I might agree with you if the shorts player wasn’t ass. Everything about it works differently to the video player, and everything about it pushes you to more shorts. Even on the video player I disable autoplay and the prev/next buttons, having a player built around those was DOA for me.
Oddly enough, there’s specific content only available through shorts that I would love to see (Scott Manley in particular does fantastic shorts), however I never see them because the shorts player invariably kills any enjoyment I may have be having at the time.
No matter what content exists on shorts, I will go out of my way to disable shorts altogether. If I could block the URL I would.
On one hand, the archlinux bbs had the only exact reference to the issue I was having. On the other hand, no one could replicate it enough to figure anything out. :/
The limits of “hot” and “cold” change with location and personal experience. 0°F is shorts weather for some, while 70°F is jacket time for others. Both live in my neighborhood.
There are hundreds of millions of people who see negative double digits every year, and billions of people who have never seen snow (Mumbai has never seen below 50°F!). There is no scale that can claim to cover human’s experience of temperature in general, but some scales can be useful.
The exact numbers don’t matter to people anyway, no one sees 70°F and estimates 70% hot, just like most of the world knows what 22°C means, even if it never freezes there. We could measure in yoctojoules (40.7) or simply relative to what the pope feels is hot and cold (85?). For daily use all temperature scales are arbitrary. Why not use one that’s useful?
Hard disagree. 0°F is colder than the pont it stopped being cool, but not yet really cold. 100°F is many degrees into dying of melting, but also a few degrees short of a fever worth noting.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen either 0°F or 100°F used in any way to refer to actually temperature. It’s always defining the scale or comparing to °C. Maybe once when checking for a fever.
Nah, definition 1 right there isn’t inherently negative. It’s certainly more involved than otherwise necessary and seems somewhat driven by emotion, so while it skips the negative connotation I think this counts plenty well.
Deorbit hardware isn’t big, just a small solid rocket motor would supply most of the thrust, say 100kg thruster for a 5 ton projectile. The deorbit burn is only 100m/s or so. That’s some very sensitive monitoring for what amounts to ISS station keeping burns. Monitoring effectiveness could be increased by only tracking oblong objects, but such a burn on the day side might be near impossible to see anyway. This is for the LEO type the US air force is interested in.
A higher orbit projectile system would be slower but more powerful, and wouldn’t need more than 3km/s to deorbit, so 4 ton-ish propulsion section (an eccentric orbit could reduce this significantly, but would narrow possible targets. The long period could allow ion engines, but the downside is big solar panels). At 30,000 km high anywhere in the sky, that’s a lot of high-power telescopes tracking a lot of sky for just an exhaust plume.
Decoys would only be useful for the burns, and possibly only for false alarms. If you know a projectile is coming, you probably have a good idea about it’s target, so moving to a different bunker could be good enough. In the same way, if an actual threat exists out there, a decoy burn could spur movement.
I don’t think decoy satellites are useful here. If you can track these projectiles closely enough to detect plumes or small velocity changes, no amount of decoys will be enough, and orbital warfare is an entirely different ballpark.
About countermeasures, trying to intercept outside of the atmosphere requires a suborbital capable missile (probably fully orbit capable for an intercept from MEO), which will be huge and would require an incredibly precise final stage and a convenient launch location to have any chance of hitting. If you have that capability, you could just hit the projectile before it’s used at all, but again, that’s orbital warfare.
As for atmospheric countermeasures, a LEO type will spend maybe 20 seconds in atmosphere, mostly covered with a ball of plasma, so tracking could be a non-issue, depending on method. The issue is hitting with enough force to do anything about it. Most interceptor weapons are designed for much weaker, much much slower targets, and anything short of a direct hit will do nothing. A MEO type will be even faster, with less than 10 seconds of plasma and moving over 8 km every second. Good luck hitting that.
Nah, this is 200 times escape velocity, there is no possible orbit at that speed, just careening out to another galaxy, floating endless in the galactic cluster, or leaving the cluster altogether.
Any orbit would take millions of years anyway, so they can just cruse around, ingoring orbit altogether.
And I will continue to assail your hill with; wet is a property that water has.
Wet is simply the surface tension balance of a substance. If a fluid sticks to somthing, it is wet. You can wet your brush, yes, but also wet a soldering iron, or wet every surface with superfluid. Wet refers to the conducting of fluid, capillary action, all the effects of surface tension adhering to something.
How wetting a substance is of another substance is usually measured by the angle a droplet makes upon contact. More sticky (adhesive) and less blobby (cohesive) means more wetting. Cohesion being simply self-adhesion means any fluid with surface tension necessarily totally wets itself, otherwise it’s a gas. And since water is a cohesive liquid (with a rather strong surface tension), it is by definition wet.
High orbits are probably the way to go anyway. Not only will the payload be decently higher, the entry angle will be much steeper and more accurate, much easier hide, and much more capable of hitting anywhere in the world. This trades an hour’s delay for a day’s delay, but this size of weapon is a strategic weapon anyway.
Why would you need to blow up a city in an hour’s notice, but not as soon as possible? If WDMs can be used in this situation (MAD doesn’t apply), just use a normal ICBM. 15-30 minutes, possibly much larger booms. The advantage of orbital kinetics is stealth and immunity to countermeasures. A country-wide strike could be arranged with only seconds of warning for the targets, possibly getting ahead of most launch sites, leaving only mobile launchers to deal with.
That of course means a new intelligence war, but whoever gets there first has an unstoppable weapon, which might be important depending on how good interceptor weapons get. Even the idea of feasible hypersonic ICBMs is twisting knickers for a reason.
There are very few situations where that amount of lifting capacity is available for such a niche use. But more has been done for stupider, so something dumb very well could end up flying dangerously.
We’ve seen this already. Starship should be capable of at least 100t to orbit, which is about 40TJ of energy on orbit. The Little Boy was 63TJ, so accounting for losses, Starship flight test 1 was exactly what that would look like.
Do note that much of the energy was lost because most of the fuel didn’t burn, it just evaporated. The Beirut fertilizer explosion was 1/30th the energy, but all released at once.
I’m not sure countermeasures would even work. Even if you could blast it with a half dozen CWIS for the entire duration it’s in the atmosphere, hitting every shot, you might change the impact zone by a few hundred meters. A high-angle trajectory would be completely unaffected.
Kinetic drives are mass drivers. Unless you use some kind of teleportation or space warping for travel, every ship is a weapon of mass destruction. Every old boat is a surprise WMD, every craft a viable nuke with zero preparation.