LAYOUT_TEST

I am making this to test the layout. If you are seeing this and you are not part of the Drone Wars staff, then someone dropped the ball. Most likely me. Sincere apologies.

The idea behind weaponizing the Orion modules is credited to Morris "Moe" Scharff, who moved to General Atomics from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The name comes from the casaba melon, a variety of honeydew, because the lab was "on a melon kick that year," naming various projects after melons and having already used up all the good ones.[6] Development for weapon use is straightforward; for Casaba the tungsten was replaced with a lightweight material that would provide higher jet velocity, while at the same time thinning the plate to reduce the dispersion angle. This would produce a narrow, high-velocity jet. A wide variety of different jet types could be produced with different materials.[7]

In general terms, the Casaba-Howitzer concepts are somewhat similar to X-ray lasers studied under Project Excalibur during the 1980s. These replaced the pusher plate material with metal rods; when optically pumped by the atomic bomb's X-rays, the rods would theoretically produce collimated beams of X-ray radiation in the same fashion that a ruby laser produces red light when pumped by a flashtube. Testing in the 1980s demonstrated the efficiency was far too low to be useful and further work was dropped.

ARPA funding for Casaba-Howitzer continued for a time after the original Orion project at General Atomics ended, but when it shut down a number of the original team members left the company for other work.[8] Notable among these was Scharff, who had developed most of the ablation theory, who left to form S-Cubed.[9] The concept got a second lease on life during the Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s, but unclassified details are lacking.[10]