Posts by Phlogistan

Re: Methane?

There was and is absolutely nothing wrong with the concept of the Big Dumb Booster.

They are a straightforward engineering way to get *LOTS* of mass into space in a useful way in ONE GO. Often relatively cheaply. O2/H2 plumbing is seldom simple and never cheap.

The Sea Dragon conceptualized in 1962 could have been built with then current technology and gotten a huge amount of useful stuff into orbit. Sometimes bending LOTS of tin quickly to get your job done is not considered bad.

The reusability case that Elon Musk brought to fruition was *ALWAYS* the goal of a true space-faring society but actually getting stuff into space is pretty much the only goal we measure by.

There are still use cases for expendables now. IF they are cheap and/or plentiful and can actually do the job you need done *now*. Re: Rocket Lab Electron

Launch often. Break things. Iterate. Improve.

Per Aspera Ad Astra.

Who Watches The Watchmen...

The CIA has never really been a friend to the Republic. They pretend they are out to hobble and confound the enemies of the United States. In practice they have always spent far too much effort on disinformation and psyops aimed inward towards the citizenry.

Now they along with the rest of the THREE LETTER POWERS are too big to fail and only interested in protecting their turf.

Pournelles Iron Law writ large.

Re: There are limitations to the attacks

As drewsup opined down further in the comments the Real World Attack Vector could be quite applicable.

Imagine some fellow who regularly uses his segway to travel from point A to point B. The attacker sets up an ambush and drives the unwitting fellow into traffic, or off an elevation or.... any number of things. It would appear to anyone involved that it was the result of operator error.

I do not put ANYTHING past antifa or Russian trolls.

"Accidently" driving oneself off a cliff sounds like a pretty useful deployment of an attack to me.

Just My Opinion. I Could Be Wrong.

Cheers.

Re: Nothing new here...except maybe the IT angle.

Nothing new here.

Still shouting "BUSH DID IT!" after eight years in order to minimize or justify bad behavior in Executive Branch Land®.

Perhaps after killing a few millions of folks one could use the old saw:

"But STALIN was SOOOOO much worse!"

That's the ticket!