The Astronomy Thread

MusicForFish

MusicForFish

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All this mars talk has me hankering for a little
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Cybsled

Cybsled

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Aaron said:
Come to think of it, after writing that about The Moon is a Harsh Mistress I read a tweet (that I can't find now) where someone said that the opening up of a "Moon city" is just an way to paper over the militarisation of the Moon by the USA, in that they can then quickly create some sort of a bombardment system on the Moon whereby they can launch large Moon bolders at the Earth to target enemy nations, simar to what the Lunar Rebels did in Heinlein's novel. It's a crazy idea, but at this stage, I wouldn't put it past some people in the Pentagon and other think tanks to think along those lines.
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It wouldn’t be that much of a “super weapon”

1) You’d still have to launch your payload off the moon. Even if gravity is lower, the rocks still have mass. To launch anything of size/mass, you’d basically need a lunar trebuchet, otherwise you’re spending a fuckton on mass drivers or a rocket system that can evenly lift a large boulder

2) You’d need something precise/guided, otherwise you’re just lobbing rocks

3) your rock would still be slow as fuck relatively speaking and since it’s hard to hide and load a moon boulder launcher, it would be pretty easy to figure out when one is coming

4) the rock has to be large enough and dense enough to survive atmospheric reentry without breaking up
 
Cad

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Cybsled said:
It wouldn’t be that much of a “super weapon”

1) You’d still have to launch your payload off the moon. Even if gravity is lower, the rocks still have mass. To launch anything of size/mass, you’d basically need a lunar trebuchet, otherwise you’re spending a fuckton on mass drivers or a rocket system that can evenly lift a large boulder

2) You’d need something precise/guided, otherwise you’re just lobbing rocks

3) your rock would still be slow as fuck relatively speaking and since it’s hard to hide and load a moon boulder launcher, it would be pretty easy to figure out when one is coming

4) the rock has to be large enough and dense enough to survive atmospheric reentry without breaking up
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And the cost to lob rocks from the moon would be approximately 12 bajillion dollars while we can launch ICBM's nobody can currently stop for relative peanuts.
 
BrutulTM

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Cad said:
And the cost to lob rocks from the moon would be approximately 12 bajillion dollars while we can launch ICBM's nobody can currently stop for relative peanuts.
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You wouldn't even have to nuke them back, just blow up the launch pads on Earth and wait for them to starve to death.
 
Gravel

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Aaron said:
Y'all making me want to re-read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. And then Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
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And here I was thinking it made me want to watch a movie.

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Where's Elon's bio dome?
 
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Aaron

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Everyone here poopooing the idea of Musk wanting to put mass drivers on the Moon to launch shit at the Earth, but here it is straight from the horse's mouth.

And anyone saying: "well, it's just to haul finished goods to the Earth with!" Well, that's what the mass drivers in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress were for too, until the revolution happened and the started hauling bolders at the Earth instead of cargo.

 
Maximis Velocity

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I always thought that under the ocean should be the test bed for a viable off world habitat solution. If it breaks/fails, swim up... you might live. Testing in space... no so much.
 
Big Phoenix

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Aaron said:
Everyone here poopooing the idea of Musk wanting to put mass drivers on the Moon to launch shit at the Earth, but here it is straight from the horse's mouth.

And anyone saying: "well, it's just to haul finished goods to the Earth with!" Well, that's what the mass drivers in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress were for too, until the revolution happened and the started hauling bolders at the Earth instead of cargo.
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Anything going fast enough is a weapon and most things in space are going pretty fast.

Mass drivers would be the entire point of lunar industry. Low gravity, no atmosphere 2 weeks of sunshine means mass drivers would be an incredibly efficient and easy way to launch payloads.
 
BrutulTM

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It's not so much that it couldn't happen, but it would just be insane for a moon colony to attack earth because even though they could do some significant damage, they would have no way of defending themselves from a counterattack and they would be totally dependent on regular shipments from Earth to survive.
 
Aaron

Aaron

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BrutulTM said:
It's not so much that it couldn't happen, but it would just be insane for a moon colony to attack earth because even though they could do some significant damage, they would have no way of defending themselves from a counterattack and they would be totally dependent on regular shipments from Earth to survive.
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It's not for an independent lunar colony to attack the whole of Earth. It is for a US based lunar colony (or other nation's colonies if they can have them) using that colony's mass driver to target the enemies of the US.
 
Cad

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Aaron said:
It's not for an independent lunar colony to attack the whole of Earth. It is for a US based lunar colony (or other nation's colonies if they can have them) using that colony's mass driver to target the enemies of the US.
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Again... why?

ICBM's exist.
 
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