JoeSchmuckatelli

I've always thought that a 'spinning accretion disc' would, very quickly after the protostar lit off, become an orbiting dust cloud. Given that orbital speed is determined by distance, how is friction going to work? The protoplanet should not be plowing through a virtually stationary dust cloud... It would be the big bad clump of a coorbiting dust cloud. The tidal migration of the moon has taken the life span of the moon. If tidal forces can explain the Jupiter (and Saturn?) outward migration... How we get inner planets at all? (and wouldn't they, also, be migrating outward and thus away from Jupiter like a kid playing can't catch me?)

I've lately run into a few shows and articles suggesting that Jupiter migrated orbits way back in the way back. One suggested it started out about where it is now, then wandered into the inner solar system, and then back out again to its current orbit (along with Saturn). Another couple have suggested that Jupiter formed way out in the icy distant parts of the solar system, only to later migrate in to the current position. From what I can tell, the purpose of the suppositions is to explain some of the chemical anomalies of the planet itself, while others are based on observational data of hot Jupiters around a bunch of stars... My question is how? I'm very hazy on how a planet can migrate orbits - and the articles I've read and the programs have failed to break it down Barney style enough for this old jarhead to figgur out. Appreciate anyone willing to tackle this one!

LOL - Humans are so destructively creative! @Spacescifi -- back to my quibble: I'm reminded of the old platitude that humans can destroy anything that we can create. If your drone army was created by people... expect that someone, somewhen will discover how to throw a monkey wrench into it!

If instead of a soccer ball you used an inverted cone shape for your warhead, can you get a nuclear shaped charge? If so, you could have an interesting weapon that can penetrate the EM and ablative shields of the enemy intergalactic battle cruiser Mk iv

I don't know the aircraft - but it looks like either WarThunder or World of WarPlanes - and their game sites have a ton of information about real and speculation aircraft

With full awareness that I'm quibbling with your fiction writing - where you can create any reality for your characters that you need to tell your story... My first observation is that you are merely replacing modern human soldiers - whether infantry, tankers or fliers with a drone analog. Regardless of the technology - it sounds like analogs of the current world... And again I will point out that absent the sci fi aspect, in the current Era the most powerful and experienced /professionals in the history of humanity have largely failed to change the reality on the ground against a completely mismatched force of infantry. This, as you pointed out, because we refuse to do what it takes to just kill everyone. And in your story - if your drone army is willing to do anything without regard to the laws of war or political consequences (etc) - then why not just nuke the whole area? Chernyobil and the Bikini Atols show that nukes are not going to prevent life from returning. Back to Afghanistan - the only way America could have won was to do to the people of Afghanistan what we did with the Native Americans - supplant them. With Iraq, perhaps, an analog to the post-war German and Japanese occupation might have succeeded - but short of absolute Colonial control and mass immigration, Afghanistan was never a winnable war

And yet our most recent experience with combat using drones, gunships and every other high tech etc against infantry proves otherwise. C. F. AFGHANISTAN. We used to have a saying in the Marines. 'The Air Force can drop bombs on a target all day, but you don't own it until a 19 year old Lance Corporal is standing on it holding an M-16. If your theory were correct - we would have finished with Afghanistan back in 2003 at the latest. FYI getting people to agree that they are beaten is a lot tougher than some folks realize

A quibble about the arrow and the body armor... I assume you are aware of the Marines' reputation for having the best and brightest minds in the world... Well, just before I arrived at TBS a couple of our 'jeniuses' put on their body armor before testing it against the KABAR. A little trivia about military body armor - while often perceived as a protective layer against bullets... It's not. The old 'Flak Vest' moniker is actually more accurate - the body armor is worn to protect the torso against shrapnel from mortars, grenades, etc. and not specifically against military grade rifle rounds. This is mostly because flexible Kevlar body armor is ineffective against rifle rounds. Even the hard helmet is only viable against 9mm pistol rounds... But rifle rounds go right through. Adding a hard, thick plate can be effective for rifle rounds - but they're heavy, awkward and only cover the heart and lung areas. Additionally, Kevlar and the like are designed to dissipate the blunt force impact of shrapnel - but like all cloth can be cut. So, going back to super smart Marine Officers using the body armor to protect against the KABAR knife - they discovered to their surprise that it went right through. Seeing as it's a seven inch blade and the heart is about 4 inches inside the chest, it was the last mistake one of them ever made. To leap to the next conclusion - the technology of the European settlers / conquistadors is less a factor in understanding the repopulation of the Americas than the simple fact of the population mismatch resulting from the pandemics that preceded mass colonization. Dee Brown once pointed out that in the Wild West days, starting around 1860, there were about 300,000 Native Americans of various cultures west of the Mississippi while there were about 60 million European / African derived people living East of the river. By 1890, the number of Native Americans was about the same - 300,000... While the 'Americans' numbers had exploded to over 90 million. ... So yes, low tech can kill high tech - but ultimately the numbers are determinative

I'll bite - why do you think an AM bomb would be any different from a nuclear bomb in space?

This. We also have ground penetrating delayed detonation warheads... Tailor made for those pesky hardened C&C bunkers. But I think that for pure reentry purposes the smaller size and lack of need to protect a human crew makes them 'sturdier' without any specific need to worry about military grade 'hardening' beyond what DDE described - and mostly that is not to protect the warhead from reentry, but rather to go boom when we want it to... Not bc something else went boom nearby

I don't know if you have any combat experience... But my perception of humans vs drones is that the humans win. Not in every fight, but over time people win. I've spent time as an infantry officer and a tank officer. I can tell you that the ingenuity, tenacity and pure destructive will of 20-somethings is impressive. I would never bet against humans in that fight. Even if the drones are operated by AF weenies. What you are describing is the armor vs infantry debate. It's an argument that's been raging since the introduction of... well shiz, the horse... Or wait - actually before: We've introduced literally generations of war-ending, human defeating 'Ultimate Weapons' since Thak first strapped a rock to a stick.

Well - the STRV is a fun example to bring up, but a closer analog from aerospace would be the A-10. They basically took a tank killing gun and built a plane around it. It's a fantastic airframe and purpose built weapon system. Too bad the AirFarce doesn't care about ground attack aircraft = not sexy enough... If they did perhaps they might spend a bit of time teaching their pilots what USMC ground combat vehicles look like.

And yet another indication that our distance calculations using redshift may be inaccurate https://www.universetoday.com/26277/intergalactic-dust-could-be-messing-up-observations/ also https://www.msn.com/en-ph/news/technology/half-the-matter-in-the-universe-was-missing-we-found-it-hiding-between-galaxies/ar-BB14RxtY With us now using Radio Telescope Arrays that cover the globe, I'm hopeful to see some really interesting work on re-estimates of the distances to galaxies and work on DM and DE estimates.

(And can you help me figure this out?) I've recently been gifted a Garmin Fenix 6x Pro (Okay, I picked it out, bought it, gave it to my wife and said... 'Here, this is for my birthday'). So after 2 days, its a great watch. But the thing I can't figure out how to do is get it to do what I think it should do. in other words: I want to get it to start tracking a route I take, as I take it, map it, and tell me how long the route is once I've completed the route. Then let me save that as "Route 1" and then repeat the process for my next usual running route for "Route 2" etc. Anyone know how to do this?

Do not annoy Happy Fun BallTM

Okay, I'll be the dumb Jarhead in the room: why are the tidal forces of a Stellar Mass BH more dangerous than those around a Super Massive?

So, here is yet another measurement, using a different technique (radio telescopes and geometry) - and it gets yet another different value for H0. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200611133127.htm Their data is closer to the Cepheids than from the TRGB and CMB predictions

You are totally someone who I would want to sit down with over a beer and pick your brain! Thanks for the answer - and doubly thanks for the link to Ms Noether! Now for a bigger question - the guy referred to in the article doesn't seem like a complete quack... What about some of the other, wildly experimental stuff they describe?

I thought the EM drive was debunked. This article makes it sound like there is still room for debate? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/nasas-emdrive-leader-has-a-new-interstellar-project/amp

Just ran across this https://www.wired.com/story/the-rocket-motor-of-the-future-breathes-air-like-a-jet-engine/ Seems interesting. Any idea why the graphic shows the engine as an arc?l

Aside from the covid delay - is there a reason for such a long lead time to launch? Given that they're going to put it in L2 orbit, there isn't a 'launch window' like there would be for Mars etc. So if the telescope is ready - why not build a rocket and go?

That's just the tip of the iceberg - the easy stuff I pulled together in less than 20 minutes of typing on my phone. There's a plethora of reading on 'Crisis in Cosmology' - much of which is supportive of the status quo... But the fact that respected scientists are bucking the trend is notable. Like the Wired article above - this one (also, in part about Friedman and her work) https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sciencenews.org/article/debate-universe-expansion-rate-hubble-constant-physics-crisis/amp ...shows how contentious this is. Reiss (who also received the Nobel with Perlmutter) really doesn't like the TRGB data, and there are many others who prefer different methods - all of whom are getting different answers. TRGB is trending towards the Early Universe projections, whereas others are getting expansion rates far in excess of the numbers Reiss and Perlmutter got from Cepheids and 1a's. What I read with interest is the part about accounting for dust- where the dustiness makes stars (or candles) seem further away than they are... Which is problematic for many of the yardsticks we've used in the past decades. Add to that the question raised in the Quanta article above (reporting on work published by an Oxford physicist in Astronomy & Astrophysics) who looked at 1a SN to find that local group motion may be causing distant 1a SN to only appear to be receding at the rate described by Perlmutter and Reiss (etc.) - ultimately questioning the very existence of DM/DE expansion along with observations of galaxies with apparently zero DM, and combined with the continued failures of ever more sensitive experiments to prove the existence of DM (much less DE) and things are looking interesting in Cosmology. Note: I'm well aware that 'failure to prove the existence" =/= 'proof of non-existence'... But the simple fact that Sakar and Friedman and others are even publishing in respectable journals is remarkable! (in 2008, merely questioning the basis of DE got you driven from the room)

Enjoy! https://aasnova.org/2019/07/26/tldr-the-trgb-gives-us-another-h0ttake/ https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/galaxy-s-brightest-explosions-go-nuclear-unexpected-trigger-pairs-dead-stars https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/cosmology-has-some-big-problems/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/05/03/cosmologys-biggest-conundrum-is-a-clue-not-a-controversy/#264ca8d078ea https://www.universetoday.com/92543/hubble-provides-evidence-for-double-degenerate-progenitor-supernova/ https://www.wired.com/story/science-has-a-new-way-to-gauge-the-universes-expansion-rate/ https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/supernova-standard-candles-not-so-standard-after-all https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/tension-continues-hubble-constant/ https://astronomy.com/news/2019/10/hubble-reveals-that-galaxies-without-dark-matter-really-exist https://phys.org/news/2019-10-crisis-cosmology-universe-rapidly-believed.html https://phys.org/news/2009-08-variability-1a-supernovae-implications-dark.html https://astronomy.com/magazine/news/2020/05/is-the-big-bang-in-crisis https://www.quantamagazine.org/no-dark-energy-no-chance-cosmologists-contend-20191217/ This is just a smattering. Funny thing is that when you read enough of these articles, you start picking up on people saying, "Hmmm... this data doesn't match up with the standard model" with others replying, "ZOMG!!! Dark Matter is a LIE! It's all Turtles!" and some saying, "Hmmm, interesting data... I wonder if you've run the numbers properly? Please check, because your result doesn't match expectations." and other people shouting "I have absolute faith in DM's existence. You... You just called my baby UGLY! I hate you you're stupid and the data you look at is bad and you are bad!"

Pardon my ignorance: are the towers communications related, or part of a lightning safety system. Also - is there a reason for the use of an inland launch location? Wouldn't launching over the Pacific have the same advantages we utilize by launching over the Atlantic?