• Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    The problem I remember is that it is expensive to get the rod up there in the first place.

    Also every other nation would hate us and make jokes about the collective small penis of the US state.

    • WarlordSdocy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That’s why the eventual strategy would be to build them in space with minerals from the asteroid belt.

    • FARTYSHARTBLAST@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Gotta mine them in space, but there’s still a whole host of other issues with the idea including aiming them, having enough stations to deploy them anywhere on the planet in a reasonable amount of time, and the other non-radioactive problems that result from throwing a fuckton of tungsten at terminal velocity into something.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        Yes. The United States of America is, itself a federated state that also represents the fifty states. It’s why we have a state department and a Secretary of State in the White House.

        • doctorcrimson@lemmy.today
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          1 year ago

          I never said otherwise. Petition to call it the United States State from now on. Let’s also call the UK as the United State Kingdom State.

          • sizzler@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Just remember, they answered your joke seriously agreeing with it. It’s always gonna be united states state along with atm machine and pin number for me.

            • doctorcrimson@lemmy.today
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              1 year ago

              No because each nation within the United Kingdom, in example Ireland, Scottland, England, and Wales is it’s own State and United they form the UK State so it’s the United State Kingdom State.

    • bitwolf@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      There was a YouTube video with, I think action lab, where they tested this weapon on a smaller scale with sand castles.

      The experiment failed overall because of the difficulty of aiming the payload and anticipating the correalis effect

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        I remember that this was one of the factors that weirded up the whole cold war. ICBMs are hard to aim, though in the US we were able to find a workable solution. (A Polaris could drop a retarded-descent pizza into my driveway and then conveniently dispose of itself in the nearby unused lot.)

        Soviet missiles were not so accurate, so they just build bunches of them hoping to hit their targets through sheer redundancy. (This became dinner talk at Cal-Tech in the eighties since SDI was expected to be able to intercept the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal, including bunches of decoys) So their redundancy was used by General Electric to promote the missile gap, as justification why we needed to buy more GE nukes to close the difference.

        This is why, I’m pretty sure, we don’t really need to be too afraid of DPRK going madman with their handful of nukes. So far we’ve seen the Kims lob ICBMs into the pacific, but they haven’t shown they could hit a given continent, let alone someplace important, and the US knows from its own experience that ICBM math is hard.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        It’s well within the character of the US federal government and the armed forces to go forward with an OWP platform program right now, even despite the risks and ethics concerns, sadly.