Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Can you expand on this?
Read twitter files.
Russian Assets Reportedly Seized at Baikonur Cosmodrome by Kazakh Authorities
121–130 of 152 posts
Re: Russian Assets Reportedly Seized at Baikonur Cosmodrome by Kazakh Authorities
#122Re: Russian Assets Reportedly Seized at Baikonur Cosmodrome by Kazakh Authorities
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the USSR actually traded with the West. Made tons of money selling oil, gas and grain. Putin's actions are devoid of economic logic.
The political logic works even if Russia’s economy tanks he can point to people outside the country as scapegoats. If Russia had normal trade relations with other countries and everything was in shambles then the only blame would be internal. The crazy thing is their population was crashing so fast adding territory for the people is more important than adding territory for the natural resources.
> The crazy thing is their population was crashing so fast
Basically the case of every eastern european country since fall of communism
Re: Russian Assets Reportedly Seized at Baikonur Cosmodrome by Kazakh Authorities
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hoping that a nuclear power breaks apart is a nightmare. This is true for states like Pakistan but when you have a stockpile in the thousands and a nuclear logistical distribution like Russia it is nearly guarantee that we have several (terroristic) nuclear explosions over the next decades and probably half a dozen rogue states more. And do not assume that this is a peaceful transition. Putin is very much concerned a…
This already happened once when the USSR broke up. The world got through that. I think in the end you can't dismiss how much it is in every state's self-interest to not start a nuclear exchange.
You can draw a straight line from the USSR breaking up, to Ukraine giving away their nuclear weapons via the Budapest Memorandum, to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia (which was a signatory). States are going to be less likely to give up their nuclear weapons, even with treaties, because treaties can be easily broken.
Re: Russian Assets Reportedly Seized at Baikonur Cosmodrome by Kazakh Authorities
#125Re: Russian Assets Reportedly Seized at Baikonur Cosmodrome by Kazakh Authorities
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re right. 45.6deg vs 51.8deg N. The eastward boost you get from the earths rotation is just: 2 * pi * cos(latitude)/day so the difference is: 2 * pi * r_Earth*(cos(45.2deg)-cos(51.8deg))/day = 40m/s. Which doesn’t sound like a lot but can add up. I compared Plesetsk (Russia) vs Baikonur (Kazakhstan) in the Silverbird Astronautics calculator for Soyuz v2-1B using 3.3m fairing and without Fregat, and I got 1552kg e…
I never considered this and your response made me ask google the question: "Where is the best place to launch a vehicle?" "The land at the equator is moving 1670 km per hour, and land halfway to the pole is only moving 1180 km per hour, so launching from the equator makes the spacecraft move almost 500 km/hour faster once it is launched." Neat, thanks for such an interesting answer.
Kourou, at 5° North, is very nicely positioned.
Re: Russian Assets Reportedly Seized at Baikonur Cosmodrome by Kazakh Authorities
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
To run space programs they'll need money. Even with resources they have running both war and space programs will lead to catastrophic consequences. But I suspect that's exactly the way they'll choose.
For the time being, the West has been supplying Putin's troops with plenty of money (taxes from selling natural resources go into the federal budget, which is used to fund the military, and therefore the war). They made record profits last year. https://svtv.org/gas-for-putin-war/
IDK about gas, but the price cap on Russian oil is lower than what Russians need to break even. They are now losing money on each exported barrel, but IIRC they can't just stop the production; the wells would become unusable.
Of course, the price cap is only in force since December 2022, so the effects haven't fully shown themselves yet.
Re: Russian Assets Reportedly Seized at Baikonur Cosmodrome by Kazakh Authorities
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn’t China create advanced electronics?
> Doesn’t China create advanced electronics? It creates advanced electronics in the sense that it assembles them. It does not manufacture advanced or even mid-grade chips though which is the crucial point. That’s all Taiwan, Korea, Japan, USA.
SMIC makes 7nm chips, which is considered high-end. It's not the highest of the high end, but it's not far from that, and it's definitely considered high-end.
Re: Russian Assets Reportedly Seized at Baikonur Cosmodrome by Kazakh Authorities
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I had read that a good number of anti-war people had gone there both before and after mobilisation. In fact I was watching a video by the youtuber "nfkrz" (from Chelyabinsk, left after the invasion and now lives in Tbilisi) who made a really interesting point. You can still travel to the EU if you're a Russian passport holder, however you do still need to get a visa from the destination country's embassy inside…
I have (had?) a lot of friends there, some of whom have emigrated permanently, some have moved here to Kazakhstan when Putin declared his "partial mobilization", and have returned when it was declared over (although it isn't over legally…) If you haven't spoken up publicly against the war or did anything else that might endanger you personally, it has been quite safe to return to the country for the past few months.…
> chauvinism sells better than compassion.
I was trying to make sense of this sentence and only understood you were upset with me once I read my comment back. It looks like you’ve parsed what I said as “we should only issue visas to Russians who left” but I meant “we should simply issue visas who left”. The word “just” is overloaded and makes it a little ambiguous :)
I think only a really ignorant person would think someone who deserves to be punished because of their nationality or country of residence.
Re: Russian Assets Reportedly Seized at Baikonur Cosmodrome by Kazakh Authorities
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an important distinction. The majority of the aerospace know-how in the Soviet Union came from Ukraine, not from Russia.
What you’re missing is that factories were built in Ukraine as a part of reconstruction after WW2, but engineers were mostly Russian, relocated from Russia. These days pretty much all Ukrainian space industry is dead, and it was dead even before war. Most competent people left for Russia or USA. Yes, they still provided some components just because it was cheaper to build them in the original factory, but in a last f…
Regarding engineers, I don't think that's true at all — as a simple example, two of the three lead engineers on the Soviet space program were from Ukraine.