StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Honestly, I could see the same pressures driving the expansion of the US and Soviet nuclear arsenals also driving us towards lunar military bases. The whole point of such massive nuclear arsenals was precisely to ensure a second-strike capability (in the event of a US/USSR first strike). A moon base...

What it says in the title, basically. I'm already planning on going through the Smyth Report/ Atomic Energy for Military Purposes , Hewlett and Anderson's The New World 1939/1946 , and Reed's The History and Science of the Manhattan Project once I can dig up a copy, but I was wondering if there was ...

...is it just me, or is one of the preconditions for power armor that you need to have some kind of armor plating that's cost-effective to produce on a small scale, but whose production cost increases substantially if you try to make it in bulk? Because that's one of the underlying assumptions behi...

...is it just me, or is one of the preconditions for power armor that you need to have some kind of armor plating that's cost-effective to produce on a small scale, but whose production cost increases substantially if you try to make it in bulk? Because that's one of the underlying assumptions behin...

Ghetto edit to my post above: I screwed up, iron's Young's modulus is 91 GPa according to Engineering Toolbox, its ultimate tensile strength is 170 MPa. So it won't deform that much, but it'll probably get a chunk torn out of it by the shot.

Would this be that well-protected, anyways? It should be proof against anything lighter than Confederate field guns and it could have mounting points for logs as additional armor. Given that once emplaced it likely won't move the added weight shouldn't hurt too much. Of course, that idea relies on ...

All for the upside of having two guns in protected positions with the pipe dream of actually getting this thing to trundle at the enemy if the stars align and it's working, ready, and in position with a fresh crew as your army is in a position to attack into the enemy. Would this be that well-prote...

...not gonna lie, I have no idea how they're going to get out of this. Like, is there even any way, mechanically, that Durkon can break the control Count Durkula has on him at this point, because I wager that's the only reinforcement they're liable to get at this point.

In fairness, some of that is apparently in future developement. The Guardian explicitly mentioned that the nuclear-powered cruise missile was something they were planning to DEVELOP, at least.

LadyTevar wrote: ↑2018-02-17 04:33am Now that was a nasty little computer hickup.

I was going for "deliberate and subtle hacking attempt", but I'm assuming that falls under "computer hiccup".

...okay, so my anxieties over the current state of my home country may be influencing my writing a tad. Just a tad.

Something I tossed together when my brain sparked while perusing Atomic Rockets. I am a one-shot semi-autonomous space denial weapons platform. In more pedestrian phrasing, you might call me an orbital mine. What I am, regardless of the terminology, is a pair of tubes massing some five hundred kilog...

I wasn't around for the last tax code revision; would anyone from that era mind elaborating on what it took last time to revise it and the odds in the present of revising corporate tax rates back up (within the next couple decades, at least)?

Ah, shoot. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/20/republican-tax-cuts-democrats I think many Democrats and independent political observers are puzzled by the intensity with which Republicans are pursuing their tax cut. It’s not politically popular and may well lead to the party’s defe...

I'm noting that basically all of the examples cited come from before the Industrial Revolution; are there any nations that could've successfully conquered Britain after they began to industrialize aside from perhaps post-WWII United States?

Aside from notable examples like Caesar and the Normans, has there ever really been a contemporary power that had thr capability to invade and conquer all of Great Britain?

Speaking of, does anyone know whether they've confirmed that the nuke the Norks initiated about a month back was a hydrogen bomb, or just a really big fission weapon?

Pardon me, but does anyone know if Stuart's still around? It'd be nice to get his take on the situation.

Would it really be proper to say that the people running North Korea and the actual average North Korean citizen would have the same understanding of the geopolitical situation, though? I mean, Un was Western-educated, unless my memory fails me, so I personally find it unlikely that he doesn't at le...

Sorry, let me just see if I've got this right: weak-to-strong deterrance is basically predicated on the idea that while you, the "strong" one, can obliterate me, I, the "weak" one, can cripple you, for a given value of cripple. Hence, it makes zero sense for the weak power to lau...

Does anyone know whether the Norks would see a successful intercept as provocation? I vaguely remember examples of the Soviets getting tetchy about US ABM systems in the 1980s? since that would mean that they could obliterate the USSR and be relatively shielded from the retaliatory strike (undermini...

Ralin wrote: ↑2017-09-16 10:56pm

Enigma wrote: ↑2017-09-16 04:36pm I wonder if the Japanese or the SK retrieved any of these missiles.

Why exactly would they go through the effort even if they could?

More accurately gauge the Norks' level of development in materials science, industrial quality control, and the like?

'Humans' routinely survive aircraft crashes and we're a damn lot more fragile then missile components It's not like the missile belly flops into the water at full power. Humans in airplane crashes also don't hit the ground in freefall going several hundred meters a second, and also don't have an ex...

Would there be enough to retrieve at all? Splashdown isn't exactly a gentle process, and the ocean's pretty deep off the east coast of Japan.

Broomstick wrote: ↑2017-09-15 08:18pm It's not the US public they have to scare - the US public is, by and large, a herd of dumb, ill-educated panic-prone animals. It's the US government, the people who actually have control over the US arsenal, they have to convince not to attack them.

Yeah, I see what you mean. Mea culpa.

Of course, I can absolutely see Orange Kim going "Fuck the Chinese, they can't tell us what to do!" ...Why the hell do you think they're firing these missiles over Japan, specifically? Someone else pointed out earlier in this thread that the Norks just don't have a lot of good options whe...