Neat, thanks.
Carrolade
joined 1 year ago
Can a solar sail get something from Earth to Mercury?
The issue is less that it's the hardest to land on and more that it's the hardest to get to, to arrive at and orbit. It takes less fuel to get to Pluto than it does Mercury.
Mercury actually isn't tidally locked, it has a 3:2 resonance, so does have a day/night cycle.
It's expensive and the conditions are harsh.
The daytime side gets hot enough that a rover would be difficult to operate for long. You'd also be getting big swings between daytime hot and nighttime cold, so thermal expansion would probably be annoying.
Then it's unusually expensive because orbital mechanics make it very difficult to approach the sun. We're currently all flying sideways with respect to the sun, so if you launch something, it just wants to continue that orbit. In order to get closer, you'd need to shed most of that momentum, which takes a whole bunch of energy since inertia in the vacuum of space just means everything keeps going forever.
Ahh, that's a new copypasta for me, thanks for sharing. I don't run into the new ones much anymore, shitpost communities in general became a bit too skewed for me in the funny:dumb ratio at some point. That's a good one though.
Yes, and how exactly does it know?
Yes, glide bombs are also vulnerable to electronic countermeasures. This is because of how they figure out where they are and where they need to glide to in order to get to their target.
I did hear that electronic countermeasures have gotten better, reducing the accuracy of the bombs recently.
But yeah, they're making conversion kits for their old stockpile of big aerially dropped bombs, similar to our JDAMs. The kits are supposedly pretty easy to make.
You're probably operating from outdated information, we don't have the same budget we had 10-20 years ago. Here ya go:
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/
No.
Rome fell (among many reasons) due to overextension beyond their ability to maintain and concentrate sufficient forces, alongside military invasion by multiple groups over many years.
Germany was going to fall in one of two ways, either economic collapse from a grossly unaffordable military buildup that was on track to bankrupt them, or getting into wars with powerful countries in order to help pay for said military buildup. They went with option B.
The US has no issues concentrating and deploying sufficient military force to defend itself, and isn't spending anywhere near enough on defense to make it unaffordable, spending about 13% of our budget on defense. (compared to over 100% [edit: of annual income, I mixed my figures inappropriately here] for the Germans) Most of our deficit comes from domestic expenses like health care.
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This story is and always has been a gigantic nothing-burger. The science is not settled, which means many hypotheses could be true or could be false.
The problem, is who the fuck cares? Is there any difference whatsoever if its man made or natural, in how we should act or what decisions we should make? Can we do anything to prevent bio engineering in a foreign country?
No. No, there is no practical difference, no, we cannot prevent research in other countries, and we probably shouldn't even try since the goal is not practical.
One gigantic red herring.