Tactical nuclear slide rule – Google Patents

I was mucking around doing patent searches on Google, and came up with the following interestingly titled patent: Tactical nuclear slide rule.

A calculational aid is provided, in the form of a slide rule, to facilitate calculation of damages inflicted by a nuclear detonation. The particular apparatus permits calculation of the effects of an air blast, due to static overpressure, resulting from such a detonation. Appropriate scales, properly spaced in particular relationships, are provided on a slide rule, thus providing a means for performing the calculational functions described above. The calculations utilize five parameters, and the present invention provides an apparatus for determining any one of the five parameters once the other four are known.

I was interested in finding examples of patented nomographs. More on this later.

2 thoughts on “Tactical nuclear slide rule – Google Patents”

  1. Theo

    I wonder if the five parameters are the same as those in Taylor’s formula for calculating yield using dimensional analysis: there’s a nice account on the Wikipedia page for “Buckingham Ï€ theorem”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckingham_%CF%80_theorem

    Generally I guess there’s some kind of relation between dimensional analysis and nomographs.

  2. Mark Post author

    Thanks Theo! You pointed me at a chunk of mathematics that falls in the many gaps of my knowledge. I’ll have to ponder this some more.

Comments are closed.