SunlitZelkova

I don’t what you mean by “the general is cast wrong”. He’s the same voice actor who played the character in one of the animated shows. I saw a meme where someone is replying to someone on Twitter who said “Space whales is my line. No thanks Disney”. Replier says something to the effect of “Because space wizards fighting with laser swords is oh so realistic”. I assume you haven’t watched The Clone Wars or Rebels animated shows. It’s much better if you have watched those. Of course, animation isn’t for everyone, so I’m not telling you to watch those. The prequels were treated the exact same way, and the kids that grew up with them now form a large enough portion of the fan base that they are respected movies now. I don’t think a quality drop occurred with him selling to Disney.

No. Thomas doesn’t have a tender.

SLS can not do a single launch mission without using a tiny open air lander like Gemini LOR was intended to use, and even then SLS probably would not be able to put it in an orbit where the lander could get to the surface and back. Yes, NRHO was chosen because of a lower delta v requirement, but only because SLS can’t do anything better. I’m sure @tater and @sevenperforce can give a much more detailed response breaking down the numbers.

Their ballistic missile and cruise missile tests have actually been largely successful so far. Space development on the other hand is not really developing.

Lol, this is just what my boats look like when I try to build them with airplane parts! This is officially the most Kerbal thing ever.

No Kerbal no life.

I had one of these when I was in Japan at an okonomiyaki restaurant. It had a cat face though and spoke to us after delivering the food. In America maybe the criticism of robots replacing humans is justified, but in Japan it’s necessary due to declining population. That said, there was a bizarrely high number of young female workers in the restaurant and retail service business, both in Tokyo and the countryside of Tokushima. I’ll post a picture of mine when I get back to my PC on Monday!

https://x.com/colinzwirko/status/1707197941503643914?s=46&t=Jd73T2beq0JLNtwTy1uR5A National Aerospace Development Agency is now called National Aerospace Technology General Bureau (NATGB). Time for thread name change, @steve9728?

Attacking a friendly Typhoon SSBN for some reason…

Refueling is necessary to reuse the lander, lowering cost. Having a singular Moon rocket would mean building a new spacecraft each time and throwing it away, something unviable in the long term. Artemis is trying to build a lunar base, and to do that within a realistic budget, you need to reuse stuff. Is it a little dangerous? Yes, but I don’t think it is any more dangerous than a singular Moon rocket. It’s just a matter of deciding what is dangerous. With reuse, you leave the lander up there for a long time. You can’t inspect every component after each flight in the same way you can with a Space Shuttle returning to Earth, so something could fail due to prolonged use. But with a singular Moon rocket, you are building a brand new spacecraft each time. There are bound to be defects eventually, as happened with Apollo 13. Note that most spacecraft have been lost to production defects, like Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11, Apollo 1, and Apollo 13. Challenger and Columbia were not lost due to a problem with the vehicle itself, but rather external damage. Perhaps someday a lunar dockyard could be built for looking over Starship HLS’ in detail.

I forgot to put a “know”. As in “you know people are trying to stop sea level rise, right?” I had only three hours of sleep. Apologies! If that’s the case that’s fine, but no one should expect regulators to go along with SpaceX’s “break things and move fast” philosophy. They will take the time they need to approve things. They work from their own schedule, not SpaceX’s. ”Please start the regulatory process now even if you don’t feel like you will have all the data necessary to properly assess the conditions,” or “just start now because we need you to do it now or have it done by this date” is basically asking them to rush it. Obviously you don’t want them taking years to approve things, but I don’t think waiting a couple months is outrageous and it is totally understandable on the part of the regulators. It’s not the end of the world and is not going to significantly impact anything. I mean let’s be real, the only real reason to do it now instead of two months later is for the popcorn and X views. Especially as testing picks up the pace later on, SpaceX will certainly be able to meet all the goals. But before that, we need to let the regulators do their jobs. If they said it was going to take another year to finish it I would be sympathetic to the outrage, but a few months is not that bad. Upsetting the environment excessively anywhere is bad. Just because it’s happening in Florida doesn’t make it ok in Texas. But as I said above, if those conditions exist that make Florida unviable, that’s fine, but don’t expect regulators to bend over backwards for them. They need to hold a Q&A session to explain it. But lack of explanation does not indicate malicious intent. They need to gather data now because letting things go on and potentially harming the environment is not only bad, it’s illegal. I think the “please provide Starlink for free” thing is over. This is about whether Musk has the right to restrict the users of his product. I think he should get a pass. As Pavel Podvig, an expert on Russian nuclear forces said, “never try to stop someone who thinks he is preventing a nuclear war”.

The point isn’t to say they should move there now, it’s that they could have chosen an existing rocket launch site where regulations might be easier to overcome. It is a fallacy to think that building an entirely new launch site should be as easy now as it was in the 1960s. They were always going to have a big regulatory slog, whether they built it in Boca Chica or the Bronx. As I said, these things take time. If you don’t let the regulators do their job, and push for “do it according to my needs and my timeline”, instead of what the regulators need to do to get the job done, you will end up with another Challenger disaster. Just because you disagree or it seems outrageous does not make it cheap. People make emotional statements sometimes, and sometimes that emotion comes in the form of a strong exclamatory or seemingly hyperbolic nature. I have done this myself in the past and ended up walking it back when people corrected me. Perhaps that was your intention too (to correct/advise and not shun), but it just came off to me as a put down. Apologies if there was a misunderstanding.

If three doctors told you you had a risk of dying from liver cancer in your 50s, would you start drinking a wine bottle everyday, or try to live a healthier lifestyle to prevent yourself from getting cancer. You people are trying to stop the sea levels from rising, right? Not just throw their hands up in the air and say we’re doomed. That’s like… the whole point of climate action. If it wasn’t for nuclear weapons being controlled by bureaucracy they probably would have been used in every major Cold War proxy war. How about KSC? Don’t they literally have a second launch site there, currently being converted for Starship ops? The processes take time. Unless you can prove that they are being done for superfluous reasons, criticism of their pace of work as being a sign of incompetence is conspiratorial. This is also conspiratorial. Unless you have evidence of some kind to support this accusation. It’s his opinion. There is no “bad form”. Correct him and move on, never discourage someone from sharing their views just because they might make a mistake.

https://nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/web_peoples_liberation_army_rocket_force_order_of_battle_07102023.pdf Even if DF-21 stocks remain in reserve, the fact remains that DF-26 numbers are rising.

I changed mine again, likely for the last time for awhile. It’s a KSP1 replica of VALIS, the satellite from Philip K. Dick’s novels VALIS and Radio Free Albemuth.

The DF-21 is/was China’s premier ballistic missile for targeting stuff in Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia. It was easy to intercept for the Patriot. The nuclear and conventional versions were also clearly defined, and it was known there were fewer nuclear ones than conventional. In contrast, the DF-26 is an IRBM. Patriot can’t do jack poop against it, making it easier for it to get through ballistic missile defences. It’s also dual capable, meaning every DF-26 could possibly have a nuclear warhead. To me, this reminds me of when the less capable, borderline stationary, liquid fueled SS-4 Sandal MRBM was replaced by the MIRVed, mobile, solid fueled SS-20 Saber, resulting in a scare in Europe.

Rather than a “decisive battle”, I think the problem for Japan was that the battle ended up being a campaign. The Solomons operations in late ‘42 to 43 drained the IJN of a lot of strength and experienced pilots as much as, if not more than Midway did, and Japan just had no chance of keeping up with the US ability to replace losses. Lack of surface search radar didn’t help either, and gave the US an edge despite excellent Japanese night-fighting capabilities. That wasn’t a declaration of war, just a notification they were abandoning diplomacy. So the US would be enraged even if the 14 part document arrived on time. IIRC the US actually decoded the whole message ahead of the Japanese embassy.

TIL China is replacing some of the DF-21 MRBM with the DF-26 IRBM. This loosely parallels the replacement of the R-12 MRBM with the Pioner.

Just a hour and half from where I live. So when the AI activate the nuclear weapons, I should be shielded from the bombs, because Oregon will become the base of the AI army. I, for one, look forward to serving as the human advisor to the new apex predator of Earth. Long live the People’s Republic of Cascadia!

Congrats to my American comrades on our nation becoming the second country to successfully return a sample from an asteroid Next stop: Mars!

The Dr. Strangelove in me wishes the Cold War continued so we could get cool pieces of engineering the the Ulyanovsk class carriers, Yak-41, LOSAT sabot ATGM tank destroyer, and SIDAM 25 SPAAG with Mistral missiles.

Doe! So would be possible to damage the neutron protection with an HE shell or near miss from gun or rocket artillery and thus “poke a hole” for a nuclear weapon’s radiation to hurt the crew?

The First Team: Pacific Naval Air Combat from Pearl Harbor to Midway by John Lundstrom covers this nicely. Having read this book, I think there were two the key things that made USN flyers ultimately prevail over the IJNAS, rather than aircraft themselves- 1. The USN practiced deflection shooting. This is when you shoot at a target while it is turning. It seems like an obvious thing if you’re like me and play combat games like War Thunder a lot, but very few air forces did this at the time. The IJN was stuck trying to get on the tails of fighters before they could fire a shot. 2. Radar ground control intercepts. The IJN had nothing like this, and it gave the USN a huge edge in intercepting incoming strikes. Both sides were a really interesting bunch though. The First Team details the profiles of each pilot, and gives a fair bit of detail on the Japanese side too. If the late war was characterized by masses of Hellcats and Corsairs flying against inexperienced kamikazes, the early war had some of the finest airmen to ever face off against each other. At the same time, I think superior tactics and intelligence on the part of the Americans leveled the playing field more than the average history accepts.

Earth and Moon taken by SLIM’s landing camera. https://x.com/slim_jaxa/status/1705042659075854484?s=46&t=Jd73T2beq0JLNtwTy1uR5A

From what I’ve read the goal was to prevent the enemy from finding the target in the first place. No consideration was given to helping down the attacker if it actually found the target. In the case of the modern day, you might want to keep the lights off. I’m not sure about the launch parameters of EO weapons like the KAB-500Kr, but if the opponent did happen to attack with such weapons, you wouldn’t want to illuminate the target for them. I wonder just how vital the targets the DShKs are defending. If the really important stuff is protected by Gepards, it seems like it wouldn’t be worth it to risk an TV guided weapon attack (as unlikely as it is).