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When it comes to Weird War 2 stuff, you always hear Nazi this or Hitler that. And with good reason. They were into some weird shit, and they had dozens of high-tech projects in various stages of development. Hell, their rocket designs took us into space and the Moon. They’re still in use today with little more modification than better materials engineering, more redundancy/safety, and computers.

You almost never hear about Japanese super weapon projects from World War 2. I suspect because it’s easier to hate Nazis. With the Japanese there’s always that moment of, “Wait, is this racist?”

Meanwhile, with Nazis it’s more like, “Occultism + Super Science + Army of Evil = Great sci-fi villain!”

Interestingly they had at least as many Crazy Sci-Fi War Projects as the Nazis. Maybe more. The key difference, and this is another feather in the Nazis-as-villains cap, is that the Nazis got more of theirs done. Or at least to the prototype stage. Japanese efforts run the gamut from plausible to straight up sci-fi, but as soon as something appeared to be too impractical they’d dump it and move on.
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My favorite thing about Project Orion is how close we came to making it. The only thing that stopped it was a bit of bureaucracy and then JFK.

See, it began in the late ’50s. More as a scientific lark. The thinking was, “Hey, nuclear reactions have a lot more energy than these pesky chemical reactions we’re using for rocket propellant. Could we maybe start using nukes as fuel instead?”
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Project Orion might be my favorite thing ever. It’s the kind of big crazy science you can never quite believe happened. One of those moments in history that would’ve changed everything.

And I mean everything. Imagine it is fact that there’s a fleet of starships ranging in size from the Empire State Building to Chicago (like, the city), and they’re capable of 10% light speed, and these things have been around since the 1960s. Also, owing to their Cold War roots, they’d have huge arrays of atomic artillery cannons to make sure 1) the Ruskies were annihilated and 2) any Space Ruskies out there would be annihilated one day.

So, y’know, something like this.

Come to think of it, maybe we’re better off.

Then again, if we’d pursued Orion and somehow managed to avoid weaponizing it, we’d no doubt be well on our way to the first Project Daedalus ships.

Log a couple generations of successful unmanned missions and then, blammo, move on to extra-Solar colonization. I mean, by then it’ll be downright crowded around here with Earth, the Lunar, Martian, Venusian, Jovian and Saturnian colonies (all made possible and very comfortable thanks to the interplanetary superhighway and regular visits from Orion craft). All aboard the fusion pulse train, next stop Sirius B!

Speaking of which! Let’s get hopping with those off world colonies, hmmm? Lord knows we’ve got to do something with all these people. I mean, if you think about it for a few minutes it becomes pretty clear that about half the jobs out there consist of nothing but busy work just to keep us from setting fire to public buildings. We are explorers. We’re a product of thirteen billion years of stellar evolution and while I don’t claim there’s a specific end game at work, I find it hard to believe that sitting around an office moving numbers around an Excel sheet does any kind of justice to that process.

Now, writing silly robot stories, that’s something to be proud of!

Project Icarus picks up where Daedalus left off. I’m a little worried about that name though. I mean, okay, we’re paying homage to the groundwork put down by Daedalus, but naming what would be humanity’s greatest technological achievement after the embodiment of the disastrous consequences that can befall mankind for reaching too far technologically, well, no one else is calling their cruise ship Titanic is what I’m saying.