tightly directed. The idea being instead of a spherical detonation, the device would produce a cone-shaped burst directed at the pusher plate of an Orion ship to achieve better efficiency per blast pulse.
Okay, that's...I think there's a few layers of confusion there. The concept for the Orion propulsion device generated a cone of approximately 22.5°. CASABA-HOWITZER is the hypervelocity gas/plasma design (I'm seeing references to a dispersion angle of 0.057°). Now here's where it gets headache-inducing, per that link. You're right that Casaba and Howitzer may have been separate programs. But what's being described with the solid projectile kinetic design sounds a lot more like something SDI cooked up called PROMETHEUS. There's very little known about that and going off that link, it sounds fairly different from the plasma lance idea.
