271–280 of 397 posts
>"We urge the US side to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space," AFP quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying. I'm no geopolitics whiz but "we urge the USA to be unprepared for war" is a pretty comical statement to me.
Weapons in space is like putting nukes and missiles in international waters 12 miles from coast of all other countries, to reduce strike time.
Space really should be a neutral ground like Antarctica. Especially since the consequences of space debris might trigger the Kessler effect [1], denying humanity future access to low-earth orbit for the considerable future. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
There is the Outer Space Treaty (1967), which forbids placing "nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner", but you can get around that by saying that it's just a conventional weapon, not nuclear or WMD. If it's for space to space combat, you could say that any weapon is potentially a WMD due to the Kessler potential, but if…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
China is not Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela or some other third world country that the US has fought in over the past few decades. You can't just destroy one of their satellites for free. And I can bet the US didn't do it, because that would be a major escalation, especially now that Xi is coming to the US and there are rumors that the US wants a deal.
So it broke apart by itself?
It’s not clear what may have caused the Yaogan-50 (02) satellite to break apart, but it may have been a propulsion or battery failure, or it may have itself collided with another object or space debris."
It's most likely space-based missile defense, perhaps DOD secretly revived the Brilliant Pebbles ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles ) program? People hear "space weapons" and think Rods from God ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment ) but hitting a precise target on the ground from space is really hard, like tying to hit a bull's eye from hundreds of miles away. The more practical applica…
It probably felt really hard decades ago. But we are already well into the era where you can target a particular seat of a car driving on a highway with a nonexplosive kinetic weapon.
Wasn't the shuttle originally planned to be a weapon as well, capable of intercepting and sabotaging satellites using its loading bay workshop? There are also the various "mini shuttles" the three letter agencies fly around the earth for several hundred day stints of doing who knows what exactly with who knows what capabilities (other than having a similar sabotage potential as the original shuttle perhaps).
And since you brought up the X-37B, I have to admit, I absolutely love its dynamic flight capabilities whereby it literally banks off the upper atmosphere like a silver surfer to rapidly change orbits at perigee. Quite an interesting bit of tech that did evolve from the shuttle and is still doing work this very day.
> "a kinetic kill vehicle of some sort - so a vehicle that would release a projectile of some sort that would ram into a satellite and destroy it" Semi related "Rods from God": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
So, it's a pistol on a robotic arm, or what? Kinetic weapon doesn't say much. A pillar with a tiny engine that just incrementally increases the speed could be devastating at a distance though, I'm sure I've read this as some solution to a problem (or attempted solution to some problem) in some sci-fi book, can't remember which though.
But to me it really doesn't make more sense than using nukes though unless they are coming from another body in space, dropping shit from normal earth orbital altitudes is like throwing peanuts compared to something coming out of solar orbit, and actually hitting your target is 10,000x harder. And anyone with a space program large enough to put such weapons in place could more easily produce nukes instead.
Wasn't the shuttle originally planned to be a weapon as well, capable of intercepting and sabotaging satellites using its loading bay workshop? There are also the various "mini shuttles" the three letter agencies fly around the earth for several hundred day stints of doing who knows what exactly with who knows what capabilities (other than having a similar sabotage potential as the original shuttle perhaps).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Iran has shown how utterly pointless and ineffective these expensive weapons are. Make no mistake, the US has exercised incredible restraint when it comes to Iran. If it wanted to, they would be nothing left of Iran at all.
Iran is 90 million people and a gigantic mass of land. Go read some history about what industrial quantity of ordinance was required to somewhat destroy European cities in the 40s. America does not have a bomber fleet capable of doing that in Iran, no matter the will. Strategic Bombing in WW2 is an unfathomable scale. The US, just the US not Britain (who had similar numbers on their own), dropped 1.4 million tons of…
A single Trident can (officially) carry 4-5 warheads, up to 476 KT each.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you had time to plan it, you'd probably want to put the warhead on a satellite launched by a normal satellite launcher. It'll look benign until you detonate it.
Plot twist - someone has already thought about this and took measures of unimaginable scale...so that, no one, ever, wipes out, humanity, with nukes.