Read the first few chapters of "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb". Every week or so during WWII a plane would fly from the US to the USSR chock full of documentation. Industrial and chemical processes, factory plans, blueprints, mechanical drawings. It's also how the spies at the Manhattan Project got the plans for the atomic bombs to the USSR.
Soviet industry was built on those plans, stolen plans, and slave labor. The jet engine for the first MIG that shot US planes to hell over Korea? Design stolen from the British Rolls-Royce jet engine. They even had a guy with special soles on his shoes go on a tour through the machine shop to get samples of the metal used.
It also helps when you devote your economy to military and space programs instead of to the consumer market.
Whenever I read crap like this, I think it would be nice if the INS had a policy where people who spout this crap would be made to change places with some peasant in a third world country.
The third world country gets a citizen who claims to enjoy living in poverty, and the US gets a productive, happy citizen who's happy as hell to be here. And they wouldn't even have to risk dying from heat stroke in some semi trailer to get here. Everyone comes out ahead.
Idiot. He was pointing out the fact that the atmosphere did all the accelerating. At the end. The whole POINT is that you seem to think your rocks are going to be going at warp factor 8. They're not. They're going to be going as fast as an Apollo capsule when it got to Earth. 25,000 mph. And, while that's fast, it ain't nearly fast enough to turn you 50 kg rocks into weapons of mass destruction. A Nazi V-2 would pack more punch, for a lot less money.
Bullshit. Apollo accelerated away from the moon just enough to get over the hump; it was ballistic all the way to the Earth. The only times the rockets fired were for minor course corrections. Not deceleration. It hit the atmosphere at 25,000 mph. It got *all* that speed from Earth's gravity, and didn't use rockets to eliminate *any* of that speed. Rockets take fuel. They used the earth's atmosphere to decelerate. Christ. I knew this shit in grade school.
Would I like one dropped on me? If the Chinese want to build a moon base so they can drop rocks with the kinetic energy of a car bomb on me, hey, it's their money. They should be warned, though, that I may not be in the same place I was when they launched their rock two days ago. I only wish Al-Queda would be stupid enough to what you're suggesting.
It'll be going 25,000 mph. About 11 kilometers a second. Not hundreds of kilometers a second.
And as far as worrying about it, if they think they can drop a 50 kg rock with with the kinetic energy of 2 tons of TNT anywhere near me when aiming from the moon, they can feel free to try. Oh, I guess they could add guidance equipment, but then they'd have to rely on resupply from Earth. No more infinite supply of rocks.
As for stopping them, nuke the Chinese space launch facilities. When the guys on the moon starve, the problem is over. That's assuming the US military is stupid enough not to have something that can hit the moon by then.
Please. Do you honestly think the guys in the five sided building are going to wake up one day and go "my god, the chinese have spent the last twenty years building a mass driver on the moon, what will we do?". Do you think the Chinese can build a moon colony, complete with mass driver, faster than we can modify a few ICBMs to vaporize it? Get real.
Are you familiar with the concept of "Earth escape velocity"? It's how fast a rocket has to go to completely escape Earth's gravity field. For some weird reason, it's also how much something falling from INFINITELY FAR AWAY will be going when it hits Earth. Earth escape velocity is 25,000 miles an hour. That is the *fastest* something that is falling to earth will be going when it hits if it is accelerated only by Earth's gravity.
Lunar escape velocity is 8000 ft/sec, or 5400 mph. You need to get your rock going that fast so it will get over the gravitational "hump" between the earth and moon. It will lose pretty much all that velocity getting over the hump (after all, the moon has gravity, too, and is pulling it back), so it will still only hit earth at 25,000 mph.
If you want to increase the yield of the weapon by shooting the rock out faster, knock yourself out. You'll be fired by your Chinese masters for gross incompetence. Doubling the initial rock velocity will take 4 times as much energy, and will change impact velocity from 25,000 to 30,000 mph. Actually less than that, because by increasing the initial velocity, you reduce the amount of time your rock gets accelerated by earth's gravity. Kinetic energy of the impact would be increased only by 44%. It would be much better to launch a rock 4 times the mass and have 400% the impact energy. The most efficient way to use your mass driver is to put in the least amount of velocity to get it over the hump, and max out the mass. In other words, if your rock hits at more than 25,000 mph, you're wasting electricity.
And many meteors hit *much* harder than they would if they'd just fallen from the moon. For instance, they estimate the rock that made Meteor Crater hit at 40,000 mph, nearly twice escape velocity. Keep in mind kinetic energy goes up with the *square* of velocity.
And "A" drops off *real* fast as you move away from the earth. The relevant equation is E= 1/2 M V^2. It's the kinetic energy that does the damage.
V is pretty much hard-coded for something coming from the moon. Are you clear on that yet? 25,000 mph.
The rock that caused meteor crater hit at 40,000 mph, weighed several hundred thousand *tons*, and caused damage equal to 20 million tons of TNT.
www.meteorcrater.com
To make an equivalent hole, a rock from the moon would have to mass 2.56 times as much (because it's velocity is slower). Say 500,000 tons. 500 million kg. So for every kg of rock, you have the kinetic energy equivalent of 0.04 tons, or 80 lbs, of TNT. Your 50 kg rock will pack as much punch as 4000 pounds of TNT. Whoopi-friggin-doo. And the energy only scales *linearly* with mass.
I'm done arguing. Talking like you is like talking to a post.
Did you even READ my post? The point of my post is that you need a *much* bigger mass than 50 kg to be anything other than an annoyance. There isn't a *reason* to intercept them.
Of course the command module hit at an angle; it was the only way to get rid of that 25,000 mph they built up.
Since you seem to be getting all your physics from "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", please remember that in that book the mass drivers they were using were originally built to THROW FRIEGHTERS FULL OF GRAIN at the earth. Not 50 kg bags of grain. That grain was a major source of food for Earth; enough for Earth to start an interplanetary war over.
How many times do you have to be told? Earth's gravity drops off with the square of distance. 4000 miles up (2% of the way to the moon) it's one quarter what it is at the surface. 10% of the way to the moon, it's about 4% what it is at the surface.
Again, the Apollo command module dropped from the moon just like your rocks, and hit at 25,000 mph. Period. End of story. That's how hard your rock will hit. 0.00373% of the speed of light. For comparison, orbital velocity is about 18,000 mph.
You'll need a hell of a lot more mass for these rocks to do any damage.
Dude, get real. A meteor comes from *interplanetary" space, much faster than something dropped from the moon. Even then, it's significantly decelerated by the atmosphere.
The Apollo command module dropped about like one of your rocks, and hit the Earth at 25,000 mph. For comparison, the rock that created Meteor Crater hit at about 40,000 mph and weighed SEVERAL HUNDRED THOUSAND TONS.
To get the equivalent amount of kinetic energy from a rock from the moon, it would have to mass almost 4x times, or about a MILLION TONS.
Go ahead, build a mass driver that can boost that rock off the moon. Me, I'll wait until the Chinese start moving around asteroids with mass drivers or steam rockets before I start worrying.
Doh! Why didn't the USSR think to do that when they existed. Oh, yeah, must of been the 6000 hydrogen bombs we had laying around.
And why in the hell do you keep insisting that we wouldn't be able to shoot back? We put things much larger than nukes on the moon over 30 years ago. It was in all the papers.
And you know what you call a 50 kilo rock entering earth's atmosphere? A meteor. Something to make a wish by. Maybe some kid will find a pebble-sized chunk of it and put it on eBay.
For retaliation for them punching a hole in the roof of a double-wide in Wyoming, we destroy China's space launch center. Their moonbase either is abandoned or everyone dies.
If they build a moon base, and it's really unlikely it will, it'll be done solely for bragging rights. Cause it's pretty much useless for anything else, at least for the foreseeable future.
You're not familiar with the concept of nuclear deterrence, are you? You know,, what kept the USSR from nuking us?
Oh, and you may want to look at how hard it would be to make a mass driver that could boost a rock with WMD-equivalent kinetic energy. And, in the extremely unlikely event that this happens, you don't think the US would have plans for vaporizing that mass driver? We can launch ICBMs fast enough to prevent incoming ICBMs from wiping them out. We can certainly launch them faster than a rock falling from the moon can get here.
1.5 billion people don't count for diddly squat if all their troop transports sink to the bottom of the ocean. So the US and Taiwan don't have much to worry about.
And in 10 years they'll be well on their way down the slippery slope to democracy.
If all you have to watch a DVD on is a Linux box with DeCSS, how can you "agree" to the terms of the "contract" when you don't know what they are until you've already broken the "contract"?
"Ooooh, it's printed on the DVD case". Too bad. I didn't read it.
"It was displayed when the movie started". Too bad. I was in the pisser.
They don't have my signature acknowledging I know the terms of the contract and that I agree to them. Too bad for them. At least a POS EULA has a "Yes I Agree" button. So that's why you have one of your buddies install your software for you when they're over for a beer:).
And again, how do you implement communism? Who gets to decide how much someone has, or what they have? The Soviets didn't eliminate human distinction. The managers, the scientists, the engineers lived much better than the common laborer, just as in the west. Because the system just plain sucked, though, there was far less to go around.
Have you not noticed that the only decent countries on this planet are capitalist democracies? Even in heavily socialist European countries like Sweden, the bulk of the taxes are paid by people engaged in private industry. Please note the word "private".
The major problem in capitalist democracies is the influence companies have on politicians. A company's purpose is to increase their wealth. A politician's purpose is to serve the public. Who should we blame for the failure? Incidentally, this failure is what drove the creation of communism (i.e. "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair).
You'd probably like "Before The Golden Age" edited by Asimov; it's a bunch of short stories from the 20's and 30's. They're "pulp" stories like Battlefield Earth. Some good stories in it.
I guess the reason I didn't like Battlefield Earth was it was written in the pulp style. I don't mind the pulp style, as long as it was written back when the pulp style was in style. That, and it had some really stupid things in it that as an engineer totally ruined the book for me. Like when they heard the supersonic spy plane coming their way and hid from it before it passed over. There was a bunch of stuff like that. Again, I can handle stuff like that when it was written 50 or 60 years ago, before Campbell raised the bar on what science fiction should be, but not if it's written recently.
I also almost never quit reading a book without finishing it. That didn't help matters much with Battlefield Earth:).
And yeah, the Unbeliever series was good. A lot of the Niven/Pournelle stuff is good, like Ringworld, Mote In God's Eye, Lucifer's Hammer. You may want to look at the Man/Kzin Wars series, too.
Unfortunately, you can't blame it on Hollywood. I didn't learn until college about the relative magnitude of losses between the allies in WWII. USSR paid in blood, England in time, the US in money.
The depressing thing is, because of Yalta (?), US and British troops had to stop advancing because we got to the agreed-upon line first.
The next 8 combined countries on the list of countries with the largest defense budgets either a) have populations considerably smaller than the US or b) have costs of living much smaller than the US and can get way more bang for the buck.
The size of the US military is mostly based on inertia. The percentage of the US's GDP being spent on the military is smaller than it was 10, 20 years ago. I know a lot of people who got laid off from defense companies in the early 90's; it was like telecom is today, and it didn't came back. Look at the arsenal: B-52, F-15, F-16, Apache, M-1, all at least 20 years old. The F-22 is the only major program to come along in *decades*, and it's already being cut back. Lockheed is laying off people in Fort Worth, where it's built.
And the way things have been going the last few years, don't expect the US defense budget to drop. Don't expect them to start mothballing B-52s and A-10s. Not unless the Europeans increase their defense spending and grow a pair of balls.
You won't find many American citizens that think that toppling democratically elected governments are a good thing. I'm certainly not one of them. As far as I'm concerned, the only president in the last 40 or 50 years that had a decent foreign policy was Carter.
Or are you claiming that the Taliban was a democratically elected government?
The point is, there about a million things that the Euros could spend their money on that would ensure their own sovereignty much more effectively. Building their own GPS won't improve it. Building up some sealift and airlift capability, and maybe a few more carriers would improve it.
Galileo is a waste of money. The only reason the US requires their own GPS system is for their military. The Euros can't use that reason, because, well, their militaries can't operate outside of their own countries without US help (except, of course, for the British).
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Read the first few chapters of "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb". Every week or so during WWII a plane would fly from the US to the USSR chock full of documentation. Industrial and chemical processes, factory plans, blueprints, mechanical drawings. It's also how the spies at the Manhattan Project got the plans for the atomic bombs to the USSR.
Soviet industry was built on those plans, stolen plans, and slave labor. The jet engine for the first MIG that shot US planes to hell over Korea? Design stolen from the British Rolls-Royce jet engine. They even had a guy with special soles on his shoes go on a tour through the machine shop to get samples of the metal used.
It also helps when you devote your economy to military and space programs instead of to the consumer market.
Whenever I read crap like this, I think it would be nice if the INS had a policy where people who spout this crap would be made to change places with some peasant in a third world country.
The third world country gets a citizen who claims to enjoy living in poverty, and the US gets a productive, happy citizen who's happy as hell to be here. And they wouldn't even have to risk dying from heat stroke in some semi trailer to get here. Everyone comes out ahead.
I'm sure a nice EMP pulse or a penetrator followed by a ground burst will fsck up a colony in a big way.
Or you can just nuke the Chinese launch facility and let them all starve on the moon.
Idiot. He was pointing out the fact that the atmosphere did all the accelerating. At the end. The whole POINT is that you seem to think your rocks are going to be going at warp factor 8. They're not. They're going to be going as fast as an Apollo capsule when it got to Earth. 25,000 mph. And, while that's fast, it ain't nearly fast enough to turn you 50 kg rocks into weapons of mass destruction. A Nazi V-2 would pack more punch, for a lot less money.
Bullshit. Apollo accelerated away from the moon just enough to get over the hump; it was ballistic all the way to the Earth. The only times the rockets fired were for minor course corrections. Not deceleration. It hit the atmosphere at 25,000 mph. It got *all* that speed from Earth's gravity, and didn't use rockets to eliminate *any* of that speed. Rockets take fuel. They used the earth's atmosphere to decelerate. Christ. I knew this shit in grade school.
Would I like one dropped on me? If the Chinese want to build a moon base so they can drop rocks with the kinetic energy of a car bomb on me, hey, it's their money. They should be warned, though, that I may not be in the same place I was when they launched their rock two days ago. I only wish Al-Queda would be stupid enough to what you're suggesting.
It'll be going 25,000 mph. About 11 kilometers a second. Not hundreds of kilometers a second.
And as far as worrying about it, if they think they can drop a 50 kg rock with with the kinetic energy of 2 tons of TNT anywhere near me when aiming from the moon, they can feel free to try. Oh, I guess they could add guidance equipment, but then they'd have to rely on resupply from Earth. No more infinite supply of rocks.
As for stopping them, nuke the Chinese space launch facilities. When the guys on the moon starve, the problem is over. That's assuming the US military is stupid enough not to have something that can hit the moon by then.
Please. Do you honestly think the guys in the five sided building are going to wake up one day and go "my god, the chinese have spent the last twenty years building a mass driver on the moon, what will we do?". Do you think the Chinese can build a moon colony, complete with mass driver, faster than we can modify a few ICBMs to vaporize it? Get real.
You should change your nic to "Chicken Little".
Christ. I can't take it any more.
Are you familiar with the concept of "Earth escape velocity"? It's how fast a rocket has to go to completely escape Earth's gravity field. For some weird reason, it's also how much something falling from INFINITELY FAR AWAY will be going when it hits Earth. Earth escape velocity is 25,000 miles an hour. That is the *fastest* something that is falling to earth will be going when it hits if it is accelerated only by Earth's gravity.
Lunar escape velocity is 8000 ft/sec, or 5400 mph. You need to get your rock going that fast so it will get over the gravitational "hump" between the earth and moon. It will lose pretty much all that velocity getting over the hump (after all, the moon has gravity, too, and is pulling it back), so it will still only hit earth at 25,000 mph.
If you want to increase the yield of the weapon by shooting the rock out faster, knock yourself out. You'll be fired by your Chinese masters for gross incompetence. Doubling the initial rock velocity will take 4 times as much energy, and will change impact velocity from 25,000 to 30,000 mph. Actually less than that, because by increasing the initial velocity, you reduce the amount of time your rock gets accelerated by earth's gravity. Kinetic energy of the impact would be increased only by 44%. It would be much better to launch a rock 4 times the mass and have 400% the impact energy. The most efficient way to use your mass driver is to put in the least amount of velocity to get it over the hump, and max out the mass. In other words, if your rock hits at more than 25,000 mph, you're wasting electricity.
And many meteors hit *much* harder than they would if they'd just fallen from the moon. For instance, they estimate the rock that made Meteor Crater hit at 40,000 mph, nearly twice escape velocity. Keep in mind kinetic energy goes up with the *square* of velocity.
And "A" drops off *real* fast as you move away from the earth. The relevant equation is E= 1/2 M V^2. It's the kinetic energy that does the damage.
V is pretty much hard-coded for something coming from the moon. Are you clear on that yet? 25,000 mph.
The rock that caused meteor crater hit at 40,000 mph, weighed several hundred thousand *tons*, and caused damage equal to 20 million tons of TNT.
www.meteorcrater.com
To make an equivalent hole, a rock from the moon would have to mass 2.56 times as much (because it's velocity is slower). Say 500,000 tons. 500 million kg. So for every kg of rock, you have the kinetic energy equivalent of 0.04 tons, or 80 lbs, of TNT. Your 50 kg rock will pack as much punch as 4000 pounds of TNT. Whoopi-friggin-doo. And the energy only scales *linearly* with mass.
I'm done arguing. Talking like you is like talking to a post.
Did you even READ my post? The point of my post is that you need a *much* bigger mass than 50 kg to be anything other than an annoyance. There isn't a *reason* to intercept them.
Of course the command module hit at an angle; it was the only way to get rid of that 25,000 mph they built up.
Since you seem to be getting all your physics from "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", please remember that in that book the mass drivers they were using were originally built to THROW FRIEGHTERS FULL OF GRAIN at the earth. Not 50 kg bags of grain. That grain was a major source of food for Earth; enough for Earth to start an interplanetary war over.
How many times do you have to be told? Earth's gravity drops off with the square of distance. 4000 miles up (2% of the way to the moon) it's one quarter what it is at the surface. 10% of the way to the moon, it's about 4% what it is at the surface.
Again, the Apollo command module dropped from the moon just like your rocks, and hit at 25,000 mph. Period. End of story. That's how hard your rock will hit. 0.00373% of the speed of light. For comparison, orbital velocity is about 18,000 mph.
You'll need a hell of a lot more mass for these rocks to do any damage.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but meteors the size of your moon rocks hit the earth every day with no ill effect. And they hit faster.
To make a hole like Meteor Crater, you need a rock weighing hundreds of thousands of tons.
Funny, gravity drops off with the square of distance. Apollo dropped that far and only hit at 25,000 mph. Meteors drop from *much* further away.
Dude, get real. A meteor comes from *interplanetary" space, much faster than something dropped from the moon. Even then, it's significantly decelerated by the atmosphere.
The Apollo command module dropped about like one of your rocks, and hit the Earth at 25,000 mph. For comparison, the rock that created Meteor Crater hit at about 40,000 mph and weighed SEVERAL HUNDRED THOUSAND TONS.
To get the equivalent amount of kinetic energy from a rock from the moon, it would have to mass almost 4x times, or about a MILLION TONS.
Go ahead, build a mass driver that can boost that rock off the moon. Me, I'll wait until the Chinese start moving around asteroids with mass drivers or steam rockets before I start worrying.
Doh! Why didn't the USSR think to do that when they existed. Oh, yeah, must of been the 6000 hydrogen bombs we had laying around. And why in the hell do you keep insisting that we wouldn't be able to shoot back? We put things much larger than nukes on the moon over 30 years ago. It was in all the papers.
Oh please. What about nuke subs?
And you know what you call a 50 kilo rock entering earth's atmosphere? A meteor. Something to make a wish by. Maybe some kid will find a pebble-sized chunk of it and put it on eBay.
For retaliation for them punching a hole in the roof of a double-wide in Wyoming, we destroy China's space launch center. Their moonbase either is abandoned or everyone dies.
If they build a moon base, and it's really unlikely it will, it'll be done solely for bragging rights. Cause it's pretty much useless for anything else, at least for the foreseeable future.
You're not familiar with the concept of nuclear deterrence, are you? You know,, what kept the USSR from nuking us?
Oh, and you may want to look at how hard it would be to make a mass driver that could boost a rock with WMD-equivalent kinetic energy. And, in the extremely unlikely event that this happens, you don't think the US would have plans for vaporizing that mass driver? We can launch ICBMs fast enough to prevent incoming ICBMs from wiping them out. We can certainly launch them faster than a rock falling from the moon can get here.
1.5 billion people don't count for diddly squat if all their troop transports sink to the bottom of the ocean. So the US and Taiwan don't have much to worry about.
And in 10 years they'll be well on their way down the slippery slope to democracy.
If all you have to watch a DVD on is a Linux box with DeCSS, how can you "agree" to the terms of the "contract" when you don't know what they are until you've already broken the "contract"?
:).
"Ooooh, it's printed on the DVD case". Too bad. I didn't read it.
"It was displayed when the movie started". Too bad. I was in the pisser.
They don't have my signature acknowledging I know the terms of the contract and that I agree to them. Too bad for them. At least a POS EULA has a "Yes I Agree" button. So that's why you have one of your buddies install your software for you when they're over for a beer
And again, how do you implement communism? Who gets to decide how much someone has, or what they have? The Soviets didn't eliminate human distinction. The managers, the scientists, the engineers lived much better than the common laborer, just as in the west. Because the system just plain sucked, though, there was far less to go around.
Have you not noticed that the only decent countries on this planet are capitalist democracies? Even in heavily socialist European countries like Sweden, the bulk of the taxes are paid by people engaged in private industry. Please note the word "private".
The major problem in capitalist democracies is the influence companies have on politicians. A company's purpose is to increase their wealth. A politician's purpose is to serve the public. Who should we blame for the failure? Incidentally, this failure is what drove the creation of communism (i.e. "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair).
You'd probably like "Before The Golden Age" edited by Asimov; it's a bunch of short stories from the 20's and 30's. They're "pulp" stories like Battlefield Earth. Some good stories in it.
:).
I guess the reason I didn't like Battlefield Earth was it was written in the pulp style. I don't mind the pulp style, as long as it was written back when the pulp style was in style. That, and it had some really stupid things in it that as an engineer totally ruined the book for me. Like when they heard the supersonic spy plane coming their way and hid from it before it passed over. There was a bunch of stuff like that. Again, I can handle stuff like that when it was written 50 or 60 years ago, before Campbell raised the bar on what science fiction should be, but not if it's written recently.
I also almost never quit reading a book without finishing it. That didn't help matters much with Battlefield Earth
And yeah, the Unbeliever series was good. A lot of the Niven/Pournelle stuff is good, like Ringworld, Mote In God's Eye, Lucifer's Hammer. You may want to look at the Man/Kzin Wars series, too.
Unfortunately, you can't blame it on Hollywood. I didn't learn until college about the relative magnitude of losses between the allies in WWII. USSR paid in blood, England in time, the US in money.
The depressing thing is, because of Yalta (?), US and British troops had to stop advancing because we got to the agreed-upon line first.
The next 8 combined countries on the list of countries with the largest defense budgets either a) have populations considerably smaller than the US or b) have costs of living much smaller than the US and can get way more bang for the buck.
The size of the US military is mostly based on inertia. The percentage of the US's GDP being spent on the military is smaller than it was 10, 20 years ago. I know a lot of people who got laid off from defense companies in the early 90's; it was like telecom is today, and it didn't came back. Look at the arsenal: B-52, F-15, F-16, Apache, M-1, all at least 20 years old. The F-22 is the only major program to come along in *decades*, and it's already being cut back. Lockheed is laying off people in Fort Worth, where it's built.
And the way things have been going the last few years, don't expect the US defense budget to drop. Don't expect them to start mothballing B-52s and A-10s. Not unless the Europeans increase their defense spending and grow a pair of balls.
You won't find many American citizens that think that toppling democratically elected governments are a good thing. I'm certainly not one of them. As far as I'm concerned, the only president in the last 40 or 50 years that had a decent foreign policy was Carter.
Or are you claiming that the Taliban was a democratically elected government?
The point is, there about a million things that the Euros could spend their money on that would ensure their own sovereignty much more effectively. Building their own GPS won't improve it. Building up some sealift and airlift capability, and maybe a few more carriers would improve it.
Galileo is a waste of money. The only reason the US requires their own GPS system is for their military. The Euros can't use that reason, because, well, their militaries can't operate outside of their own countries without US help (except, of course, for the British).