For Questions That Don't Merit Their Own Thread

[SunlitZelkova]

If the proper support infrastructure and launch pads were built, how often can rockets be launched?

The story I use as the background for my KSP save has two Saturn Vs launching every other month in the 1980s, along with Saturn IC (INT-20) launches, and Space Shuttle launches also occurring- not to mention normal commercial and military launches.

Likewise, there are two N-1s launching each month, with four every 6 months from Baikonur.

With Baikonur, it is in the middle of nowhere so I assume massive expansion wouldn't be problematic, but is there space for another VAB or three at Cape Canaveral?

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

32 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

is there space for another VAB or three at Cape Canaveral?

I would take a page from SX on this: given the will (and the resources), you can do a lot in a small space.

[monophonic]

On 11/20/2021 at 6:58 PM, kerbiloid said:

But why "amphibious"? It can only swim, not crawl.

This one is amphibious.

  Reveal hidden contents

(But you need the Breaking Ground DLC for the fenestrons.)

Because it is (Amphibious Assault) Ship. I.e. the amphibious part refers to the assault, not the ship itself. The ship is needed to make the assault swim. The boots, tracks and tires the ship vomits at the beach then make the assault crawl. Sometimes the bigger ships don't go to the beach itself, but instead drop smaller ships from their rear ends that proceed to the beach to vomit out the boots etc. The biggest ships can also throw off helicopters that fly to the beach or even farther inland and drop the boots onto the ground. Some even use only helicopters. It is a whole ecosystem out there, with various niches and specialized species of Amphibious Assault Ships to fill those niches!

But the assault is always amphibious, because it comes from the sea and goes to the land.

[kerbiloid]

13 minutes ago, monophonic said:

But the assault is always amphibious, because it comes from the sea and goes to the land.

Thus, the Death Star is a Landing Assault Ship, even if it's spherical, because it can deliver the landing troopers.

[lrd.Helmet]

2 hours ago, monophonic said:

 

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

 

and this:

[kerbiloid]

Zubr is also beach-friendly and rather nice.

Spoiler

 

 

[magnemoe]

On 11/20/2021 at 5:58 PM, kerbiloid said:

But why "amphibious"? It can only swim, not crawl.

This one is amphibious.

  Hide contents

(But you need the Breaking Ground DLC for the fenestrons.)

It looks so much an mouth and that it gone eat that APC. 
Painting the tongue as in the ramp red makes sense

[DDE]

44 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

It looks so much an mouth and that it gone eat that APC. 
Painting the tongue as in the ramp red makes sense

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Zubr is also beach-friendly and rather nice.

I always wonder whether Russia is a place where the military does not care about where civilians are (as is often portrayed) or civilians don't care about military reservations and just lay out on the training areas.

(We'd always run into a surfer or two while doing stuff: Recon Marines go about their training while watched by a surfer aboard Camp Pendleton, California Stock Photo - Alamy) 

6 reasons why Camp Pendleton is the best base in the Marine Corps - We Are The Mighty | Camp pendleton, Marine corps, Marines (pinterest.com)

When you get a photo like that about us, we're usually in someone else's country.  

 

[kerbiloid]

31 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I always wonder whether Russia is a place where the military does not care about where civilians are (as is often portrayed) or civilians don't care about military reservations and just lay out on the training areas.

It was a wild (unofficial) beach on the military test site, and the place where the ship was crawling out of water had (or should have had) a cordon around, so nothing to worry about.

Almost always - the latter.

31 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

When you get a photo like that about us, we're usually in someone else's country. 

What's wrong in a wheeled car moving on a road?

If it was tracked - it should be carried by trailer.

Edited November 22, 2021 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

13 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I always wonder whether Russia is a place where the military does not care about where civilians are (as is often portrayed) or civilians don't care about military reservations and just lay out on the training areas.

Well, let's start with the obvious. A lot of "tank drives across Russian road" footage come from one specific crossing between Uralvagonzavod on Nizhnyi Tagil, and its proving grounds. There's a traffic light. You don't want to run the red, but some people have and... well, they survived.

Lighter armor tends to coexist with traffic commuters, sometimes peacefully...

...and sometimes not.

Obligatory dashcam:

Then there are the really unforseen outcomes:

I believe the Chinese are actually far more flagrant in that regard, they just let tanks and SPGs wade through traffic.

That said, the actual firing ranges seem to be moderately secure even around the densely populated Alabino, and there are always places like Ashuluk for when you need a lot of space (and sand). It's really only in the Baltics where you see the public and the warships this close, persistently.

There's also Severodvinsk:

But San Diego should be able to relate.

[TheSaint]

10 minutes ago, DDE said:

But San Diego should be able to relate.

I remember stories from the guys on the boat who were stationed in San Diego. When they were left in on a run (i.e. the boat was going out to sea but they were staying in for training, leave, medical hold, etc.) they would wave good-bye to the ship from the pier, then they would get in their cars and drive out to Point Loma (which is right at the mouth of the harbor) and watch the boat go by as it was leaving and wave, jeer, moon, etc. The channel is only about a quarter mile wide at that point.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

30 minutes ago, DDE said:

...

 

I know that look - Universal "What the...."

 

 

30 minutes ago, DDE said:

Well, let's start with the obvious. A lot of "tank drives across Russian road" footage come from one specific crossing between Uralvagonzavod on Nizhnyi Tagil, and its proving grounds. There's a traffic light.

We've places like that (Tank Crossing signs along roads) - but they're all inside reservations, and while there's no light, I've not seen something like those: glad to hear its a unique place.

OTOH, I have had a tank platoon pulled over by an MP (blue lights flashing, and everything) for driving through the bushes.  Yes, PROTECTED bushes, which are the habitat of a rat that nearby canyon-living raptors eat... hence the bush is 'no go' terrain, even though it covers the entire training area.

Folks on this board should appreciate driving I-80 from Reno to Salt Lake City... can't tell you how many times I've been buzzed by low flying fast movers along that route.  Saw a truck get blown by jetwash from the right lane to the center median once; kinda exciting.

Edited November 22, 2021 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[kerbiloid]

14 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

We've places like that (Tank Crossing signs along roads) - but they're all inside reservations, and while there's no light, I've not seen something like those: glad to hear its a unique place.

He talks about the tanks. APC and tugs are rare but nothing special. Because wheels. Tracks would damage the asphalt and cost a road repair.

Also, when a road passes by a shooting range border or a test site, the tracks are normal, too.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I always wonder whether Russia is a place where the military does not care about where civilians are (as is often portrayed) or civilians don't care about military reservations and just lay out on the training areas.

(We'd always run into a surfer or two while doing stuff: Recon Marines go about their training while watched by a surfer aboard Camp Pendleton, California Stock Photo - Alamy) 

6 reasons why Camp Pendleton is the best base in the Marine Corps - We Are The Mighty | Camp pendleton, Marine corps, Marines (pinterest.com)

When you get a photo like that about us, we're usually in someone else's country.  

 

I say its more that the civilians don't caring about the military in areas with lots of military activity. 

Remember two cases from my time in the army in Norway +30 years ago, this was during the cold war. 
I was in engineering battalion so we got to play with lots of explosives. We rigged an bridge with dummy explosives (wood bricks) but real detonators.
Then blowing up an small bridge you also want to blow up the guard rails who can else be climbed and help creating temporary bridges. 
Well we was about to set off the detonators and we obliviously wanted to be safe from the simulated blast. 
But they needed to stop traffic because the detonators. 
On guy was liquided having to stop because the army so he drove past the guard, he fired an blank who cause the guy with the with the button pressed it hearing the shot setting off all the detonators. Most inside their wooden blocks creating wood splinters. The car accelerated very fast afterward.  

Half a year later in north of Norway, we had established an unloading site for heavy amphibious ships and was protecting it until we was needed other places. 
Well we had an new ship this time with self propelled artillery and their support. Again some guy was told to stop traffic, an car drove around, then he got a scare because

Something like this, slammed down on the road in front of him moving from the ship onto the road.  

In my experience US armored forces tend to have very large training areas, guess larger than countries like Luxembourg so they are not very trained in dealing with civilians on narrow roads and in large NATO excesses US armor tend to mangle some cars. 

[kerbiloid]

"That's not a problem if a military driver is drunk.
Drunk or sober, he drives equally."

[SunlitZelkova]

Where does the "modern buildings don't catch fire" argument used in defence of nuclear deterrence come from?

The inside is flammable too (fire departments still exist for a reason), and nuclear weapons don't just sizzle the outer surface- they blast away the entire structure. Even if you aren't going to get a Hiroshima-like landscape after the blast, shouldn't large fire storms akin to those at Dresden and Tokyo be expected? Damage is different due to construction material differences, but area affected similar.

If I'm missing something and incorrect, of course please correct me 

Also, does the blast force scale with the yield?

Example- dropping a 10 kiloton weapon (same as Little Boy) on modern day Hiroshima, with its various modern construction techniques, would be very different from what actually happened at WWII Hiroshima (many more buildings standing), but if you drop a 1 megaton weapon on modern day Hiroshima, could you expect a more "WWII Hiroshima-like" landscape afterwards (more buildings completely or near demolished)?

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

17 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Where does the "modern buildings don't catch fire" argument used in defence of nuclear deterrence come from?

The inside is flammable too (fire departments still exist for a reason), and nuclear weapons don't just sizzle the outer surface- they blast away the entire structure. Even if you aren't going to get a Hiroshima-like landscape after the blast, shouldn't large fire storms akin to those at Dresden and Tokyo be expected? Damage is different due to construction material differences, but area affected similar

It really depends on detonation altitude and distance and secondary propagation. 

Much of Hiroshima's aftermath was due to uncontrollable secondary fires - which may not be the case for a modern city.  Or it might be.  You can look at the Camp Fire in Northern California (City of Paradise) and see that there are no guarantees for 'modern' buildings - especially residential - to survive the fireball (but no one thinks that the crater zone will have any survivors.)

But both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had 'modern' stone /masonry structures that did not get erased. 

There is a zone outside the crater / fireball that is subject to intense thermal radiation - which can cause secondary fires, and it is here that the 'modern concrete building' idea arises to differentiate past urban detonations from the future ones. 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

54 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Example- dropping a 10 kiloton weapon (same as Little Boy) on modern day Hiroshima, with its various modern construction techniques, would be very different from what actually happened at WWII Hiroshima (many more buildings standing), but if you drop a 1 megaton weapon on modern day Hiroshima, could you expect a more "WWII Hiroshima-like" landscape afterwards (more buildings completely or near demolished

Have you looked at nuke map? 

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

You can specify a number of different types of bomb over a variety of cities.  

Still requires a lot of interpretation as I don't think it takes terrain or construction into account... But if you want to compare fireball of Fat Man to Tsar Bomba you can 

[wumpus]

On 11/22/2021 at 7:05 PM, SunlitZelkova said:

Where does the "modern buildings don't catch fire" argument used in defence of nuclear deterrence come from?

The inside is flammable too (fire departments still exist for a reason), and nuclear weapons don't just sizzle the outer surface- they blast away the entire structure. Even if you aren't going to get a Hiroshima-like landscape after the blast, shouldn't large fire storms akin to those at Dresden and Tokyo be expected? Damage is different due to construction material differences, but area affected similar.

If I'm missing something and incorrect, of course please correct me 

Also, does the blast force scale with the yield?

Example- dropping a 10 kiloton weapon (same as Little Boy) on modern day Hiroshima, with its various modern construction techniques, would be very different from what actually happened at WWII Hiroshima (many more buildings standing), but if you drop a 1 megaton weapon on modern day Hiroshima, could you expect a more "WWII Hiroshima-like" landscape afterwards (more buildings completely or near demolished)?

I've never heard that line, and since I'm about 50 I certainly remember the [first?] era of nuclear deterrence.  Sure, you could claim that modern cities are safer from fire than 1940s Japanese cities, but few nuclear delivery systems bother with such primitive weapons as pure fission devices (possibly not true as more nations enter the "nuclear club").  It hardly seems to matter if your house wouldn't burn from a Hiroshima-class nuke if a 20 megaton warhead puts you in ground zero.  And just because your house didn't burn down, you now have a bigger problem of where your next week's meals are coming from: every car's electrical system was just fried thanks to EMI.  I suspect the same happened to every delivery truck.  If you can't obtain food more or less directly from a farm (did the fish survive?  Can you live that way?) your house won't matter at all.  Burnt down or not, any house even lightly hit by a nuke is probably in an area about to suffer a serious famine (survivable if the hit was local, nation/continental wide I hope you know your 18th century tech).

Presumably just about anything burns less than traditional Japanese buildings  (especially houses).  But as mentioned, once you start a firestorm certainly modern (US anyway) towns burn as well as forests.  Traditionally, fire was feared and treated as a disaster on the level of earthquakes.  I'd assume they've but more effort into changing that, but really don't know.  WWII incendiary attacks were horrifyingly effective.

[SunlitZelkova]

14 hours ago, wumpus said:

I've never heard that line, and since I'm about 50 I certainly remember the [first?] era of nuclear deterrence.

It is mainly used against nuclear winter/nuclear autumn/*nuclear weapons causing near-extinction like events* theories, but also to downplay the damage of the weapons in general (to describe a nuclear war as more like WWII bombings over a larger area instead of having any special or long-term disastrous effects).

However, something interesting to note is that a lot of those arguments and studies were made prior to mainstream acceptance of climate change and before ocean acidification was widely known (1980s).

I haven’t seen any works relating to how a nuclear war and the associated uncontrolled fires and release of numerous dangerous chemicals (as factories/industrial plants and buildings of different construction methods/materials get destroyed) might affect those two things.

[K^2]

9 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

I haven’t seen any works relating to how a nuclear war and the associated uncontrolled fires and release of numerous dangerous chemicals (as factories/industrial plants and buildings of different construction methods/materials get destroyed) might affect those two things.

I haven't seen any focused studies either, but based on what we're seeing with volcanoes, etc, while the short-term effect of a global scale nuclear bombardment would be cooling, and idea of nuclear winter might not be far off, long terms is going to be contributing to heating and can easily tip us over into a runaway effect.

Roughly, the mechanism is as follows. Normally, most of the sunlight reaches surface and some part of it is absorbed, heating the surface up. Surface cools by emitting infrared, some fraction of which is re-absorbed in upper atmosphere by high elevation clouds and greenhouse gasses. The portion that does not escape to space directly is re-emitted and re-absorbed heating the upper atmosphere somewhat. The surface and upper atmosphere are further in rough an adiabatic equilibrium due to convective currents. So energy trapped as IR in upper atmosphere eventually makes it back to the surface. Normally, heat wouldn't flow from cold upper atmosphere to warm surface, but air currents moving down are compressed by higher pressure, warming up enough to transfer heat to the surface. The effect is called "greenhouse effect," but the direct heating works more like a heat pump. And this is crucial to impact of ash clouds.

I don't know if nukes are going to be exactly the same, but ash clouds from volcanoes typically occupy altitudes between 6 to 9 km or so, where temperatures are 40 to 60K lower than at the surface. So step the first, major eruption or series of nuclear explosions took place, placing ash and dust at these altitudes. At first, the impact is rather direct. Sunlight no longer reaches the surface in the same quantities. At the same time, surface continues to radiate the same amount of infrared. The ash cloud, now opaque both in visible and infrared, also radiates infrared, but because it is at least 40K cooler, it sends back a lot less energy. Between the IR from ash cloud and limited sunlight, the net flux to surface is now lower than net flux away from surface. Surface begins to rapidly cool. Depending on coverage, we can be talking about a drop of a few Kelvin, which might impact crop yields, to tens of degrees, which can lead to a global disaster.

However, the thing to keep in mind is that equilibrium isn't reached yet. The ash cloud now receives direct heating from the Sun and the infrared heat from the surface, which is more energy than it can emit into space at its current temperature. It starts to heat up. The equilibrium temperature for it is still slightly bellow what normal equilibrium temperature for the surface is, as the ash cloud isn't impacted by greenhouse effect nearly as much, and can only get additional heating due to lower albedo, so if there was no air circulation, the final effect on the surface would still be net cooling, but as I've mentioned above, there is a heat pump effect. In the long term, temperature differential between surface and clouds is fully established by the pressure differential. So as the temperature of the ash cloud starts to rise, so does the temperature of the surface. In the most extreme case of a dense ash cloud with albedo of about 0.6, the equilibrium temperature at 9km will hit 300K. That will put surface temperature at 360K. Close to the boiling point of water. This sort of dense cover is not realistic, but it's a hell of an upper limit, and should give you an idea of the sort of catastrophe that's likely to follow. Climate change as we know it is absolute peanuts to what will happen if we dump enough ash into upper atmosphere to appreciably reduce the amount of sunlight that's coming through.

 

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

I haven’t seen any works relating to how a nuclear war and the associated uncontrolled fires and release of numerous dangerous chemicals (as factories/industrial plants and buildings of different construction methods/materials get destroyed) might affect those two things.

A lot of literature in late 1980s. By Carl Sagan, Roald Sagdeev, and others.
(Can't find the paperbook with detailed list of literature, somewhere in the shed.)

You can start from the refs in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter and from Sagan's articles of that time, he was almost the main apologist of the nuka-wintah hypothesis.

The weak part of it is that the smoke is forcedly generated by smolder, while the smokicles descent - by the firestorm, which exclude each other.
But the proponents calculate both together, what makes their models somewhat blurry.

Upd.
The book I'm talking about.
by A. Barrie Pittock, Thomas P. Ackerman
https://www.ozon.ru/product/posledstviya-yadernoy-voyny-fizicheskie-i-atmosfernye-effekty-31351745/?sh=oeWHuz-e

Spoiler

 

Edited November 25, 2021 by kerbiloid

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

6 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

haven’t seen any works relating to how a nuclear war and the associated uncontrolled fires and release of numerous dangerous chemicals (as factories/industrial plants and buildings of different construction methods/materials get destroyed) might affect those two things

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://ota.fas.org/reports/7906.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwikq8z14bP0AhWOk4kEHRy6C2MQFnoECAQQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0izhTfE-JiTQAS1v_Szq5J

(if this links it should be interesting) 1979 PDF of a Congressional report on the effects of Nuclear War 

Edited November 25, 2021 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[ARS]

What's the design consideration specific for aircraft operating at extreme altitude? Because one one hand, we have the slow-moving aircraft with near-glider like characteristic such as U-2, but on the other hand, we have a literal speed demon with overkill engines like SR-71 or MiG 25/31

Also, does this statement correct?: "A material with high melting point is stronger in terms of mechanical characteristic than material with low melting point"