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Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

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Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#581

Post by robbiep »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #562
stctw wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to say that now. Have you lived through unrestricted, total warfare, where one side intends to conquer a continent or the world, invades without provocation, and won't stop until brought to submission through extreme force? The Allies did not initiate war and did not want war. How many of your country's people should you sacrifice to end a war of aggression started by the enemy? Should you not use the means…

> where one side intends to conquer a continent or the world I believe this view indicates you may have drunk a bit too much of the kool aid. Germany had zero ability to hold all of Europe longer term, let alone the entire world. This is a comic book tier view. Any end to the war would have had concessions and land transfers but there is no precedent to suggest that even France would have remained under Germany longe…

Are you advocating for a view of history that paints Germany as a victim?

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#582

Post by pdonis »

FredPret wrote: post #555
xcv123 wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Conditional surrender would have been completely unacceptable And some would argue that nuking entire cities is completely unacceptable.

Allied options were: 1. Invade. Expected Allied casualties of 300k all the way to much more than a million. Expected Japanese casualties: tens of millions, perhaps up to literally all of them. Previous Japanese strongholds fought to the last man, earlier in the war the Allies invaded an island with 11000 Japanese soldiers, and I think 47 of those eventually surrendered. The rest died. The civilian populations on thes…

Your survey of the options is basically the one that the US government put out after the war to push back against criticism. However, historical scholarship since then has shown that it wasn't that simple.

First, there is no evidence of any actual casualty estimates made during the war that were anywhere near as high as the ones you give in option 1. Those numbers were made up after the war. The wartime estimates were about an order of magnitude lower.

Second, you left out an option: clarify the status of the Emperor if the Japanese surrendered, which the US government well knew, since they were reading Japanese diplomatic traffic and also had plenty of intelligence from spies, was the only real obstacle in the way of the Japanese surrendering. The final surrender agreement left the Emperor in place as the head of the Japanese state. If the Japanese had known that was going to be the final outcome of surrender earlier, it is highly probable that they would have surrendered earlier. The status of the Emperor was the primary weapon the military war faction in the Japanese cabinet used to quash surrender proposals.

Third, to call the time since WW II "an unprecedented era of global peace" is a bit much. What the bombs ushered in was an era of nuclear stalemate. The US does deserve credit for not using the bombs again, even though the US was the only nuclear power for at least four years after WW II. It is also true that many people after WW II expected a nuclear conflict to happen as soon as the USSR got nuclear weapons, and none did. But that didn't stop plenty of conventional conflicts from continuing to break out all over the world, nor has the US kept out of such conflicts.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#583

Post by cubefox »

pixl97 wrote: post #417
adolph wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I was young, there were no rocket landings. For all born after July 1969, you lived with rocket landings: Apollo lunar lander was a propulsive soft landing.

I mean the old rocket landings threw away 90%+ of the rocket first. Minus the hot staging ring and some molten metal almost all of this rocket was present at both its landings.

I wonder how much earlier a rocket like Falcon 9 (with automatic landing of the lower stage) could realistically have been developed and built. In the 70s? 80s? 90s?

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#584

Post by pfannkuchen »

robbiep wrote: post #581
pfannkuchen wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where one side intends to conquer a continent or the world I believe this view indicates you may have drunk a bit too much of the kool aid. Germany had zero ability to hold all of Europe longer term, let alone the entire world. This is a comic book tier view. Any end to the war would have had concessions and land transfers but there is no precedent to suggest that even France would have remained under Germany longe…

Are you advocating for a view of history that paints Germany as a victim?

Definitely not. Just one that depicts actual humans and not comic book villains.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#585

Post by pdonis »

FredPret wrote: post #568
pdonis wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even after the first nuke they didn't surrender. It took the emperor speaking up - for the first time ever - after the second nuke, and even then the military junta tried to stop it. All this is true, but it's also true that the nukes weren't the only factor involved. A good case can be made that it was actually the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, which started at midnight local time on the same morning that Nagasaki…

This is an excellent point. This is why it was necessary to beat the Germans first - so the Russians could invade or at least threaten Japan. Even so, a land conquest of Japan would have cost vast numbers of lives - far more than the nukes. When people die one by one in war, the emotional impact is blunted. But when a million die in one bomb, it seems much worse, even if the overall body count is lower.

> This is why it was necessary to beat the Germans first - so the Russians could invade or at least threaten Japan.

That was the strategy that FDR and Churchill agreed to, but the primary person driving it was Stalin, because he didn't want the US and Britain to defeat Japan before he got a chance to attack them, and he knew he would not be able to attack them until Germany was defeated. (He wanted to attack them so he would have a pretext for taking over territory that Russia had lost in the Russo-Japanese war in 1904-1905.) As events proved, the US and Britain did not need any help from the USSR to defeat Japan militarily, and with different diplomatic choices they probably could have gotten Japan to surrender before the USSR attacked.

Once FDR died and Truman took office, btw, it was no longer clear that having the USSR enter the war against Japan was a US objective. Truman, unlike FDR, was not a fan of Stalin and viewed him as a geopolitical threat, not an ally. Which, historically speaking, was a sounder view.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#586

Post by dotnet00 »

ryandvm wrote: post #221
api wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve said for a while that we won’t be ready for the real space age until you can have a rusty pickup in space. What I mean by that is that we have it down well enough that the tech exceeds tolerances and can degrade gracefully. You see this in some sci-fi where there are rust bucket old ships that work.

You have to be careful how much wisdom you glean from fiction. The sheer hostility of space kind of precludes the "she's a good ol' ship" trope. When your door doesn't shut on your pickup, you can bang on it a bit. When your door doesn't shut on your spacecraft, you've got a ship full of corpses that look like a blob fish brought up from the Marianas Trench.

That's more of a movie trope. The ISS has had leaks, they are not explosive decompression. It makes sense too, the pressure vessel only has to hold in 1 atm, and we can manage to breathe a lot less than that.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#587

Post by cubefox »

mathsmath wrote: post #360
cryptonector wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Failure of the tanks would undoubtedly have been catastrophic. Partial failure of a flight control surface proved survivable.

It's also worth noting part of the craft flew (intentionally) without heat tiles, and another part with thinner tiles. They're gathering a ton of data to make it robust! Many of these engineers built Falcon 9, and I have a pretty high degree of confidence they'll shake out the issues. SpaceX operates very differently from traditional aerospace, so we'll likely see many more issues come up before Starship is human rat…

Getting it human rated is likely much harder than reusing the upper stage a couple of times. The difficulty is that Starship has 1) no launch abort system, and 2) the belly flop landing is much more dangerous than conventional and proven capsule based landing. To get the system human rated, they may have to fly tens or even hundreds of flawless cargo missions first.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#588

Post by xcv123 »

FredPret wrote: post #555
xcv123 wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Conditional surrender would have been completely unacceptable And some would argue that nuking entire cities is completely unacceptable.

Allied options were: 1. Invade. Expected Allied casualties of 300k all the way to much more than a million. Expected Japanese casualties: tens of millions, perhaps up to literally all of them. Previous Japanese strongholds fought to the last man, earlier in the war the Allies invaded an island with 11000 Japanese soldiers, and I think 47 of those eventually surrendered. The rest died. The civilian populations on thes…

6. Accept Japan's request for peace negotiations. Stop fighting and begin negotiating their conditional surrender.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#589

Post by dzhiurgis »

flerchin wrote: post #429
HPsquared wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The oceans are very hostile to humans too, really not much less than space, and a lot of ocean-going vessels are rusty hulks.

A naked human can survive the ocean for 3 orders of magnitude longer than they can survive space.

Up until 90s or so more people been on moon surface than sailed around world non-stop single handed.

Now it’s a race every few years - Vendee Globe. Something like half do not finish.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#590

Post by aeternum »

KiwiJohnno wrote: post #552
aeternum wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of the weight however is oxidizer which you could theoretically eliminate since the rocket is surrounded with various amounts of oxygen depending on launch trajectory. A scramjet power first stage for example could overcome the tyranny of the rocket equation (at least on earth).

Not necessarily as much as you think. The issue is orbital velocity is an absolutely bonkers high velocity. Nothing can even come close to that velocity in the atmosphere. The SR-71, fastest air-breathing aircraft ever flow topped out at around 1/9th of orbital velocity. Yes scramjets could certainly beat that speed, once they are developed but even if that doubles the speed of a SR-71 (which already was pushing the…

Right but the SR-71 had a pretty significant fuselage cross-section that is basically pure drag. If going for max efficiency, the entire nosecone of the rocket should probably be the air intake. Basically take one of the SR-71's engines put it vertical and mount the payload inside of it under the shock cone. TWR needs to be high enough to eliminate the need for wings.

Some of the newer missiles like the BrahMos are designed like this and have a ramjet powered second stage to save on oxidizer. It doesn't reach anywhere near orbital speed, but with this design, the shock cone takes the majority of the heating vs. the SR-71 where there were many exposed parts and materials.

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