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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

#841

Post by Aeolun »

arrowsmith wrote: post #800
Aeolun wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, the books I’ve read in Japan make it seem more like the emperor was just tired of an unwinnable war. The nuclear bombs and soviet invasion were simply a catalyst. They just got a surrender note from the US at the proper time for that to be the topic under consideration (aside from, you know, surrendering to the people that tricked you being a generally bad idea). I like how they ultimately accepted the unconditi…

> the emperor was not to be blamed. Even though he should have been: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/hirohito-the-war-crimina...

Maybe. He was pretty young at the time, and surrounded by old guys telling him what to think.

Contrary to what this article says, I’m absolutely convinced that not prosecuting the emperor was the right call. The country would have more or less literally exploded overnight.

The fact the man himself told everyone to surrender was of more importance than almost anything else done, both at government and civilian levels. Most of the internal efforts to stop the surrender were around stopping him from declaring as such.

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

#842

Post by lupusreal »

pdonis wrote: post #829
lupusreal wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that meant to be an oblique reference to the meme that America "initiated war" with Japan by choosing not to literally fuel Japans imperial ambitions ? This reddit take is the most moronic of them all (and if this is what you're talking about, you got the decade wrong.) Japan was not entitled to foreign oil, nor the foreign land they intended to take by force using that oil, and America choosing not to give it to…

> Is that meant to be an oblique reference No. I meant exactly what I said. I didn't say anything about Japan except that the USSR attacked them--more precisely, they attacked the Japanese troops in Manchuria. Not just in 1945--in the late 1930s.

Okay, so the Soviets attacked the Japanese after the Japanese started their invasion of China, and that is meant to somehow reflect poorly on America? Get a fucking grip, stop huffing weeb fumes.

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

#843

Post by racional »

pdonis wrote: post #828
FredPret wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that stopping all Axis aggression in WW2 was good for everyone. The West may have been imperfect but was orders of magnitude better. You don’t have to convince me that the Soviets were evil. They were part of the Allies purely because Hitler put them there. They then immediately started propagandizing the world to undermine the genuine contributions and general legitimacy of the West.

> stopping all Axis aggression in WW2 was good for everyone Stopping Axis aggression against the US, Britain, France, and other Western countries was good for everyone. Stopping Axis aggression against the USSR ? I'm not so sure. Particularly not since the price of doing that was condemning Eastern Europe, China, and a good chunk of Southeast Asia to tyranny.

Stopping Axis aggression against the USSR

And with it, the enactment of the Final Solution in its territories.

Are you sure you mean to say that you're "not sure" if stopping this project in its tracks was a good idea or not?

We know that this wasn't the primary motivation behind the decision of the Soviet-Western alliance, of course. But it was indisputably one of the key outcomes of the war and that cooperation.

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

#844

Post by zardo »

arrowsmith wrote: post #795
Aeolun wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your goal is to terrify enemy civilians, which is not a legitimate military strategy This seems like a perfectly legitimate military strategy? It’s a strategy which the allies used to great effect in Germany and Japan :/ The Germans used rockets instead of bombers because they couldn’t, not because they didn’t want to.

I think by "legitimate" they meant morally legitimate. Humanitarian, honourable, chivalrous, whatever you want to call it. Intentionally targeting noncombatants isn't any of those things, even if it's effective at demoralising the enemy. Of course we bombed the hell out of German noncombatants too, so we don't exactly have an unsullied record.

Or not a violation of the Geneva convention that was a response to exactly those practices.

> even if it's effective at demoralising the enemy.

It wasn't.

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

#845

Post by racional »

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.

The fault was not doing the same to the USSR.

You realize that this is exactly how the war between Oceania and Eurasia started, right?

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

#846

Post by themaninthedark »

pdonis wrote: post #825
themaninthedark wrote: post #820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirohito_surrender_broadcast The emperor directly mentions the atomic bomb in his address; "Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it wo…

> The emperor directly mentions the atomic bomb in his address...He only tacitly mentions the battle situation I know that. And I said why: to save face. He didn't want to tell the Japanese people that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria was the reason. The atomic bomb made a much better reason for public consumption. That doesn't mean it was the actual reason that drove the decision, which was made in private.

So without the atomic bomb, the emperor and the peace faction did not have a way out and the fighting would have continued.

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

#847

Post by jjk166 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #736
dragonsky67 wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love that they are deliberately tempting failures with the no and thin tiles. In a lot of ways they will learn far more from the heat shield burn through around the flap(s) than they would have if they had been "lucky" and it had all gone perfectly. You during testing you want things to fail, that is the point of testing. If it's all successful you only learn that under those conditions your design works, but if it…

That's an often underappreciated aspect of engineering. When parts last longer than expected, it is considered something that needs "fixing". It is a signal that the part can be made cheaper, lighter, etc... If SpaceX had gone with heavy, thick tiles, and they did their job because they were overspecced, it is that much less payload capacity. Even value engineering, which is often criticized when it comes to consumer…

As they say, any idiot can make a bridge stand, it takes an engineer to make a bridge barely stand.

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

#848

Post by Valakas_ »

kaliqt wrote: post #741
kemotep wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk held an event earlier this year where he outlined how SpaceX was going to get 1 million people to Mars by the 2050’s. That’s not really being skeptical. The plan he outlined is so ambitious that it is entirely unrealistic to the point of being almost straight fantasy. The number of Starships needing to be built, the amount of launches necessary to send that many people, and other details don’t line up. I am not…

It would be significantly less people required to be sent as if enough fertile male-female pairs are sent then childbirth can 4x or more the original number of colonists.

Technically, only 1 male is needed

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

#849

Post by pdonis »

FredPret wrote: post #837
pdonis wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My original and subsequent posts were that the nuke made the world safer. Post-1945 battle deaths dropped to near-zero by comparison to pre-1945. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a well known logical fallacy. That is what you are doing here. Also, the relevant comparison, as I said before, is not post-1945 vs. pre-1945. It is something like post-1945 vs. pre-1914, so that the comparison involves peacetime conditions on…

I’m claiming a direct causality between how terrible the nukes were and how peaceful the subsequent decades have been. The cold war was cold because of M.A.D. And I will compare any periods I want. The nukes fell in 1945, so I compare all of human history before that and after that. There’s a clear and massive decline even if you only look at pre-1914 rates.

> I’m claiming a direct causality

You are inferring direct causality based on one event following another. That is the logical fallacy I referred to.

> There’s a clear and massive decline even if you only look at pre-1914 rates.

That's not what I see, so I guess we'll just have to disagree.

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

#850

Post by pdonis »

themaninthedark wrote: post #846
pdonis wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The emperor directly mentions the atomic bomb in his address...He only tacitly mentions the battle situation I know that. And I said why: to save face. He didn't want to tell the Japanese people that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria was the reason. The atomic bomb made a much better reason for public consumption. That doesn't mean it was the actual reason that drove the decision, which was made in private.

So without the atomic bomb, the emperor and the peace faction did not have a way out and the fighting would have continued.

> without the atomic bomb, the emperor and the peace faction did not have a way out

That's not clear either. Without the atomic bomb they might well have found another way to save face.

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