Comments on: The Americans should have looked up

By: T. Beholder

T. Beholder — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 18:20:37 +0000

Satellite-killing may be seen (at least unofficially) as “mutually assured stupidity”. Anyone who can kill satellites already owns satellites, so… There most likely will be eye-for-an-eye, until everyone goes blind, thus possible advantages are extremely dubious.

In all-out nuclear war killing satellites could prevent the other side from assessing hits and using the weaker follow-up salvo effectively, but that’s it. In any other circumstances, it’s just very annoying and also increases risk of actually starting WWIII.

By: Alistair Morley

Alistair Morley — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 14:12:17 +0000

“….55 minutes later, debris from co-orbiting satellites smashed through Tiangong-3 and its Taikonauts sucked hard vacuum…”

I would REALLY not want to be in a space station tasked with starting Kessler syndrome.

By: Alistair Morley

Alistair Morley — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 14:09:02 +0000

I’ve met Cole; he’s not an idiot.

But…

A chemical laser of sufficient power to frag satellites on a trans-orbital shot of hundreds of klicks? With a beam diffusion in the low milliradians?

Yeah….ok…assume 20% thermal efficiency. Maybe. You’ll will literally melt your own space station before you do any appreciable damage to the enemies sat fleet.

This is the bad thing about my job; it makes 95% of these techno-thriller look like innumerate wank-jobs who don’t understand the technology they fetishize. Worse, they evince tactics (especially in air combat) which are simply _wrong_ and have no grasp of the human nature of warfare. I mean….everyone works like machines…Homo Clanceyis…

By: Ezra

Ezra — Sat, 14 Dec 2019 16:46:51 +0000

Micro-cube satellites are the answer? Proliferate space with them and you have an enormous redundant capacity?

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 14 Dec 2019 01:49:59 +0000

Seeing that America is losing the war, international investors dump dollars for anything they can get. Its value drops to zero and DC becomes a ghost town because no tradeable goods are produced there.

Ten years later, the states that were once “united” are prospering again with a population of 100 million, all white except for a few Chinese exclaves on the West Coast and a strip of the desert Southwest ceded to Mexico. No one knows where the other 225 million went and no one much cares. Whether one’s preference is urban, suburban, or rural, housing is safe and affordable, government is small and unobtrusive, and there’s work for anyone who wants it.

Some of the six million Jews who fled to Israel have petitioned to return, but their applications are being processed *very* slowly.