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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

#541

Post by FredPret »

xcv123 wrote: post #511
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…

Japan was already trying to negotiate conditional surrender when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. The US demanded unconditional surrender, and they nuked hundreds of thousands of civilians to force that demand. The bombing of Dresden is arguably a war crime by todays standards. It was unnecessary. Remember that we were allied with the Soviet Union (Joseph Stalin was the "good guy" on our side). After WW2 he was giv…

Conditional surrender would have been completely unacceptable given that they were the aggressor and had a million troops in China, and wanted to hold on to their conquests after the war. 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.

Your points about the Communists stand, but keep in mind that the West always considered them the least bad option. They started out on Hitler's side and they only got half of Europe because they already had it occupied with masses of troops. The West couldn't have pushed them back to Moscow unless they were willing to fight a couple more years, killing millions more.

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

#542

Post by jccooper »

bee_rider wrote: post #492
dylan604 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that tickles me is that it has to slow down to reach terminal velocity rather than the normal way of thinking about objects speeding up to reach terminal velocity.

I’m probably missing something important here, but isn’t this true of most things that de-orbit into an atmosphere?

Yes, but that's not the case for most objects you interact with in everyday life. All, most likely, unless you're in a particular job.

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

#543

Post by xcv123 »

lupusreal wrote: post #540
xcv123 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General George S. Patton: "We may have been fighting the wrong enemy (Germany) all along. But while we're here (on the Soviet border), we should go after the bastards now, 'cause we're gonna have to fight 'em eventually." https://books.google.com/books?redir_esc=y&id=32DxAAAAMAAJ&d...

I literally just told you that the Soviets should have been taken out. This fact doesn't change the moral calculus of the strategic bombings against Germany and Japan. The fault was not doing the same to the USSR.

I understood what you wrote. The interesting part of this quote is apparently General Patton also realised they should not have been fighting against Germany in the first place. There are other quotes from him that indicate some regret of fighting against Germany instead of the Soviets, by the end of the war.

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

#544

Post by xcv123 »

FredPret wrote: post #541
xcv123 wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan was already trying to negotiate conditional surrender when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. The US demanded unconditional surrender, and they nuked hundreds of thousands of civilians to force that demand. The bombing of Dresden is arguably a war crime by todays standards. It was unnecessary. Remember that we were allied with the Soviet Union (Joseph Stalin was the "good guy" on our side). After WW2 he was giv…

Conditional surrender would have been completely unacceptable given that they were the aggressor and had a million troops in China, and wanted to hold on to their conquests after the war. 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. Your points about the Communists stand, but keep…

> Conditional surrender would have been completely unacceptable

And some would argue that nuking entire cities is completely unacceptable.

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

#545

Post by [deleted] »

xcv123 wrote: post #544
FredPret wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conditional surrender would have been completely unacceptable given that they were the aggressor and had a million troops in China, and wanted to hold on to their conquests after the war. 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. Your points about the Communists stand, but keep…

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

[deleted]

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

#546

Post by elevatedastalt »

hulitu wrote: post #296

> Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico I see a lot of newspeak used with Musk's firm. Is this intentional ?

What?

Which word in that is Newspeak? Unlike other companies Tesla and SpaceX usually use very straight-speak.

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

#547

Post by askvictor »

me_me_me wrote: post #156
kemotep wrote: post #36

I am one of the people skeptical about Elon’s specific claims of Starships abilities specifically about his Mars ambitions. Today’s test, if the Starship reentry is as successful as the booster soft landing will be absolutely a great achievement and a 100% mission success. This demonstration keeps SpaceX on schedule for their part of the Artemis 3 mission. Keeping the mission parameters simpler (no “refueuling” or do…

Anything Mars is pure BS. Just anything and everything. The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more complicated than moon. Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial. Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?

Even landing will be a huge problem. Think about the difficulties with the launch pad on Earth (engineering a launch pad for a heavy rocket is almost as hard as engineering the rocket itself). Well, to land a heavy rocket using retrofiring engines will require an engineered landing pad. Probably not quite as fancy as a launch pad, but you've got humans on the ship, so it will need to not bury itself completely, or melt the surface and weld itself to it, etc etc.

And that's before you start to think about a launch pad for the return mission. So you'd probably need to have launch a series of robots and factories to build this in advance. Maybe, but we haven't even come close to robots building something of that magnitude on Earth, let alone a planet that's quite different.

So, never say never, but it's a _long_ while off yet; long enough that social upheaval due to climate change will probably put a pause on any efforts for quite some time.

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

#548

Post by elevatedastalt »

krapp wrote: post #147
madaxe_again wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those 10k+ people would all be doing something different if it weren’t for that one guy - so ultimately, yes.

How do you know? It's entirely feasible someone other than Elon Musk could have founded a similar company with similar goals, the same or equivalent competent staff, and had the same success. There is no unique magic sauce that Elon brings to the table here, other than money.

That noise you keep hearing at night? It's the sound of goalposts being constantly shifted.

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

#549

Post by jccooper »

thehappypm wrote: post #484
PaulHoule wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A positive way of framing it is that atmospheric recently is free. If the Earth didn’t have an atmosphere it would take just as big a velocity change to land as it does to get into orbit and getting to be orbit would be as hard as an interplanetary flight. It's worse than it sounds because the rocket equation has a logarithm in it... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation double the Δv means you sq…

No atmosphere would be much easier. There's enough energy in a Tesla battery to for the Tesla to reach escape velocity. If you could simply drive at max acceleration (and the car didn't fall apart, and the tires continued to have grip, and a million other reasons why this is impossible) eventually you'd reach escape velocity and still have some percentage left. In a more realistic sense, a long railgun type system wo…

An airless Earth would be extremely hard to land on. You could easily get to quite low altitude, but orbital velocity at sea level is almost 8km/2... faster than at "orbital altitude".

Once you hit an orbit intersecting the ground, you have to scrub all your speed in whatever that amount of time is, which is gonna be short. It's basically an orbital launch in reverse.

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

#550

Post by UberFly »

tim333 wrote: post #371
somenameforme wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'worst' thing about watching space launches on streams is that you simply cannot grasp how ridiculously huge these things are. Even if, like in the stream today, you see a water tower for some scale, the size discrepancies just make it so hard to intuit. Starship is 121 meters high. That's something taller than a football field, jetting off into space! I've only gotten to see a decommissioned Space Shuttle in per…

I've got the black and white arty photo as my lockscreen which gives you an idea https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/E46BxzjjUkpthVBNE6k8mn-192...

Here's the full-sized pic:

https://rare-gallery.com/mocahbig/1305111-SpaceX-Starship-Bl...

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