281–283 of 283 posts
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If it made pew-pew sounds (inside the station, obv), mission accomplished regardless of it actually being able to shoot anything down, up or everywhere.
The story that I read somewhere was that it was tested once but the recoil either damaged the station or it would have affected its orbit so they never tried it again. There was also Polyus which was going to be an entire battle station designed to counter Reagan's SDI satellites[0], but it never made it into orbit. It had lasers, though. [0] https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-rise-fall-the-sovie...
They'd cover around 1.5 billion km (<1 billion miles), and be past Saturn's orbit if fired away from the Sun. But it would not achieve escape velocity on its own, and the station was obviously moving relative to Sun and Earth, so we'd have to account for it too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For every complex, difficult and hard problem, there is a simple, easy and wrong solution. Paint obviously is not the right tool for making seals air tight.
> For every complex, difficult and hard problem, there is a simple, easy and wrong solution. > Paint obviously is not the right tool for making seals air tight. So my obvious solution is obviously too obvious to be right, and obviously the right solution is not obvious. The sad thing, is you are just reiterating what I've said already, without providing any useful answer. "Paint obviously is not the right tool" is a…
So, the sealant has to be either a 2-part epoxy (harder to mix and apply), or a UV-cured epoxy. It has to adhere to a vast array of surfaces, since we cannot predict if the next leak will be in aluminum, cracked ceramic, silicone gasket, rubber gasket, plastic.... Anything it outgasses must be extremely inert, so that it doesn't cause a new problem when it reacts with a different surface (the gas on the ISS is never diluted by a giant planetwide reservoir).
Paint is obviously not a two-part epoxy nor a UV-curing epoxy; nor is it guaranteed to have fully inert outgases; finally it is not likely to be adherent to all the possible surfaces.
It's as if the situation requires a robotic diamond drill, and you propose we hit it with a big rock. The big rock won't do.