They gave P-39 to the "Commies" they wanted to Atom Bomb, 5 years later.
Oceania has always been at war wit Eurasia.
You see, the reasons were pantomime money games - then and now.
But the Aircobra! I'd forgotten! Mid-engine, with a cannon through the propeller shaft... Very interesting. If I recall, there were "Hugo Gernsback" type ideas to build dirigible aircraft carriers, with P-39s that would exit from a ramp, in the air... This was in the 30's, when Bell had a prototype, and LTA wasn't yet a disparaged idea. Way crazy.
The Russians rather liked the P-39, using it for low-level attack against German armor where the 37mm cannon could be used to good effect. It would also serve in that role in the Pacific, particularly in the Solomons, where the problems of liquid-cooled engines with fragile radiators in a tropical climate were made obvious. It apparently had the maneuverability of a concrete sled and when it faced Japanese opposition was shot down regularly. I wonder how eager pilots were to crashland one, given the mass of the Allison V-12 right behind the seat.
The P-39 did bring several innovations: tricycle gear in a fighter, mid-mounted engine with gear-driven prop to accommodate the nose-mounted cannon; car-style doors; heavy cannon armament. The attention paid to tight streamlining and integration on the prototypes was a drawback when it came to production, though, as there was no room for a turbosupercharger, fuel could be carried only in the wings, and upgrading the armament was difficult. Addition of self-sealing fuel tanks, radios, armor, and guns made the production P-39 over a ton heavier than the prototype.
Can someone explain to me why a spacecraft must enter the atmosphere at blinding speeds. Why cant they just slowly enter the atmosphere? drastically reducing the mega heat a fast entry makes saving equipment and more importantly life?
Because a spacecraft in orbit is, by definition, traveling at blinding speed - somewhere around 8 km/s. (Which reminds of a common misconception - the problem in getting something to orbit is not getting it high enough, it's getting it fast enough to stay there. That's why we don't launch satellites from airplanes or balloons - sure, they can get you higher, but they cannot get you much faster. Of course, sounding rockets or suborbital craft like Scaled Composites' SpaceShipTwo don't attempt to reach orbit. That one in particular reaches less than a fifth of the velocity required for low orbit; they just aim for altitude, for which a carrier aircraft is indeed handy.)
To leave orbit you can either burn fuel to slow down, or you can adjust your orbit slightly so that it intersects the upper atmosphere. In that case friction will do the work for you, but all that velocity will be converted to heat.
You could not (with today's technology) carry enough fuel to orbit to later drop your speed, relative to earth, to near zero and let you float down. We're still waiting on the magic fuel beans to make that happen.
"This shit is so unconstitutional"
please point to me where the constitution say we can't have mandatory insurance?
That's not how the Constitution works. See the 10th Amendment, which reads in full, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Meaning, broadly speaking, that the federal government gets ONLY those powers enumerated in the Constitution, and if you want to say that something is constitutional, the burden is on YOU to prove it so. To my reading, nowhere does it mention forcing citizens to purchase anything from another privately-owned entity.
If you want to try to coerce the citizens to buy insurance using the power of taxation... go for it. But don't expect everyone to like it and don't call it constitutional unless you can show that it is so.
It will cover the 48 mile engagement envelope of an S-300 (24 miles each way), in 38 seconds..,,
Think about this. If you're intercepting a Mach 6 target with a missile whose peak speed is Mach 6, the only geometry that works is effectively a head-on collision. If the target passes even a few miles to either side of the launcher, it will be safe. If it gets within a few miles of the launcher, it's safe - a missile will not have time to climb to its altitude. If it gets past the launcher at all, it is absolutely safe.
The S-300 missile operator will realistically have a window of perhaps less than 10 seconds in which a launch against an approaching Mach 6 target at altitude can put the missile in the path of the target. His best chance would be to launch early, before the target is in engagement range, lofting his missile higher than the target so that it will have speed to manuever with on the way down. Very few air-to-surface systems support this kind of "loitering" engagement, however.
BTW, read the specs of weapons systems - particularly those not tried in combat - with a more critical eye than the third-world potential customers they are marketed to. Iraq bought vast quantities of sexy Soviet air defense technology and French combat aircraft in the '70s and '80s; it's all so much scrap metal now.
What are we getting for the average $446K we spend on heart surgeons?
A few things: Malpractice insurance (since Congress refuses to pass tort reform for fear of offending attorney donors), a subsidy for people that we force him/her to treat but don't pay for, money to employ staff to navigate the incredible maze that is private insurance and Medicare/Medicaid, the diminishing returns on the latter at the whim of Congress or state legislatures who happen to have gotten themselves into a budget pinch but know that the public doesn't mind "sticking it to the rich doctors", interest on all the student loans the surgeon incurred in getting through the broken doctor training process we have in the U.S.
The other sucking sound you hear is the vacuum created by all the physicians leaving or preparing to leave practice rather than deal with more government regulation, have their livelihood progressively reduced by government fiat, and see healthcare decisions that are properly theirs or the patient's (i.e. those knowledgable about them or those with a vested interest in them) be made by anonymous bureaucrats in Washington.
In a few years the only physicians practicing in the United States will be those educated in the Third World.
The Democrats have countered by claiming that Congress & staff already have to purchase off the exchanges. That's *sorta* true. They do have to purchase off the exchanges but they get a stipend most Americans don't get. If they were to pay out of pocket, they'd get far less bang for their buck when buying healthcare. There have been claims that were such a program to be implemented Congress might suffer from a "brain drain" because staff would quit if the benefits weren't as good. From the looks of things, if we're talking about a brain drain in Congress I would say that ship sailed long ago.
Speaking as a US taxpayer... members of Congress and their staff made a choice to spend their career attached to the public teat. They should not have done so if they didn't like the taste.
Similarly, you could view the "shutdown" as an exercise in showing us, the public, who in government we could do without. Turns out to be almost all of them. A mass reduction in force is in order, beginning with those who have been going out of their way to make trouble for taxpayers. As the minions of government have been telling us for years, things are bad everywhere. Time to make them bad in Washington as well.
The fact is, without a lot more information from the OP, this question simply can't be answered. It could be one of dozens of different things... all we can do is give odds on the likelihood of what it might be... and I'd put the NSA pretty far down the list. The 'NSA Effect' is the same thing happening now in the media that caused people to beat the crap out of random muslims out of 9/11, or jerkwads in Florida to shoot black kids...
Or, for that matter, black thugs shouting "This is for Trayvon" beating and robbing random white people.
You can use GRE or IPIP tunnels to make a VPN which will be completely unencrypted. I normally use IPSEC over the top of that where encryption is required.
It should be noted that VPNs using IPSEC are especially sensitive to high latencies. If you don't like that foreign companies in your nation are using VPNs (and thus potentially side-stepping any filtering or surveillance measures) you can throw in the occasional delay and make their tunnel unusable. I have seen this in China.
Well said. Urban/suburban warfare is a nightmare for even an attacker with far more advanced weapons, artillery and air superiority, and evens the tables somewhat. Even a.22 rifle (or anything stronger than abusive language, for that matter) can be effective in a close-quarters ambush from cover.
When was the last time a soldier refused to obey an illegal order, and what happened to him? As far as I'm aware, only one refused to participate in the illegal war in Iraq, and he was court martialed.
Heavily under-reported, I suspect. The consequences for both are so severe that you probably get a lot of "sir, you DO realize you've asked me to frag an orphanage, right? You don't want to be Nancy Grace's next guest, sir... why don't we check with headquarters..."
I think it will be a while before our moon territory revolts. One of the main things missing for this to happen is a population.
And gaseous oxygen, and liquid water. For long term independence, there's also the near total absence of nitrogen and carbon on the moon to consider. No, they're going to be dependent on Earth for quite a while.
...Judging by the way you speak about it, do you call it the War of Northern Aggression?
Yes. My family's church in rural Tennessee was burned as a "military target" by Union regular troops, as was the one-room school. Their livestock and stored food were taken without compensation during a hard winter, their fences destroyed, their household belongings looted, soldiers quartered on their property. Neighbors were imprisoned and released only on payment of bribes to the local Federal Provost Marshal. All this to families that owned no slaves, but were unfortunate enough to live on the wrong side of the Ohio River.
Though they had largely resisted joining either army up to that point, they subsequently joined the Confederate side with alacrity; not because of slavery, but because their home had been brutally invaded.
Yes, war is hell, as Sherman so famously remarked. Particularly to civilians on the losing side.
The only siege-sized stockpiles of ammo (1.6 billion rounds, purchased for reasons unexplained - "cheaper in bulk" does not cut it) held in the continental U.S. outside military jurisdiction belong to the Department of Homeland Security.
More broadly, the issue is not the suspension of citizens' rights in time of war on U.S. soil. It's the unilateral action to do so by the Chief Executive.
Lincoln's power grabs were not limited to telegraph surveillance.
Very early in the war - only a month after Fort Sumter - Lincoln effectively suspended the writ of habeas corpus. A Maryland legislator, John Merryman, was taken from his home (asleep at 2am, actually) without warrant and held in military custody, charged with no crime. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court issued a ruling that Lincoln had overstepped his authority; the President simply ignored this, supporting his position in political speeches instead.
Lincoln was very much a political animal, taking power when it suited his needs and when he could get away with it. Contrast with his behavior in the Trent affair, in which Confederate diplomats were seized from a British ship in international waters. Lincoln only backed down when the British openly began war preparations and promised to break off diplomatic relations.
I have my doubts that, had he survived to continue his last term, Lincoln would have been eager to give up the sweeping powers he'd grabbed during the war. Even Andrew Johnson's impeachment was a Congressional backlash against his continuance of Lincoln's habit of acting without regard to the Legislative or Judicial branches. (It was precipitated by his dismissal of Stanton, yes, but the broader issue infuriating Congress was his stubborn pursuit of his own ideas on Reconstruction - a mule-headedness not in the least ameliorated by a spirit of compromise or attractive personality. During the 1866 presidential campaign he compared himself [favorably] to Jesus Christ in stump speeches.)
An interesting footnote appears in the writings of Lincoln's bodyguard and U.S. Marshal Ward Hill Lamon. It claims that the President issued a warrant for the arrest of Chief Justice Taney after his ruling in the Merryman case. (It's unclear why, if it existed, it was never served.) This accords with the fears expressed by Taney in his own unpublished memoirs, but is generally discredited by historians today. It's amusing, in a dark way, to consider the long-term repercussions to the Republic of arresting and, most probably, holding without charge a Supreme Court justice who had the audacity to disagree with the president.
I would think that the fastest (timeline) to having a large presence in orbit around the moon would be to boost ISS to lunar orbit...
Taken together with your.sig (life isn't permanent) this is pretty funny. Orbits around the moon are not permanent, particularly low ones. Its mass distribution is not spherical and it has concentrations of mass in odd spots here and there. The eccentricity of the moon's orbit, together with these, add up to perturbations of any lunar orbit. You can occasionally spend a goodly amount of fuel to keep it there, of course.
We should have had a base up there for years - an ideal place to serve as a jumping off point for science elsewhere in the solar system, even if the Moon itself is "barren".
Uh, no. Although there are perhaps reasons to go to the moon, there are good reasons not to as well. The 28-day lunar night will make it difficult to ever grow food or use solar power there, and the almost complete lack of volatiles will make any lunar resources extremely difficult to extract on site. And before anyone natters on about iron and titanium on the moon, look at the abundances of these; I've got better ores growing grass in my back yard.
And then there's that gravity well. It doesn't sound like much, but it's enough to be annoying and costly (all those steel beams you're manufacturing at the lunar Pittsburgh are going to need to get back to Earth orbit to be valuable, and the delta-vee for that is somewhere around 2.8 km/s.) To be long-term viable, the fuel for that is going to have to be produced on the moon (see aforementioned lack of volatiles.) The delta-vee budget to send something to the outer solar system from the moon's surface is only slightly less than to send it directly from low Earth orbit.
The Lagrangian points in the Earth-moon system are, in many ways, more attractive for settlement, provided that near-earth asteroids prove useful for raw materials. And even the surface of Mars makes more economic sense in supplying exploration and exploitation of the outer solar system.
Putting a telescope on a planet (or minor planet) is a waste. It's then limited to looking outward in one hemisphere, cannot point its antenna at Earth constantly, and is subject to the vagaries of atmosphere (even Pluto may have a bit in parts of its orbit.) It's also far more expensive (especially if there is no atmosphere) to land on something.
Let it float free in space, where it can ensure that it doesn't blind itself by looking at the sun, can easily move to point at any desired target, and can constantly talk to Earth.
Were this proposal not tied to another mission, perhaps the best approach would be a highly elliptical polar solar orbit. If sufficiently elliptical, the telescope would exceed its lifetime before it had to worry about passing through the ecliptic again.
I'm being facetious, of course, but the problem with resources on the moon is the same one Earth has - a gravity well. The moon's is considerably less of a challenge, but is enough to make using lunar resources anywhere else uneconomic. And most of what we call "resources" on the moon would be considered "dirt" on Earth - just because we could extract metals from dirt doesn't mean that it's economically useful to do so. (Admittedly, this might well be simply because we haven't explored the moon sufficiently to recognize ores and ices that would be economically viable.)
The good reasons for going to the moon have nothing to do with shipping its stuff elsewhere. The lunar farside would make an excellent radio observatory, but even that use could be trumped by a free-flying observatory farther out.
Even more problematic are permanent human settlements on the moon. The long day/night cycle is not conducive to growing anything and prevents solar power from being useful. Being on the moon includes most of the difficulties of space travel - vacuum environment, radiation - with the added vexations of gravity (good for humans, tough on exports) and the 28-day bake/freeze thermal cycle.
I suspect that human lunar exploration is going to simply be a yardstick by which nations measure their technological prowess. Once they've planted their flag in the lunar soil and brought home a few rocks, they'll call it a day. Hopefully they then will move on to more useful ways of exploiting space.
Hmmm. So, NASA says that they can be trusted. They will have 7 or more flights of F9 before a human flight. Likewise, Dragon will also have flown 7 or more times. So, what do you know that NASA does not?
That Congress will inevitably shank NASA's budget well before their choice of booster (Son of Shuttle) ever leaves the ground.
That last link is about the best I can find so far, and I'm running out of imagination and patience to search further. Enter your own terms, as you see fit, and I'm quite certain that you can find more instances of rocket engines being shut off, then restarted - all without an external ignition source.
If you use hypergolic fuel/oxidizer combinations, you need no ignition source at all - they burn on contact.The Shuttle OMS engines were an example of this; they used hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. So was the first and second stages of Titan rockets, the Russian Proton series, etc. Such propellants are often the juice of choice for flights of long duration, as well, since no ignition source is required and they store well at moderate temperatures and pressures. Restarts and cutoffs are as simple as turning the valves.
For a really nasty fuel/oxidizer combination, there's chlorine triflouride and just about anything. It ignites on contact with glass. When exposed to water it releases steam loaded with hydrochloric and hydroflouric acid vapors. Standard procedure upon accidental release is to flee to minimum safe distance.
It is mutually exclusive. Going to mars is a trillion dollar + nightmare and HUGE waste of money. If china wants to go to the moon and mars, let them. There is nothing out there that we need...
I would submit that humanity is in serious need of new frontiers.
It won't cost in the low tens of billions to go to Mars. With today's technology, if you wanted to go (and not kill everyone in the process) you literally have to put an armored space station up there and send it to mars. You'd need meters of lead between them and the sun for example just to keep them from dying from radiation exposure to the sun. That is going to cost 100's of billions to launch into space. You'd need a massive space ship with rotating sections to provide micro-gravity for the long time it would take to get there (months). You'd need the ship highly armored with many self-sealing sections for when it is punctured by micrometeorites (and those still might kill the crew)...
The sky is falling, eh?
The ISS has been floating in a far more hostile micrometeorite environment than either interplanetary travel or Mars orbit represents. For years. (And only occasionally has to dodge a flying bolt.) Think of all the debris we've added to the near-Earth region - all that is missing, at least for now, from the rest of the solar system.
As for radiation, there is no doubt that cosmic rays, and even more so, solar activity, represent a risk. However, the MARIE instrument on the Mars Odyssey probe (designed specifically to quantify this) indicated that even a long conjunction-type mission to Mars would likely not exceed the 1 to 4 Sieverts recommended as a career maximum for LEO activities. (To be fair, MARIE gave its life in pursuit of this study, but it was completely unshielded from solar events. Just about every Mars mission plan includes a shielded safe haven for the crew, and we can now give good warning of solar radiation events.) I suspect that there is no shortage of astronauts that would give far more than their career radiation exposure limit to be part of a crew to Mars.
There is a lot more to combat capability than is reported on "fly-offs", and dogfighting (which is the capability demonstrated in the videos you mention - the ones I saw, anyway) is not the preferred combat regime for any fighter pilot. I greatly prefer sticking a missile up his tailpipe from the longest range possible before he knows I'm even there. For instance, of around 40 confirmed kills by U.S. aircraft in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, 29 were with the obsolete Sparrow radar-guided missile, whose minimum range is about a mile. (And some of these were MiG-29s, shot down by F-15s of even older vintage.)
The pilot is what makes an airplane a weapons system. If for some reason (money being the usual - a typical mid-career USAF combat pilot has already cost his taxpayers several million dollars in training) you don't provide your pilots with sufficent and ongoing training and flight hours, he's simply operating a target. This has been borne out in every conflict since air war began - since you mentioned it, Germany in 1944-1945 is an excellent example - flying sometimes technically more advanced airframes, they lost big time. Fuel shortage and previous casualties combined to force them to field many pilots who were woefully undertrained. And while in the modern era third-world air forces have often been willing to procure modern weapons systems, historically they have been savaged by countries with better-trained men.
I would not put too much credence in the sales literature of any aircraft manufacturer. Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Argentina... all bought fighter aircraft off the marketing "glossies". The remains of their pretty airplanes dot various landscapes and sea floors.
Australia's an industrialized English-speaking federation of states with a dedicated capital territory that fought at our side in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I, Afghanistan, and Iraq II. And we've got a defense agreement and a free trade agreement with them.
Why would we bother to invade? They're already US!
... despite the fact that Australia (and NZ, for that matter) were rather poorly used by Britain in WWI and by the U.S. in WWII.
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They gave P-39 to the "Commies" they wanted to Atom Bomb, 5 years later.
Oceania has always been at war wit Eurasia.
You see, the reasons were pantomime money games - then and now.
But the Aircobra! I'd forgotten! Mid-engine, with a cannon through the propeller shaft... Very interesting. If I recall, there were "Hugo Gernsback" type ideas to build dirigible aircraft carriers, with P-39s that would exit from a ramp, in the air... This was in the 30's, when Bell had a prototype, and LTA wasn't yet a disparaged idea. Way crazy.
The Russians rather liked the P-39, using it for low-level attack against German armor where the 37mm cannon could be used to good effect. It would also serve in that role in the Pacific, particularly in the Solomons, where the problems of liquid-cooled engines with fragile radiators in a tropical climate were made obvious. It apparently had the maneuverability of a concrete sled and when it faced Japanese opposition was shot down regularly. I wonder how eager pilots were to crashland one, given the mass of the Allison V-12 right behind the seat.
The P-39 did bring several innovations: tricycle gear in a fighter, mid-mounted engine with gear-driven prop to accommodate the nose-mounted cannon; car-style doors; heavy cannon armament. The attention paid to tight streamlining and integration on the prototypes was a drawback when it came to production, though, as there was no room for a turbosupercharger, fuel could be carried only in the wings, and upgrading the armament was difficult. Addition of self-sealing fuel tanks, radios, armor, and guns made the production P-39 over a ton heavier than the prototype.
Can someone explain to me why a spacecraft must enter the atmosphere at blinding speeds. Why cant they just slowly enter the atmosphere? drastically reducing the mega heat a fast entry makes saving equipment and more importantly life?
Because a spacecraft in orbit is, by definition, traveling at blinding speed - somewhere around 8 km/s. (Which reminds of a common misconception - the problem in getting something to orbit is not getting it high enough, it's getting it fast enough to stay there. That's why we don't launch satellites from airplanes or balloons - sure, they can get you higher, but they cannot get you much faster. Of course, sounding rockets or suborbital craft like Scaled Composites' SpaceShipTwo don't attempt to reach orbit. That one in particular reaches less than a fifth of the velocity required for low orbit; they just aim for altitude, for which a carrier aircraft is indeed handy.)
To leave orbit you can either burn fuel to slow down, or you can adjust your orbit slightly so that it intersects the upper atmosphere. In that case friction will do the work for you, but all that velocity will be converted to heat.
You could not (with today's technology) carry enough fuel to orbit to later drop your speed, relative to earth, to near zero and let you float down. We're still waiting on the magic fuel beans to make that happen.
"This shit is so unconstitutional" please point to me where the constitution say we can't have mandatory insurance?
That's not how the Constitution works. See the 10th Amendment, which reads in full, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Meaning, broadly speaking, that the federal government gets ONLY those powers enumerated in the Constitution, and if you want to say that something is constitutional, the burden is on YOU to prove it so. To my reading, nowhere does it mention forcing citizens to purchase anything from another privately-owned entity.
If you want to try to coerce the citizens to buy insurance using the power of taxation... go for it. But don't expect everyone to like it and don't call it constitutional unless you can show that it is so.
It will cover the 48 mile engagement envelope of an S-300 (24 miles each way), in 38 seconds..,,
Think about this. If you're intercepting a Mach 6 target with a missile whose peak speed is Mach 6, the only geometry that works is effectively a head-on collision. If the target passes even a few miles to either side of the launcher, it will be safe. If it gets within a few miles of the launcher, it's safe - a missile will not have time to climb to its altitude. If it gets past the launcher at all, it is absolutely safe.
The S-300 missile operator will realistically have a window of perhaps less than 10 seconds in which a launch against an approaching Mach 6 target at altitude can put the missile in the path of the target. His best chance would be to launch early, before the target is in engagement range, lofting his missile higher than the target so that it will have speed to manuever with on the way down. Very few air-to-surface systems support this kind of "loitering" engagement, however.
BTW, read the specs of weapons systems - particularly those not tried in combat - with a more critical eye than the third-world potential customers they are marketed to. Iraq bought vast quantities of sexy Soviet air defense technology and French combat aircraft in the '70s and '80s; it's all so much scrap metal now.
What are we getting for the average $446K we spend on heart surgeons?
A few things: Malpractice insurance (since Congress refuses to pass tort reform for fear of offending attorney donors), a subsidy for people that we force him/her to treat but don't pay for, money to employ staff to navigate the incredible maze that is private insurance and Medicare/Medicaid, the diminishing returns on the latter at the whim of Congress or state legislatures who happen to have gotten themselves into a budget pinch but know that the public doesn't mind "sticking it to the rich doctors", interest on all the student loans the surgeon incurred in getting through the broken doctor training process we have in the U.S.
The other sucking sound you hear is the vacuum created by all the physicians leaving or preparing to leave practice rather than deal with more government regulation, have their livelihood progressively reduced by government fiat, and see healthcare decisions that are properly theirs or the patient's (i.e. those knowledgable about them or those with a vested interest in them) be made by anonymous bureaucrats in Washington.
In a few years the only physicians practicing in the United States will be those educated in the Third World.
The Democrats have countered by claiming that Congress & staff already have to purchase off the exchanges. That's *sorta* true. They do have to purchase off the exchanges but they get a stipend most Americans don't get. If they were to pay out of pocket, they'd get far less bang for their buck when buying healthcare. There have been claims that were such a program to be implemented Congress might suffer from a "brain drain" because staff would quit if the benefits weren't as good. From the looks of things, if we're talking about a brain drain in Congress I would say that ship sailed long ago.
Speaking as a US taxpayer... members of Congress and their staff made a choice to spend their career attached to the public teat. They should not have done so if they didn't like the taste.
Similarly, you could view the "shutdown" as an exercise in showing us, the public, who in government we could do without. Turns out to be almost all of them. A mass reduction in force is in order, beginning with those who have been going out of their way to make trouble for taxpayers. As the minions of government have been telling us for years, things are bad everywhere. Time to make them bad in Washington as well.
The fact is, without a lot more information from the OP, this question simply can't be answered. It could be one of dozens of different things... all we can do is give odds on the likelihood of what it might be... and I'd put the NSA pretty far down the list. The 'NSA Effect' is the same thing happening now in the media that caused people to beat the crap out of random muslims out of 9/11, or jerkwads in Florida to shoot black kids...
Or, for that matter, black thugs shouting "This is for Trayvon" beating and robbing random white people.
You can use GRE or IPIP tunnels to make a VPN which will be completely unencrypted. I normally use IPSEC over the top of that where encryption is required.
It should be noted that VPNs using IPSEC are especially sensitive to high latencies. If you don't like that foreign companies in your nation are using VPNs (and thus potentially side-stepping any filtering or surveillance measures) you can throw in the occasional delay and make their tunnel unusable. I have seen this in China.
Well said. Urban/suburban warfare is a nightmare for even an attacker with far more advanced weapons, artillery and air superiority, and evens the tables somewhat. Even a .22 rifle (or anything stronger than abusive language, for that matter) can be effective in a close-quarters ambush from cover.
When was the last time a soldier refused to obey an illegal order, and what happened to him? As far as I'm aware, only one refused to participate in the illegal war in Iraq, and he was court martialed.
Heavily under-reported, I suspect. The consequences for both are so severe that you probably get a lot of "sir, you DO realize you've asked me to frag an orphanage, right? You don't want to be Nancy Grace's next guest, sir... why don't we check with headquarters..."
I think it will be a while before our moon territory revolts. One of the main things missing for this to happen is a population.
And gaseous oxygen, and liquid water. For long term independence, there's also the near total absence of nitrogen and carbon on the moon to consider. No, they're going to be dependent on Earth for quite a while.
...Judging by the way you speak about it, do you call it the War of Northern Aggression?
Yes. My family's church in rural Tennessee was burned as a "military target" by Union regular troops, as was the one-room school. Their livestock and stored food were taken without compensation during a hard winter, their fences destroyed, their household belongings looted, soldiers quartered on their property. Neighbors were imprisoned and released only on payment of bribes to the local Federal Provost Marshal. All this to families that owned no slaves, but were unfortunate enough to live on the wrong side of the Ohio River.
Though they had largely resisted joining either army up to that point, they subsequently joined the Confederate side with alacrity; not because of slavery, but because their home had been brutally invaded.
Yes, war is hell, as Sherman so famously remarked. Particularly to civilians on the losing side.
The only siege-sized stockpiles of ammo (1.6 billion rounds, purchased for reasons unexplained - "cheaper in bulk" does not cut it) held in the continental U.S. outside military jurisdiction belong to the Department of Homeland Security.
More broadly, the issue is not the suspension of citizens' rights in time of war on U.S. soil. It's the unilateral action to do so by the Chief Executive.
Lincoln's power grabs were not limited to telegraph surveillance.
Very early in the war - only a month after Fort Sumter - Lincoln effectively suspended the writ of habeas corpus. A Maryland legislator, John Merryman, was taken from his home (asleep at 2am, actually) without warrant and held in military custody, charged with no crime. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court issued a ruling that Lincoln had overstepped his authority; the President simply ignored this, supporting his position in political speeches instead.
Lincoln was very much a political animal, taking power when it suited his needs and when he could get away with it. Contrast with his behavior in the Trent affair, in which Confederate diplomats were seized from a British ship in international waters. Lincoln only backed down when the British openly began war preparations and promised to break off diplomatic relations.
I have my doubts that, had he survived to continue his last term, Lincoln would have been eager to give up the sweeping powers he'd grabbed during the war. Even Andrew Johnson's impeachment was a Congressional backlash against his continuance of Lincoln's habit of acting without regard to the Legislative or Judicial branches. (It was precipitated by his dismissal of Stanton, yes, but the broader issue infuriating Congress was his stubborn pursuit of his own ideas on Reconstruction - a mule-headedness not in the least ameliorated by a spirit of compromise or attractive personality. During the 1866 presidential campaign he compared himself [favorably] to Jesus Christ in stump speeches.)
An interesting footnote appears in the writings of Lincoln's bodyguard and U.S. Marshal Ward Hill Lamon. It claims that the President issued a warrant for the arrest of Chief Justice Taney after his ruling in the Merryman case. (It's unclear why, if it existed, it was never served.) This accords with the fears expressed by Taney in his own unpublished memoirs, but is generally discredited by historians today. It's amusing, in a dark way, to consider the long-term repercussions to the Republic of arresting and, most probably, holding without charge a Supreme Court justice who had the audacity to disagree with the president.
I would think that the fastest (timeline) to having a large presence in orbit around the moon would be to boost ISS to lunar orbit...
Taken together with your .sig (life isn't permanent) this is pretty funny. Orbits around the moon are not permanent, particularly low ones. Its mass distribution is not spherical and it has concentrations of mass in odd spots here and there. The eccentricity of the moon's orbit, together with these, add up to perturbations of any lunar orbit. You can occasionally spend a goodly amount of fuel to keep it there, of course.
We should have had a base up there for years - an ideal place to serve as a jumping off point for science elsewhere in the solar system, even if the Moon itself is "barren".
Uh, no. Although there are perhaps reasons to go to the moon, there are good reasons not to as well. The 28-day lunar night will make it difficult to ever grow food or use solar power there, and the almost complete lack of volatiles will make any lunar resources extremely difficult to extract on site. And before anyone natters on about iron and titanium on the moon, look at the abundances of these; I've got better ores growing grass in my back yard.
And then there's that gravity well. It doesn't sound like much, but it's enough to be annoying and costly (all those steel beams you're manufacturing at the lunar Pittsburgh are going to need to get back to Earth orbit to be valuable, and the delta-vee for that is somewhere around 2.8 km/s.) To be long-term viable, the fuel for that is going to have to be produced on the moon (see aforementioned lack of volatiles.) The delta-vee budget to send something to the outer solar system from the moon's surface is only slightly less than to send it directly from low Earth orbit.
The Lagrangian points in the Earth-moon system are, in many ways, more attractive for settlement, provided that near-earth asteroids prove useful for raw materials. And even the surface of Mars makes more economic sense in supplying exploration and exploitation of the outer solar system.
...far side of Pluto?
Putting a telescope on a planet (or minor planet) is a waste. It's then limited to looking outward in one hemisphere, cannot point its antenna at Earth constantly, and is subject to the vagaries of atmosphere (even Pluto may have a bit in parts of its orbit.) It's also far more expensive (especially if there is no atmosphere) to land on something.
Let it float free in space, where it can ensure that it doesn't blind itself by looking at the sun, can easily move to point at any desired target, and can constantly talk to Earth.
Were this proposal not tied to another mission, perhaps the best approach would be a highly elliptical polar solar orbit. If sufficiently elliptical, the telescope would exceed its lifetime before it had to worry about passing through the ecliptic again.
There's plenty to be found on the moon.>/p>
Like what?
I'm being facetious, of course, but the problem with resources on the moon is the same one Earth has - a gravity well. The moon's is considerably less of a challenge, but is enough to make using lunar resources anywhere else uneconomic. And most of what we call "resources" on the moon would be considered "dirt" on Earth - just because we could extract metals from dirt doesn't mean that it's economically useful to do so. (Admittedly, this might well be simply because we haven't explored the moon sufficiently to recognize ores and ices that would be economically viable.)
The good reasons for going to the moon have nothing to do with shipping its stuff elsewhere. The lunar farside would make an excellent radio observatory, but even that use could be trumped by a free-flying observatory farther out.
Even more problematic are permanent human settlements on the moon. The long day/night cycle is not conducive to growing anything and prevents solar power from being useful. Being on the moon includes most of the difficulties of space travel - vacuum environment, radiation - with the added vexations of gravity (good for humans, tough on exports) and the 28-day bake/freeze thermal cycle.
I suspect that human lunar exploration is going to simply be a yardstick by which nations measure their technological prowess. Once they've planted their flag in the lunar soil and brought home a few rocks, they'll call it a day. Hopefully they then will move on to more useful ways of exploiting space.
Hmmm. So, NASA says that they can be trusted. They will have 7 or more flights of F9 before a human flight. Likewise, Dragon will also have flown 7 or more times. So, what do you know that NASA does not?
That Congress will inevitably shank NASA's budget well before their choice of booster (Son of Shuttle) ever leaves the ground.
That last link is about the best I can find so far, and I'm running out of imagination and patience to search further. Enter your own terms, as you see fit, and I'm quite certain that you can find more instances of rocket engines being shut off, then restarted - all without an external ignition source.
If you use hypergolic fuel/oxidizer combinations, you need no ignition source at all - they burn on contact.The Shuttle OMS engines were an example of this; they used hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. So was the first and second stages of Titan rockets, the Russian Proton series, etc. Such propellants are often the juice of choice for flights of long duration, as well, since no ignition source is required and they store well at moderate temperatures and pressures. Restarts and cutoffs are as simple as turning the valves.
For a really nasty fuel/oxidizer combination, there's chlorine triflouride and just about anything. It ignites on contact with glass. When exposed to water it releases steam loaded with hydrochloric and hydroflouric acid vapors. Standard procedure upon accidental release is to flee to minimum safe distance.
It is mutually exclusive. Going to mars is a trillion dollar + nightmare and HUGE waste of money. If china wants to go to the moon and mars, let them. There is nothing out there that we need...
I would submit that humanity is in serious need of new frontiers.
It won't cost in the low tens of billions to go to Mars. With today's technology, if you wanted to go (and not kill everyone in the process) you literally have to put an armored space station up there and send it to mars. You'd need meters of lead between them and the sun for example just to keep them from dying from radiation exposure to the sun. That is going to cost 100's of billions to launch into space. You'd need a massive space ship with rotating sections to provide micro-gravity for the long time it would take to get there (months). You'd need the ship highly armored with many self-sealing sections for when it is punctured by micrometeorites (and those still might kill the crew)...
The sky is falling, eh?
The ISS has been floating in a far more hostile micrometeorite environment than either interplanetary travel or Mars orbit represents. For years. (And only occasionally has to dodge a flying bolt.) Think of all the debris we've added to the near-Earth region - all that is missing, at least for now, from the rest of the solar system.
As for radiation, there is no doubt that cosmic rays, and even more so, solar activity, represent a risk. However, the MARIE instrument on the Mars Odyssey probe (designed specifically to quantify this) indicated that even a long conjunction-type mission to Mars would likely not exceed the 1 to 4 Sieverts recommended as a career maximum for LEO activities. (To be fair, MARIE gave its life in pursuit of this study, but it was completely unshielded from solar events. Just about every Mars mission plan includes a shielded safe haven for the crew, and we can now give good warning of solar radiation events.) I suspect that there is no shortage of astronauts that would give far more than their career radiation exposure limit to be part of a crew to Mars.
I have an enemy-repelling rock you could replace at least half of your military with. I'll give it to you for free.
I fail to see the deterrence value unless said rock is in orbit.
There is a lot more to combat capability than is reported on "fly-offs", and dogfighting (which is the capability demonstrated in the videos you mention - the ones I saw, anyway) is not the preferred combat regime for any fighter pilot. I greatly prefer sticking a missile up his tailpipe from the longest range possible before he knows I'm even there. For instance, of around 40 confirmed kills by U.S. aircraft in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, 29 were with the obsolete Sparrow radar-guided missile, whose minimum range is about a mile. (And some of these were MiG-29s, shot down by F-15s of even older vintage.)
The pilot is what makes an airplane a weapons system. If for some reason (money being the usual - a typical mid-career USAF combat pilot has already cost his taxpayers several million dollars in training) you don't provide your pilots with sufficent and ongoing training and flight hours, he's simply operating a target. This has been borne out in every conflict since air war began - since you mentioned it, Germany in 1944-1945 is an excellent example - flying sometimes technically more advanced airframes, they lost big time. Fuel shortage and previous casualties combined to force them to field many pilots who were woefully undertrained. And while in the modern era third-world air forces have often been willing to procure modern weapons systems, historically they have been savaged by countries with better-trained men.
I would not put too much credence in the sales literature of any aircraft manufacturer. Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Argentina... all bought fighter aircraft off the marketing "glossies". The remains of their pretty airplanes dot various landscapes and sea floors.
Australia's an industrialized English-speaking federation of states with a dedicated capital territory that fought at our side in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I, Afghanistan, and Iraq II. And we've got a defense agreement and a free trade agreement with them.
Why would we bother to invade? They're already US!
... despite the fact that Australia (and NZ, for that matter) were rather poorly used by Britain in WWI and by the U.S. in WWII.