Staines [they/them]

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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2020

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  • You cannot indefinitely force people to be part of a nation when they don’t want to be, and the violence will always continue in cycles until freedom is finally attained. In order for people in an occupied territory to truly want to integrate with their brutal occupiers, they have to be able to offer them a far far better life than they would have had otherwise. Of course, a nation that has never managed to achieve true democracy since the fall of the soviet union, and is undergoing total economic collapse will never be able to offer that better life - so war and resistance against the occupation will continue on and on indefinitely, until the occupation stops. When you’re fighting against people who are trying to occupy your land and subject you to forced ethnic assimilation, even things that are otherwise morally grey become justifiable when it helps ensure the kind of ultimate freedom that will end a prolonged cycle of hegemonic violence. If those occupied people didn’t want to be part of Ukraine, why spend almost a decade forcing them to be Ukrainian at gunpoint? Fuck Kyiv and the full-scale civil war waged against people it claimed dominion over, and bless Russia, for all its many, many, many flaws, for its intervention against such immoral violence. Typically, liberals respond to liberal arguments and they can swallow bait hook, line, and sinker.

    Outside of the moral arguments, people respond to fear that the UK press stokes. Sir Arthur Travers Harris, the commander of the RAF Bomber Command in WW2 is famously quoted as saying, “The Nazi’s entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they’re going to reap the whirlwind.” Missiles made in Britain, and aimed by British command centers are killing Russians right now. They could bomb the fuck out of the UK right now and they’d simply be getting even. Maybe bombing them isn’t the right course of action if we don’t want them to bomb us?





  • It’s worth noting that the Zhuque-3 is considerably girthier than the Falcon-9, and unlike the Falcon-9, it actually has the ability to launch things into low-earth-orbit and return to the launch site. Currently, although the Falcon-9 can technically do so for higher, easier orbits, it has a minuscule payload capacity when returning to the launch site - this is why it lands downrange on a barge. ZQ-3 also uses much cleaner burning Methane fuel, meaning that it might stay usable after launch; the Falcon-9’s kerosene engines are dirty and require a full rebuild before the rocket can be used agian.

    Both rockets use 1950’s Soviet gridfin tech, which for some reason people often assume SpaceX invented?

    China currently has very high commercial launch demand too, so LandSpace won’t have any shortage of customers.



  • The US Navy can’t go back to steam catapults so they’ll just humor Trump and delay.

    The issue with the USN’s half-century old steam catapults is that due to mechanical limitations, they operate at roughly the same power level every time. This is acceptable if you want to lob something heavy like a fighter jet into the sky on full afterburner decade-after-decade. Consider, however, for the sake of argument, that US Navy has increasingly gotten into the business of feeding vast numbers of expensive drones to Iranian air defense. If you try to fire a much lighter twin-towers-era unmanned wedding-bomber-drone off a carrier via a steam catapult, it tends to accelerate it to mach-fuck, which causes cumulative damage to both the drone and the catapult, which ultimately deprives the Iranians of their rightful and well earned dronefeast. Ripping the landing gear off a drone, or slamming the piston of a steam catapult at full-speed into the end of the catapult track is bad for the imperial machine, right??

    Electromagnetic catapults can be precisely dialed in to the perfect power level for whatever you want to yeet. Perfect for when you want to toggle between tossing a murder-drone or a chudian Tom Cruise to war. - The issue with the hexbear-famous USS Gerald R Ford - the prototype which is set to replace the entire Nimitz fleet - is that to save weight and reduce complexity, the 4 catapults have their critical electrical systems paired. If one catapult fails or needs work, it takes out the adjacent catapult. This means that if your catapult fails in a critical moment, everything is twice as bad as it would be with a steam catapult. Obviously, this is a new system with many many new parts which can experience failures in new and exciting ways. This pairing issue is the thing I can see them resolving in future Ford-type carriers. I think they’re planning to build 5 more, pending the results of the USS Fords torturous hell-cruise. The advantage of a steam catapult is that failures were isolated to the specific catapult. You could launch as many Tom Cruisesque patriotic heroes as you wanted, even if the system was determined to fail and you could only launch him one at a time; regardless of how many people it took to rescue him after he got shot down by Iranian air defense on the cheap.

    The US Navy is currently undergoing a naval design and building crisis, badly (extremely badly, actually) failing two large scale attempts to design a new class of ships; including one where the successful, proven blueprints were actually provided for them by their Europeon vassals, which they mangled beyond usability to the point where they declared the project a dead-end. The US at this point is simply rebuilding the same ship with some minor improvements from the usable standard-template-construct of the Arleigh Burke class that they’ve been building for 38 years with minor improvements. This class of warship is old enough that it even has its own dedicated TV show. – Their only latest, observable success is the Gerald R Ford, a 50 year overdue project which is THE ship of Hexbear styxian poop-starvation-laundry fire fame – and that’s, frankly, if you don’t include sheer the bullshit (sorry Iran, I support you, but don’t believe you) knifefight claims.

    The worlds largest navy, the Peoples Liberation Army Navy, has never used steam catapults. Instead, they went straight from buying an old Soviet ski-ramp carrier from the Russians under clandestine (it’s a casino, an alter to capitalism, we promise) means for institutional training, to building an electromagnetic catapult carrier prototype carrier (Fujian). Fujian was commissioned in 2025 and has been used by the Chinese to rapidly learn the skillset of carrier operation. The Chinese have now begun implementing the lessons learned to build two (of six “planned”) new electromagnetic catapult carriers to operate stealth drones. These carriers will be the largest in the world, exceeding US "super"carrier designs, with the same number planned as the USS Gerald R Failure. The Chinese have decided to plan/build the same number of super-duper carriers for drone operations in defensive local ocean control as the US are even dreaming of building smaller next-gen carriers to maintain their crumbling fucking empire. Thing is, you know they’ll fucking do it, because the Chinese don’t bullshit this stuff, they just do it because they’re clear headed and have real, actually existing seriously (AES) industrial capacity with actual existing seriously (AES) leaders. Naval ships and naval policy are the true herald of national trajectory on the global state. The US Navy is failing, and being casually eclipsed by China - who builds a new warship factory every time the US even tries and fails to build a single prototype warship - and I think the Chinese will actually legitimately use them purely defensively to shield their meteoric rise. The US Navy and Trump is failing to the point that they lost a war against a nation of beautiful poets, and the only successful war they’ve prosecuted recently is against the worlds most dangerous bus driver, who sits in a cell accused of bullshit charges.

    Socialism. Is. Winning.

    Materialism is the dominant factor on this planet. Pretending only gets you so far, and the US has reached that limit.


  • It’s not intentional - the author has stated that he tries to avoid his stories being “woke”. The stories he writes often include themes about international cooperation to save something, and as such they tend to swerve around the liberal condemnation of “authoritarianism”. For western books, the idea of international cooperation means China/Russia featuring prominently coming to the rescue, but if Andy Weir was Chinese, the same trope would be, for example, a JAXA spacecraft helping out a beleaguered Taikonaut.

    For a moment, consider how incredible it is that a movie clearing the low bar of “considering foreigners as human” is enough for us to ask if a movie is friendly to the idea of socialism.


  • I had a little vision of the future. Lathe touching time.

    The distinction of the “second missile age” over the “first missile age” is the use of GPS systems for accurate terminal guidance to the point that conventionally-armed missiles have become a useful tool. All major powers have deployed/are deploying regional high-orbit GPS navigation systems. Some of those regional systems (BeiDou-2) are now global (BeiDou-3). Low-orbit data constellations like Starlink could theoretically also be doubled up as jamming platforms to drown out the higher-orbit navigation networks over certain areas, since all GPS constellations operate on the same narrow band of frequencies. Both of these constellation types (high-orbit GPS / low-orbit data) have dual purpose economic and military use, which assures their continued existence because they are a national boon rather than just a military expenditure.

    Most space powers have anti-satellite missiles which can be used to hit low-orbit spy satellites, but in order to take out large numbers of low orbit satellites in string constellations like Starlink, you’ll need something with a better cost ratio; a mobile(ship/air) laser system which you can sit underneath the orbital string and fry them beyond use one by one.