Judge_Juche [she/her]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 28th, 2020

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  • NASAs version of this is called StarTram, it’s feasible but there are some major technical hurdles.

    In the prototype stage, the launch velocity at the end of the gun would not be anywhere near the 10 km/s you would need to achieve orbit. But you could reach a sizable fraction, say 3 km/s. Becuase the velocity gained during rocket flight is not linear with mass, having that 3 km/s inital boost would reduce your overall rocket mass by like 80%. The rocket would clear the atmosphere and then fire its motor to gain a stable orbit.

    We can achieve 3 km/s with current technology, it would require like a 100 km long maglev in a very low pressure tube, likely built on the side of a mountain. It could probably reduce space flight costs by a factor of 10 if completed.

    Building the proposed goal of a human rated version capable of reaching near 10 km/s at the end point would be much more difficult. The tube would have to span over 1,000 km and I don’t believe we have the technology yet to maintain the vacuum or supply enough power quickly enough to power it.

    China is likely proposing to build a testbed system to start researching the concept. Probably on a larger scale than NASA has but nowhere near a complete system.





  • This stuff always reminds me of China’s nuclear program in the 60s. Like once the Sino-Soviet Split happened the US literally just assumed that Chinese people were too stupid to produce an atomic bomb. Even after China’s first nuclear test in '64 the US would not recognize them as a nuclear power, and kept insisting they would be unable to develop nuclear armed ballistic missiles or thermonuclear weapons, both of which were then tested in the next two years and both times it was deeply shocking to the US foreign policy blob.

    Also, the US went on to learning nothing from this becuase the exact same thing happened with North Korea which went from their first nuclear test to thermonuclear weapons in 10 years. Like in the early stages North Korea was very willing to surrender their nuclear weapons program for lifting of sanctions, but the US would never negotiate in good faith becuase they genuinely believed the North Koreans were to primitive to proceed to the next stage of development.


  • We need to revturn to the pre-Republic Roman system of ten 28 day months and a liminal, unaccountable 90ish day period during the winter where dates don’t exist. We need to have a high priest pulling apart bird guts to tell us when in March we can start counting days again. We need a system so subjective and variable that you occasionally need a 500 day year to reset everything either becuase of compounding error or because the priest in charge got murdered and no one replaced him for two months.