The Russian ports on the Black Sea are so absurd that if you encountered a setup like that in a video game you’d just quit because it’s unrealistic.

Scenario:

Game: Ok, you’ve got a port that’s open year round with access to both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Player: Yay, I set sail for the Atlantic.

Game: You set sail, making good time across the Black sea. To continue to the Atlantic, you first have to pass through the Bosporous, a narrow channel that goes right through the biggest city of Turkey. You need to make it worth their while.

Player: This is bullshit. Ok, I bribe Turkey, now am I in the Atlantic?

Game: You’ve made it past Turkey. Are you at peace with Greece?

Player: Yes… why?

Game: Congratulations, you are able to pass the Agean sea. You have now made it to the Mediterranean sea.

Player: Wait, I wanted to go to the Atlantic.

Game: To go to the Atlantic, proceed to the Strait of Gibraltar. Are you at peace with England?

Player: What? Wait, this is bullshit. Another strait? And isn’t England up in the northern Atlantic? I’m at peace with Spain, France, Italy… what does England have to do with it?

Game: England controls the Strait of Gibraltar.

Player: This is bullshit, ok, I go to the Indian ocean instead.

Game: Are you on good terms with Egypt, Yemen, Eritrea and Djibouti?

Battleships being at the center of naval plans obviously changed. But, I think you’re right that something battleshippy will probably still exist.

I mean, look how long it took for the spear to go away. With bayonets you could argue that they’ve never gone away. But, they’re now a secondary thing, rather than the primary thing armies are designed around.

I could imagine a future where a sea-tank exists, something that can take a hit and attack with direct-fire weapons. Having said that, the war in Ukraine is showing that a multi-million dollar tank can be taken out with a few hundred dollars in drone gear. Battleships are/were closer to $1 billion, and they were already mostly obsolete when they were in danger from multi-million dollar planes, dropping thousand dollar bombs, piloted by pilots who had been trained at the cost of millions of dollars.

The subs contain lots of drones, but the subs are unmanned, making them drones, and they’re launched by a bigger mothership sub that’s also a drone. All manned by midgets pretending to be AI, of course.

With the success of drones in Ukraine, I wonder if the future’s just going to be midget drone-mothership subs.

The Pagoda Mast was a good idea, but not tall enough. 40m? C’mon, with modern tech we can do 100m easy.

What I wonder is what other industries might prompt the same level of hatred.

Private prisons companies? Hedge funds? Drug companies? Cryptocurrency exchanges? Payday loan companies? Dollar stores?

It would be a shame if it were only health insurance companies that were scared.

Hit the gym, delete the lawyer, face the book.

For one thing, the Apollo shield started in the very thin upper atmosphere, and they came in at an angle that meant they bled off as much speed/energy as possible in that thin upper atmosphere before going into the thicker atmosphere.

I don’t know that that makes a huge difference to the physics involved, though it certainly may have.

Of course it will make a difference. The whole challenge is about managing the heat build-up, which is the energy per second (i.e. power). If you hit the thin upper atmosphere you’re encountering less material, so less friction / pressure, so less heating. It means you can keep the heat on the heat shield in a manageable range, rather than putting it at a temperature where it would melt or explode.

the air cushion begins heating itself up instead of the object, reducing the amount of heat the object receives.

No, both heat up. The air cushion transfers its heat to the object next to it. At the kinds of pressures we’re talking about, you might even be getting nitrogen plasma rather than just nitrogen gas.

But it would also tail off as the bore cap heated, reducing stresses on it as it went higher.

If it went high enough for that to matter. If it disintegrated in the lower atmosphere it wouldn’t matter that the air got thinner in the upper atmosphere.

chunks of meteorites bigger than a meter have made it through the atmosphere, for instance

Is a metre the original size, or the final size? Also, reverse meteors (something starting with its maximum speed in the lower atmosphere) are doing things the hard way. Rather than getting slowed down initially by the thin upper atmosphere and then only hitting the thick atmosphere once they’re slower, they start out in the thickest atmosphere. OTOH, a meteor is a random collection of rock and metal formed by gravity in space. A pure metal plug cast on Earth is probably going to be a lot less prone to breaking apart.

the bore cap starting at the bottom of the atmosphere means that it’s likely it experienced less fracture stress, since the air would’ve accelerated with it rather than being static.

That doesn’t make sense to me. Something in a thicker medium is going to experience more stress. Try pushing a cracker through the air vs. through water vs. through gelatin. Which medium will cause the cracker to crack first? Obviously it’s the thicker medium.

Exactly. It’s the minimum speed required to get into orbit assuming you get the direction correct. If you launch vertically, you’ll almost certainly come back down, no matter how far out into space you go. The only consideration is that if you go far enough out you might be influenced by the gravity of something else like the moon which could change your trajectory.

It would spread outward a bit, but the entire kinetic energy and momentum in the system would remain the same. But, the more it broke apart, the more surface area it would have. The more surface area, the more surface exposed to heating. The more heating, the more it would break apart. I’m guessing that it was a silicon, iron and oxygen plasma without individual grains by the time it hit the upper atmosphere.

I don’t think you can compare the Apollo heat shields to a bore cap being launched into space. For one thing, the Apollo shield started in the very thin upper atmosphere, and they came in at an angle that meant they bled off as much speed/energy as possible in that thin upper atmosphere before going into the thicker atmosphere. In fact, one of the engineers said that if they came in too steep they’d generate too much heat and probably not survive the re-entry.

The layer of air you’re talking about at the front of the spacecraft was what heated up the heat shield. Instead of causing heating via friction, the heat was the result of compressing the air. The amount of compression you’re talking about would be orders of magnitude higher for something starting at 40 km/s in the thick lower atmosphere.

Also, the Apollo heat shield did heat up to 5000F or 2800C but was designed to be ablative, so that the hot layers burned off and flew off to the sides leaving new material to be heated up and burned off. This concrete and metal plug wouldn’t have been designed the same way. Concrete apparently melts at 1200C, and steel is approximately the same, so it’s very likely some of it melted or vaporized, the question is how much.

I don’t know where you’re getting the maximum of 22MJ of energy. The whole point of Apollo not going directly into the atmosphere was to take as long as possible to slow down, going through the thinnest part of the atmosphere for as long as possible. The whole point would be to reduce their energy-per-second as low as possible by taking as many seconds as possible. One reasonable first approximation of the energy would be to integrate the entire energy per second / power for Apollo’s re-entry over the entire 7 minutes (or however long it took until parachutes deployed) and then divide that energy by 2 for the 2 seconds the plug was in the atmosphere.

My guess is that that would have been temperatures well in excess of 1200C which would have made the outer surface start to melt, and most likely a temperature where it just turns to plasma. Would it all have melted / vaporized / plasmafied away? I don’t know, it’s a huge plug. Since it was launched vertically, anything remaining would probably have come right back down. But, that’s assuming it stayed in one piece. I’m guessing it broke apart due to the stresses on it, and breaking apart would have meant more surface area, which would have meant more areas exposed to massive heating, which would have meant more breaking apart.

TL;DR: I doubt it made it out of the atmosphere.

It isn’t speed.

Throw it into water or gelatin. At thousands of metres per second the air is going to seem much more dense.

That’s 11.2 km/s and 42.1 km/s.

Also, even if the manhole cover was going at above 12 km/s the trajectory has to be right for that to result in orbit. Most paths it would take would result in it going up and then coming back down again. Similarly, if somehow it did manage more than 50 km/s and wasn’t destroyed in the atmosphere, it might have the velocity to escape the sun’s gravity, but probably wouldn’t be on the right path to do it. Most likely it would fall into the sun.

So, assuming the 125,000 mph (55 km/s) velocity is correct, the most likely outcome is that it was a reverse-meteor, something that burned up going up through the atmosphere, not down. And even if it did have enough speed to get out of the atmosphere, and there was enough of it left, it most likely fell right back down through the atmosphere somewhere else, either burning up on re-entry or hitting the ground (or the water) somewhere else.

It’s interesting how there’s a hint of science here, but so much non-science.

Like, trying to categorize things is a bit scientific. Trying to distinguish between similar but different things is a bit scientific. At the same time, so many of these causes of death are symptoms not causes. And, there are too many cases where they didn’t bother to try to find a cause, like the “Planet” cases or “Suddenly”. Also, almost all of the deaths are in children / infants, but in those cases they don’t try to figure out the cause of death, they just note the age.

My premise is that people are sometimes corrupt and that power corrupts. There are democrats in power.

Are you really so much in a cult that you can’t believe that your side could possibly be anything less than pure?

It’s a laptop, do you really need 7 USB C / Thunderbolt ports on a laptop? You can always plug in a dock and get multiple other ports when you’re set up at a desk.

When I’m not at a desk I rarely have anything at all plugged in. Maybe power if I’m going for a long time, but the Pro has its own power adapter. Maybe a USB stick for a minute or two.I can’t imagine having 3 things, in addition to power and headphones, plugged in while I’m not at a desk. At a desk it’s probably more convenient to have a dock so you can have a bunch of things permanently plugged into the dock (keyboard, mouse, screens) that require just 1 plug to the laptop before they’re ready to go.

Cool stuff, I live in a city. Not a huge city, but big enough that I only see the major stars at night. It would probably take me at least 45 minutes of driving to get somewhere dark enough to take a picture like yours (assuming I had all the equipment and skill to take that kind of picture at all).

Wow, you’re like some kind of cultist. Any criticism that might apply to democrats and you come out swinging.

My premise is that we don’t know what ethics violations have been suppressed by either party. We know that both Republicans and Democrats have been found to have violated ethics, but we don’t know whether it’s the majority that have been exposed or if it’s just the tip of the iceberg. If it turns out that the Democrats have never suppressed an ethics violation then maybe they do live up to your mental image of them and are pure as the driven snow. But, it’s also possible that the democrats have protected some members.

That doesn’t mean that Republicans are better than Democrats or something, it just means that politics is politics and sometimes people in power get away with things. But really dude, you should cut back on the hero worship. These are just politicians, they shouldn’t be your whole identity.