Well, it's a little more complex than that. They had tested bits to ensure they didn't have a complete cock up. Shaping the explosives was harder then and they needed to make sure that they'd slam them together in the right way to get a critical reaction rather than a hot mess.
Plus the bit that is, as I understand it, an utter pig, is the properties of Uranium as a metal when you're forming it are just nasty, so you need to have continuously variable speeds and cooling rates on the shaping machine you're using, unlike, say, steel where you can pretty much make a single assumption.
The design isn't a problem, but building one is still less than straight forward.
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Date: 2013-06-04 04:22 pm (UTC)Plus the bit that is, as I understand it, an utter pig, is the properties of Uranium as a metal when you're forming it are just nasty, so you need to have continuously variable speeds and cooling rates on the shaping machine you're using, unlike, say, steel where you can pretty much make a single assumption.
The design isn't a problem, but building one is still less than straight forward.