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US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

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Re: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

#361

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

mschuster91 wrote: post #288
wongarsu wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US famously did that in the 60s (detonating nukes at roughly the height of today's ISS)[1]. Also some less famous ones, including a Soviet test that resulted in the EMP destroying a power plant [2]. Properly aimed at a populated area it would be devastating. And you can detonate bombs far from your enemy's country, then let earth's magnetic field lines transfer the EMP pulse to their territory. Good luck defendin…

> That said, it'd take far more than one bomb to take down a country, unless we are talking city states Hit the ten biggest metropolitan areas [1] with one nuke each and you'd hit about 88 million people and probably an even bigger share of all industry that isn't farming. The biggest problem is power transformers, there isn't much capacity in manufacturing them, it's already a bottleneck thanks to regular replacemen…

Why do you exclude farming? Even if the tractors and other machines would still work, where would the harvest go under such circumstances? By which means? Think about how industrialized all that shit is meanwhile, with 'precision agronomy' by means of GPS, and so on? And as you said yourself: Transformers. Cooling for perishable stuff without electricity? Wanna rely on some Amish with horsedrawn carts?

Edit: Will the stocks of fertilizer last long enough, before some normalcy sets in again?

Re: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

#362

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

gorgoiler wrote: post #211
mapt wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bullet travels at a relative speed of about 250 to 1250m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 600-16000 joules. Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules. Getting hit by something moving that fast is roughly equivalent to getting hit by a whole ammo case of bullets at the same speed. There is no armor that can protect you…

While armor is indeed much harder in space, it is not impossible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield Whipple shields use spaced plates to disperse the impact of a projectile on the first plate over a larger area on the second plate, and so on and so forth over four or five plates such that the final plate is not penetrated. My father worked on high velocity impact ballistics and has some very nice multiple…

New development in sight: https://phys.org/news/2026-09-eggshells-aluminum-material-si...

Re: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

#363

Post by mschuster91 »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #361
mschuster91 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said, it'd take far more than one bomb to take down a country, unless we are talking city states Hit the ten biggest metropolitan areas [1] with one nuke each and you'd hit about 88 million people and probably an even bigger share of all industry that isn't farming. The biggest problem is power transformers, there isn't much capacity in manufacturing them, it's already a bottleneck thanks to regular replacemen…

Why do you exclude farming? Even if the tractors and other machines would still work, where would the harvest go under such circumstances? By which means? Think about how industrialized all that shit is meanwhile, with 'precision agronomy' by means of GPS, and so on? And as you said yourself: Transformers. Cooling for perishable stuff without electricity? Wanna rely on some Amish with horsedrawn carts? Edit: Will the…

Many farmers still have really old diesel tractors around. These things run fully mechanical, sans the starter motor maybe. If there is one thing farmers are good at, it's in-field improvised repairs.

Refrigeration is mostly an issue with meat and milk, but eh, humans have managed to do fine for millennia without it.

Fertilizer however, oh boy, that will be a nightmare. We can get by now that we know about stuff like nitrogen fixers or the beneficial effects of livestock like chicken, but it requires a serious effort to rethink mindsets.

Re: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

#364

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

Fwirt wrote: post #209
onion2k wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target. True. If you really want to mess space up forever you need to launch a rocket full of sand, slingshot around the moon, and gently sprinkle it in an retrograde orbit. That would be fast enough for something as small as a grain of sand to create pinhole-sized punctures in anything put in orbit, and after a few years the sand would be spread out…

Space is really, really big. I think it's hard for us to comprehend just how much space is in space, especially in 3-dimensional terms. It would take a lot of sand to mine all of the useful orbital space, and that's just LEO. There's tons of room in higher orbits. It would measurably increase the risk of passing through LEO on the way to other destinations and make some orbital planes unusable for e.g. Starlink or hu…

Then why are they making so much fuss about (tracked) small things drifting by, violating the "safety box" around a satellite or station?

Re: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

#365

Post by pseudohadamard »

voidUpdate wrote: post #13
jonkoops wrote: post #8

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…

>the survival guns on Soyuz (if they still fly them), used for defending yourself against wild animals in the event that you land in a forest or similar

Not to mention the 23mm cannon on Salyut 3, in case you needed to take out the wild animals from orbit.

Re: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

#366

Post by 0dayz »

etc-hosts wrote: post #343
SubmarineClub wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very convenient of you to not include what China is doing in Nepal, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and on the Indian border. And if China hadn’t stuck its dick into the Korean War, the whole peninsula would probably be as prosperous as the south.

[flagged]

This comment makes little sense since north Korea didn't exist before the Korean war, and it's was only AFTER the war that the north enjoy some prosperity due mainly to the south not having as much investment as the north.

Re: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

#367

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

mschuster91 wrote: post #363
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you exclude farming? Even if the tractors and other machines would still work, where would the harvest go under such circumstances? By which means? Think about how industrialized all that shit is meanwhile, with 'precision agronomy' by means of GPS, and so on? And as you said yourself: Transformers. Cooling for perishable stuff without electricity? Wanna rely on some Amish with horsedrawn carts? Edit: Will the…

Many farmers still have really old diesel tractors around. These things run fully mechanical, sans the starter motor maybe. If there is one thing farmers are good at, it's in-field improvised repairs. Refrigeration is mostly an issue with meat and milk, but eh, humans have managed to do fine for millennia without it. Fertilizer however, oh boy, that will be a nightmare. We can get by now that we know about stuff like…

You know that most of the chickens we have won't make it for long, outside?¹ Because they are all highly 'optimized' breeds? Even coming with a handbook for that breed, several hundred pages long. Defining exactly what to feed when in which amounts and intervals, but also temperature and lighting. Where again does one get that stuff, when everything is chaos? Could more normal, robust ones be bred and distributed fast enough to compensate? In the required amounts?

¹As folks from PETA and the likes have discovered when freeing them, several times in multiple places. Beginning since at least two decades ago, meanwhile.

Re: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

#369

Post by kragen »

pennomi wrote: post #342
kragen wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not correct, and the experiment has been done a number of times with no real effect, most memorably in 01961, when Project West Ford put 480 million copper needles in 3500-km-high medium Earth orbit (MEO); but it's a little bit challenging to understand why. The first reason is that outer space is just inconceivably big, even just the space in low Earth orbit (LEO). LEO has very nearly the same surface area a…

Wouldn’t any needles launched prograde be put into a higher stable (though obviously elliptical) orbit?

To set the scenario, we're talking about the orbits which ball bearings would end up in if you had a cardboard box full of ball bearings in a stable, circular low Earth orbit, and you set off an explosive in the middle of the box to scatter the bearings. You're wondering if the ball bearings that the explosive happened to launch prograde would end up in a stable elliptical orbit with a higher apogee rather than re-entering the atmosphere.

I'm not that strong on orbital dynamics, but I think the answer is that you're right. The ball bearings launched directly prograde would be in a new stable elliptical orbit with the perigee at the explosion point. That means I was wrong about the debris only affecting the orbital altitude where the explosion happened. But most of the ball bearings would still re-enter the sensible atmosphere within a single orbit.

The Δv required to deorbit from LEO is surprisingly small. In https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/iss-deorbit-... we find that deorbiting the International Space Station to a controllable place in "a remote area in the ocean" from its current 415 km altitude requires only 57m/s of Δv. The more precisely controlled Space Shuttle re-entry used 90m/s of Δv: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/33172/calculating-.... It seems crazy that a change in orbital speed of only 1% would be enough, but there it is. There's a lot of explanation in that SE question.

The ISS document also explains that even the enormous ISS will deorbit by itself in "roughly one-to-two years without reboosts", which is why most LEO satellites are in somewhat higher orbits.

Re: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

#370

Post by Forgeties79 »

ang_cire wrote: post #318
Forgeties79 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the bar for this conversation “zero instances ever”? Our laws are informed by our values. How can we possibly argue they aren’t an attempt at legislating ethics and morals?

I think the point is more, "you can't legislate holding those values". Laws are informed by the interests (which may include morals) of the law-makers, and many people do base their morals in part on what laws exist, but most people believe that at least some laws are immoral, and some immoralities are legal. Many law-makers want people to view illegalities as immoralities, but that's not how most humans operate.

The goal is the society by and large keeps those values as a whole. The values inform the laws and lead to a certain result that, in theory, reflects the value (politicians decide murder isn’t ok -> murder illegal -> fewer murders -> society now, in effect, broadly reflects a people that don’t think murder is ok). Whether people “buy in” is a different matter and is less material, though given enough time laws can cause people to shift culturally (morally, ethically). A society with lax rules on dumping trash will likely lead to more people not caring about the ethics of it over time as legal permissibility can lead to shifts in what we think is morally ok.

Much of Western Europe/Scandinavia has a stronger renewables culture than the US, for instance, but a lot of that was originally (and still is) driven by necessity. Fuel is more expensive, they don’t have as much space to dump things or build, etc. so they need to be more efficient which has also led to a “green culture.”

Laws and culture/morality/etc. aren’t as independent as you think IMO

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