It says something interesting about the economics if, even with the massive penalty of the exponential rocket equation, just paying more crew and shipping more stuff by boat comes out as not worth it.

TBF bears are pretty great. Bears probably win over women, too.

So what ever happened to floating launchpads? Did they really work that poorly?

Necessary, no. Better, yes.

The more delta-v you require (so plus or minus that 500km/h) and the more payload you have, the more rocket you need. If you have fixed rocket size and/or a fixed budget, launching at high latitude translates into either less delta-v left over to go places or less payload.

There are partial or full exceptions if you’re launching into certain orbits. For a mapping satellite that goes straight north/south as the Earth rotates below I would guess you might even prefer a higher-latitude launch.

I don’t have hard data, but it seems self-evident just from my personal experience. And going back to the original point, it’s a nation of 400 million.

Yeah, occasionally. Honestly that’s fine, the annoying thing is when they assume everyone else is, too.

Yup. It was after something else little me was actually trying to watch. Couldn’t unsee.

Yeah, I haven’t noticed an unusual amount. Lemmy is still mostly Americans, and then maybe Brits and Germans. Just anyone that can speak English and has had broadband long enough to acclimatise to nerd culture, basically.

Yeah, there’s an annoying amount of controversy over whether “Iran was trying to make a bomb”. It gets mixed answers from experts, because the literal answer is one thing, the effective answer is another, and there’s no way to explain it responsibly in a word or two.

Iran was/is trying to almost-but-not-quite get the bomb. Whether just going for it would of worked better or if the US would have stepped in sooner is an interesting question. It’s possible the Ayatollah wasn’t lying about having personal moral issues with it, though.

Uh, so other side of the border from me is red state Montana. Anyway, I think the idea is you load it onto something else once it’s in and take it to an actual target. It’s just a long border that’s hard to seal perfectly.

If there’s a note of disbelief in there, I’d like to point out America has nukes and uses them as a deterrent the same way. Like, whether proliferation is morally justified, of if we should just accept our fate in that scenario, is a serious question we should ask, but you don’t really have a moral highground about it.

Obviously I’m not saying killing people is cool, and we know that 2/3 of Americans didn’t ask for any of this.

TIL.

Delivery would be an issue for sure. Then again, if the potential target is America “guys on quads” would work. If the target isn’t America, America will do it for us. Edit: Because they own the Western hemisphere, and we’re their bitch.

I mean, they’re not wrong, they could get away with a lot less without the nukes.

North Korea will fall to something other than invasion now. For example, things usually don’t go too well for female monarchs, because the men around them are dicks.

How directly civilians are targeted and how formally varies quite a bit, actually, even in ancient wars.

Actually, Canada got in on the ground floor and we have everything we’d need. They say we’re about two months out at any given time, going the plutonium route.

Then again, we’re pretty used to the luxuries of not being an isolated pariah state.

Not surprising. This would be the moment to do it.

If they want to destroy America, the Bin Laden gambit is proven to work.

Do they ever wonder if they might be the badguys, when they’re going to a meeting about how to put ultranationalists in charge of Germany?

In the third world you see people selling VPN access in person at markets. At this point junior can probably just download it themselves, but at some point maybe that opens up as a career opportunity.

I can’t tell if they haven’t thought through what that would mean for them themselves, or they know it’s BS but it’s still good for marketing.

Spoiler alert: because it hurts.

I guess turning it into a mystery gets more clicks than “check out how many times this exact molecule has evolved in parallel”, even if that’s the actual interesting part.

Nobody really looks at the past decades that way here, and even in the third world there’s plenty of America fans.

You tried to hedge that, but you’re basically just agreeing with QAnon, on grounds of a different conspiracy theory.