Product Description
An early effort of the Manhattan Project, the massive 17 foot/5.2 meter “Thin Man” was a Plutonium-fueled “gun-type” device, thought to be a relatively certain design, and conceived before Plutonium was even successfully bred in a reactor.
However, after a troublesome technical development, including extensive aerodynamic tests and redesign of Thin Man test shapes, modifications of carrier aircraft, and internal ballistics engineering to ensure the Plutonium “bullet” could be accelerated to at least 910 m/s within the weapon, the death knell to the Thin Man would come in 1944, when experimentation showed that isotope impurities in the available Plutonium resulted in a much higher spontaneous fission rate, which would have very likely resulted in a pre-detonation “fizzle” of the Thin Man weapon.
Further enlarging the weapon to eliminate this problem would have resulted in an infeasibly long device, unable to be carried by any current or planned aircraft.
Thus, design efforts for a Plutonium weapon were re-oriented to the implosion-type “Fat Man” design, and all remaining gun-type work would be redirected to the new, Uranium-gun bomb, “Little Boy.”
But now, available for the first time, this historical curiosity is available for your scale model projects! A unique addition for any Alternate History or “What If?” build.
Available in 1/48 and 1/72 scale.