I’m as much a fan of schadenfreude as the next guy, but every test brings this weapon closer to the battle field.
Still i bet russia would prefer that they had Sarmat working so they could use it as a threat.
Of course! I’d also like all my programs to run fine without bugs the first time. But that’s just not the nature of things. What we’re seeing here is, ummm, hardware debugging. It’s the process of getting to a reliable delivery system unfolding in real time.
That said, this quest for a Super Weapon that will force the West to finally recognize Russia as a Real Power Once and For All is super fucking creepy. It’s equal parts Bond villain and the final years of another famous European dictator. Neither are exciting prospects for world security.
It did run fine the first time :) then the next 4 launches failed. My hope is that sanctions and bright pepole leaving russia has made in hard to launch nukes. We will see.
∞ - 1 = ?
Sadly that’s not how it works, especially with government money. A good example is SpaceX, they succeeded so fast because they failed fast and learned fast. Failure is always progress as long as you don’t give up
That being said the Russians should totally give up
James Acton, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote on X that the before-and-after imagery of the Sarmat missile silo was “very persuasive that there was a big explosion.”
Glad they got an expert to weigh in on this…
It’s very funny to me how much nonsense is in this article.
What I mean by that is that the satellite photos - they look like Cuban missile crisis photos. I understand why they would mask the capability of spy tech, but I can get clearer imagery of my house from google.
And they don’t know when the launch failure occurred? There are plenty of seismographs that would pick up a large explosion like that. Psh.You sure you’re not comparing it to Google’s airplane footage, instead of their satellite footage?
….
In two hours I have a reoccurring leadership-type meeting where finding replacement vendors for Nearmap has been a topic of discussion for a few years. (TBF, my focus is on data accessibility and interoperability. I kind of zone out for that part of the meeting.)
I honestly don’t know why I have never considered that Google flies its imagery.
I think specifically the parts that get modern Google Earth style 3D mapping are always shot from airplanes, I looked it up a long time ago when I was wondering why I couldn’t see our new address in 3D.
I have no sources at hand to share, but I’m sure more detailed information is easily ducked or binged or whatever you fancy.
But you can look at Dublin, for example. Compare the light green and dark green parts: https://maps.app.goo.gl/NJn5DhpW85ym9yCa7
I then compared it to San Francisco and New York, which are even higher resolution.
In rural areas the resolution seems to get lower again.Yeah - absolutely.
I didn’t explicitly agree with you in my response, but what you’re saying makes perfect sense. I’m just… dumbfounded it did not occur to me. Having my hands in that space is literally something I do.If I can spare my ego just slightly - I’m sure the military has way better imaging than what was shown (but my comparison to Google maps was a bad one).
I understand why they would mask the capability of spy tech
Then why are you confused?
My comment said I was amused.
What point are you trying to make, or what angle are you trying to get at?
This is from a commercial satellite though.
Are you trying to say the Google maps imagery is not commercial satellite data?
That’s correct. Google Maps imagery is not satellite data, it’s airplane photos.
The comment I replied to was talking about spy tech, I was pointing out that the photos were from a commercial satellite, whose specs are likely well known.
Hey, and you’re right about that. It’s what I get for commenting on stuff with 4am insomnia. The photos are clearly credited to Maxar Technologies, which for some reason I know to be a satellite imaging company. (Yet I can’t remember my own zip code without thinking about it.)
I think maxar might even be the company Google licenses the Google Earth imagery from
Goddamn liquid fueled ICBM, and they think this is new tech?
Say what you like about the Sovs, they glorified engineers and scientists. Modern Russia both treats and portrays them as trash (as opposed to just treating them as trash) without the slightest bit of respect for their trade, and then are confused when all the smart lads and lasses go to the degenerate globalhomo West.
At least in the Soviet Union the risk of GULAG was balanced out slightly by the prospect of getting legit accolades from the government for being good with the designing and the thinky-numbers. In modern Russia, all you get is poisoned tea, shit pay, and no respect.
Say what you like about the Sovs, they glorified engineers and scientists.
I’m gonna have to disagree with you there. When engineers and scientists couldn’t do what Stalin asked he convicted them of sabotage and espionage and threw them into gulags. And it happened a lot. Also, much like the US, most of the Soviet engineering knowledge was gained from the Nazis during their version of Operation Paperclip.
Oh, my point wasn’t that they were treated WELL, especially not considering the arbitrary nature of the Soviet state apparatus. My point is that the Soviets, as a society, considered those to be prestigious and worthy careers, and pronounced that very loudly. Like how the US culturally puts a high value on military veterans in reaction to the horrific behavior towards troops returning from Vietnam, making respect for modern veterans essential in decent society, but practically speaking, the government still treats them like shit. By contrast, the modern Russian Federation doesn’t give a single good goddamn about engineers and scientists, and often actively scorns them.
The nice words and shit treatment are hypocritical, but as anyone who’s ever been scorned for their choice of career will tell you, it’s still better than shite words and shit treatment.
It was just propaganda though. USSR didn’r treat their scientists and engineers a lick better than Russia does. It was just lip service.
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“We are who we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be.” The stated values of a society are very often violated, but that they are stated usually influences behavior in that society.
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The Sovs definitely put a lot of effort into telling engineers and scientists that they were HEROES OF SOCIALIST LABOR and emphasizing the same to the general population. Engineers and scientists were socially valued professions. A scrap of paper in congratulations or a bit of metal and a ribbon may not be much, but as Napoleon once noted, men will do a lot for that little bit of recognition. By contrast, modern Russia has adopted a very ‘thuggish’ attitude towards academics, especially from state media, and it is oligarchs and ultranationalists who are glorified instead.
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In Soviet society, really only military officers and higher government functionaries had it better than scientists and engineers. “You get the nice apartment, access to the good stores, and a little dacha in the countryside” may not be much by Western standards, but treatment is relative to the society in which one lives - scientists and engineers were getting the good upper-middle class life. Modern Russia says “You can make as much with a doctorate as some idiot in a real country with an associate’s” and siphons the rest off for megayachts. Not very inspiring.
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The USSR did at least attempt to do the right thing by it’s citizens most of the time. Or at least they cared enough to pretend.
We have read very different history books.
Well, they’re burning UDMH, which is some scary fucking shit. I can’t imagine being in an underground
tombbunker with several dozens of tons of it.UDMH
At least that stuff is stable while in a tank. Imagine sitting next to tons of rocket grade hydrogen peroxide, slowly decomposing, just waiting for an excuse to go boom.
TBF the USA has idiots like Jeff Bezos and Musk making Natural Gas Fueled rockets still in development.
Pretty sure Starship has more successful launches than Sarmat at this point.
Doesn’t make the concept any less concaveman.
Fuck Natural Gas, fuck Commercial Rocketry.
YEA! Fuck science and NASA and all that other shit…yea man! Stick it to those damn labcoat wearing idiots!
“Gets in diesel truck and rolls coal”
/s
Fuck off, thats the public and military sector, mate. The only thing they have to do with those space tourism asshats is they occasionally buy from them.
You do realize that the only reason we’re not having to rely on russia to get our astronauts onto the ISS is because of SpaceX right?
Oh wow really sucking some big dick right there.
Oh those massive corporations are SO altruistic, oml! They do so much fkr us and we would all be lost without them! /s
How dare capitalism… Innovate in space technology? You hate just because the people doing it are rich. That’s real silly.
The fuq? Lots of great examples of Capitalism but Fossil Fuels isn’t it, pal.
The problem with fossil fuels is that they’re incredibly energy dense. Gasoline has about 12000 Wh/kg of energy density compared to about 250 Wh/kg for lithium ion.
Space is hard, and the paradox of launching a rocket is that you need a lot of fuel to fuel an engine for long enough to escape the Earth’s atmosphere and achieve orbit. All of that fuel adds weight so you need more fuel to compensate for more weight, which adds more weight meaning more fuel. Burnable fuels have the advantage of depleting as you burn it, so as you get higher your rocket gets lighter and therefore requires less fuel to pilot.
In case that’s not enough challenge, in the vacuum of space there’s no great way to propel a vehicle on electrical power alone. Wheels ain’t gonna work and neither will propellers, and while solar sails appear to work, they offer such incredibly low specific impulse (thrust basically) that realistically no manned mission that isn’t a generation ship can use solar sails
So in short, space is going to require fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. Hopefully we as a species can find the technology to make a fully reusable and renewable space program at some point, but until then we’ll have to burn chemicals get vehicles off of this planet.
Additionally, right now, until another organization actually builds and launches reusable space vehicles (and can demonstrate the competence and safety record) SpaceX is the world leader in reusability. SpaceX is one of two members of the exclusive “has relaunched a space vehicle” club, shared only with NASA’s space shuttle program which ended over a decade ago
Jfc this guy
If they managed to shave enough costs for consumer space flights you would be celebrating as the entire world burned.
I don’t give FUCK about natural gas energy density, we don’t need rockets that run on it.
@threelonmusketeers When you test that superweapon of you:
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Turns out that blowing up a hundred tons of rocket fuel underground will make some dirt land on top of roads.
The ones closer to the silo are probably part of the rubble, the ones further away are likely just buried.
If you want some idea of what blowing up an ICBMs worth of rocketsfuel will do: in 1980, a US serviceman dropped a spanner in a nuclear missile silo. That led to a fuel leak and the explosion from it sent the warhead flying THROUGH the 750 ton silo door and over threehundred meters away. There are some amazing books on the Damascus Silo incident.
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The book. Command and Control about the incident is like 600 pages and it was so good I read it in a weekend. Highly recommended.
I’ve got the audiobook, which is not the ideal form for a book with two separate narratives, but is still quite good!
Yes, totally a psyop. No way an underground explosion could have spread soil in the streets around! /s
