Re: Khrunichev's history photo archive

In article <12u2gvb1kjk783b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Pat Flannery <flanner@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The intended armament, for the first version at least, was a
big CO2 laser already built for an airborne-laser testbed, powered by a
couple of big turbogenerators.

Hydrazine powered?

The choice of fuel wasn't made clear, as I recall -- the journal isn't
handy at the moment.

overall description doesn't match what's here:
http://k26.com/buran/Info/Polyus/polyus-energia.html
Which states its aim was to develop a orbiting warhead carrier for a
attack on the U.S.

That whole web page has a distinct aura of the weird and dramatic to it,
and I wonder about its credibility -- it smells more like speculation
based on minimal information (like the tales we used to hear about how the
Blackbird could do Mach 6 at 150,000ft). The Quest article, by contrast,
tells a much more convincing and prosaic tale of ambition outrunning
resources and people patching together improvised solutions to get
something to fly.

For example, the web page says the xenon-krypton supply was somehow meant
to test a warhead launch system without radio transmissions, while the
article says that was the gas supply for testing the nonpropulsive-vent
system. (Testing it with CO2 was deemed too revealing about its intended
application; the xenon-krypton mix permitted a cover story about gas
releases for ionospheric science.)

Some of the stuff on the web page sounds like they're confusing
Polyus/Skif with a sister project -- discussed briefly in the article --
that used missiles rather than a laser, and may have been meant to have
surface-bombardment capability as well. It died early.
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