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DDE
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Posts posted by DDE
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51 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:
Curious... since the streak of fire seen on spacecraft during reentry is from the ablation of the craft's heat absorbent disposable surface.
It doesn't. The primary source is compressive heating of the air in front of the object.
So, to answer your question, he would.
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8 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
By almost two orders of magnitude.
Anyway, he did it four times.
He kept stepping on a rake, and it kept not hitting him SMH.
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1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:
I believe that a person who crossed the ocean, was enough experienced in star navigation and thus aware of the Earth radius to understand that no China can be 30 000 km across.
He bungled his calculations. This was a major criticism of the time, but he lucked out and found Hispaniola where he expected Nippon, instead of being eaten by his own starving crew.
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A helicopter refueling while carrying an external load...
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11 minutes ago, magnemoe said:
Yes, I know about the rise of slavery in Soviet Union and Germany. Now these regimes was not very rational. It also makes sense to use prisoners as labor if you have to imprison them anyway. US and UK also did this with POW, who is legal if working conditions is decent and work is not dangerous or making weapons. You would anyway be scared of the sabotaging stuff. But if they can do farm work or make simpler stuff you can put these people on making weapons.
As for not rational, US slave owners did not want to use their slaves for dangerous work like mining, they could easy loose the expensive investment. So they get immigrants to do these jobs,
In both Germany and Soviet prisoners dying was positive as it was people you wanted to get rid of, or they did not care at all. Germany killed millions of Soviet POW, they stopped as they needed them as slaves.I can fetch you a Trotsky quote about how slave labor is less effective under capitalism, but that is "not necessarily true" for socialism, and taking that as an axiom is backwards thinking.
The stuff millenarianism does to people's brains...
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Russia vetoes UNSC resolution against placement of nuclear weapons in space after a Russo-Chinese amendment adding a call against conventional weapons in space fails in a closely-tied vote
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3 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:
we accuse the opponent/target of being “brainwashed” or “lacking good faith.”
In my experience, that's usually the opening salvo, because...
3 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:I feel like the reason the world is so divided is because no one has the modesty or backbone to conduct extended, intense debates/arguments.
If we fail more than 2-3 times to convince someone of something, we don’t have a hard look at what we’re saying to see if it’s wrong
...because too much of Internet "debating" is a spectator sport that involves preaching to the converted and throwing out "sick burns".
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1 hour ago, tater said:
The prequels ruined everything. Making "the force" heritable means that the story is no longer good vs evil—it's evil vs evil. The non-force capable galaxian citizens—the bulk of the population—are to be ruled by their betters, whether they like it or not. "Good" branded Jedi, or "bad" branded Sith. Both are magical beings who have power over regular people. Even if the "good" are in charge right now
...which of course is undermined by the Jedi being pointedly apolitical to the point of apathy, which the old fluff explored in-depth.
Your post kind of reminds me of the in-universe early Imperial propaganda claiming the younglings were mind-controlling the local populace, and so Vader and the 501st did nothing wrong.
1 hour ago, tater said:ignoring a huge plotline about the droids, IMHO (they're clearly sentient)
While I won't entirely disagree, this is a case where a sci-fi cliche muddles our perception. Sci-fi doesn't generally know how to do non-sentient droids. Accordingly, it's not clear how sentient the droids are - and then we wonder into the real-life debate of what sentience is and how AIs can passably "fake" it by simply responding in-line with out expectations. All tha before the question whether sentience is even the primary factor to consider when asking whether droids deserve rights.
Also, when SW did finally have a crack at the droid rights problem, it produced a character so obnoxious I signed up with the Butlerian Jihad.
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24 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:
Ya know, one deleterious effect of these black and white, good vs evil sci-fi stories
Sci-fi isn't to blame, it's a reflection of the thinking applied to the real world, especially by third-party well-wishers.
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Korolev's brainstorming for the name "Vostok"
Everything up to and including Volna, Vulkan, Veter (wind), Vykhod (escape), Voskhozdeniye, Vzlyot (ascent) and Vozrozhdeniye (renaissance).
Love how Vostok was still his first idea, followed immediately by Voskhod
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The first Salyut station had a fairing stenciled "Zarya". TASS didn't care, so that's how the station is known now.
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4 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:
My question would be if this is lack of resources rather than lack of interest in space.
Part of the reasons the Soviets were underfunded is because the CPSU had economic issues and the task of building up the nuclear arsenal on their hands. There probably wasn’t money to afford fully funding everything even if they wanted to.
Is it the same in Russia? Apart from the obvious “if we spent a fraction of what we do on military on space we’d be on Mars by now” that can apply to all of the big three (US/RU/CHN).
I think the missing link is the unexpected commercial success and the Shuttle woes. Basically, at roughly the time you'd have expected a resurgence of government space spending, instead the mamy-named Russian space industry first began to scoop up commercial space launches, and then it got the biggest one of all - the Soyuz seat-sharing agreement with NASA.
I think at this point a dubious decision was made to wean it off into a commercial venture, despite little evidence that it would be sustainable, which was promptly exemplified in the pre-Rogozin disaster spree.
Premature attempts to monetize something are not an uncommon problem, and politically it's rather difficult to fish not for a one-time bailout, but a near-permanent garden hose of money.
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2 hours ago, Lisias said:
Sooner or later someone will try to deploy Commandos with these things! ("Commandos away...."
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That was one of the proposals, yes.
Ah, yes, I found the IRL Helldiver pod.
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A person far braver than I am.
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4 hours ago, Lisias said:
Crazy, almost desperate idea from WW2 era: doing MEDEVAC on pods mounted on the bomb mounts of a P-38.
What could possibly go wrong?
("Bombs awa..." uh... Whoops.. 
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(but it would be a hell of view!)
https://aviationhumor.net/experimental-air-ambulance-version-of-the-p-38/
It keeps coming up and coming up. I know several sides in WWII had this sort of kit. This was the latest known attempt to bring it back:
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28 minutes ago, farmerben said:
I do. The total solar eclipse was cool.
The opthalmologists won't be free.
Sorry, I still can't get over how people just stare up at the sun to the point of sustained damage.
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9 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:
Yikes. At least Soyuz got a quarter of the funding requested in 1964.
Yeah, basically Khrunichev went bust developing it exclusively out of their own pocket. This in turn became a great excuse to sell off the expensive land under Khrunichev, forcing Angara's production to move to the stillborn Energiya Block A production line at Omsk, which didn't do the timeline any favors.
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3 hours ago, darthgently said:
Smells like hermeticism wherein the world is viewed as a prison to be escaped from.
Probably closer to Kampfgesetz or whatever, with a side helping of "thermoethics". The world isn't a prison, but it is what you make it out to be, and if you don't out in a constant, coordinated effort, if you leave things be and let them slide, they degrade, rust, rot, decay and die.
Not exactly an unnatural mindset for a space traveller, eh?
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1 hour ago, Terwin said:
It always amuses me when people forget that all humans are born as self-centered sociopaths, and only through socializing do we learn to reciprocate, cooperate, and all of the other 'virtues' of humanity.
I doubt it. I do believe there is an initial bias towards empathy.
You can't rely on it to run a big society, though.
1 hour ago, tater said:This. "Natural" systems appear by themselves. "Unnatural" systems must be imposed with force.
Yes. But life is an unnatural phenomenon. Any increase in complexity comes not from some synergistic murmuration, but through a coherent push with a unified will.
Both the free market and government dictate have their niches.
"The form is the despotism of the internal idea that prevents matter from disintegrating. If the bounds of this natural despotism are broken, the phenomenon dies."
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8 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:
I think building a Mars colony based on earthly ethics, laws, and societal structures is not a good long term backup for humanity. Such a Mars colony has an equal chance of destroying itself as Earth does
Hence the civilizationists' argument why humanity needs more backups that are still here but different.
At which point... bye-bye international Mars colony run by some sort of a global government.
8 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:You could say, why not build lots of colonies then? Which brings us back to the idea capitalism will eventually facilitate the construction of a colony, which I believe is wrong…
That's just capitalism allocating resources more efficiently, as advertised.
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9 minutes ago, Codraroll said:
Or, well, that's not quite what he said, but he might as well, because what he promised will be equally impossible to deliver in the time frame:
Oh, it is possible to deliver in that timeframe.
But what if, hear me out, we gave the rocket scientists about a tenth of the necessary budget, and were utterly amazed they preferred to twiddle their thumbs, find excuses and set up rat lines and Swiss bank accounts instead of working? After all, that's how Angara happened. For the first decade, it received 4% of the funding it was supposed to.
Combine that with a stalwart example of KB feudalism (Makeyev's pet Korona) and you have an absolute swamp that needs a new authoritarian like Korolev or Webb to sort it out.
Borisov, meanwhile, just rattles off what his grammar-deficient PR team pushes his way. Be happy they don't boast of building a factory to produce carburetors for electric cars (there's such a scandal going on right now, someone included a news article from the equivalent of the Onion in a regional ministry's annual report, to great public embarrassment).
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Oh, how very, very familiar. Unfortunately, going from experience, the late Uber driver was involved, she just didn't know she was being used as a courier. Heck, there's been a dozen cases in Russia where the couriers realized what they were being used for and opened up the packages to find thick wads of cash.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/16/us/ohio-uber-driver-murder-charge/index.html
Warn your relatives, folks, you're now in the same boat as us, it seems. Unexpected calls from the FBI, FRS or Bank of America, "secure accounts", urgently needing you to read that code from a text message or installing an "anti"-virus on your phone, oh no, someone's taken a loan on you and the only way to rescind that loan is to set fire to a local public building while yelling (e.g.) "Glory to Comrade Kim!" And that's before deepfakes go industrial-scale.
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Korona SSTO has been making rounds in the press again. I find it alarming that it's still a thing alongside Amur-SPG (Falcon-Methanski) and is getting more and more official endorsement. The last thing Roscosmos needs on their plate is a Korolev-Chelomei situation, but instead they're just throwing more and more things at the wall (Angara, Soyuz-5, Bartini's Krylo, even Don/Yenisei SHLV is still making noises).
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During the closing days of WWI, the Germans developed the B-1E Elektronbrandbombe, a 1 kg incendiary bomb with a thermite payload in a casing of an aluminum-magnesium alloy known as Elektron. It was the predominant Luftwaffe incendiary in WWII, leading to many raised eyebrows as contemporary materials keep referring to "electron(ic) bombs".
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A City On Mars
in Science & Spaceflight
Posted · Edited by DDE
To be fair, the eastern route was already taken - not sure if formally - by the Portuguese. Similarly, many years later the English would look for a northern route to India and China through the Siberian rivers.