6 ms·

I wonder what the best space vehicles today look like. We may only know decades from now. If having spy satellite photos reduces the chance of WW3 by even 1%, i

I wonder what the best space vehicles today look like. We may only know decades from now. If having spy satellite photos reduces the chance of WW3 by even 1%, it’s worth the wait

adhesive_wombat 4y ago
What if it increases it by 1%?
- moffkalast 4y ago
  What if 73% of statistics get made up on the spot?
  - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
    Well that's one stat in the world that you definitely want to know the sign of at least!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- FredPret 4y ago
  Knowing where the other powers' silos and possibly subs are is better than worrying about it. Having them know that you know means it's not worth it for them to press the big red button. Military intelligence supports the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine, which is what's keeping us all alive.
jdironman 4y ago
This is an interesting thought experiment. Take open source vs closed source software for example. Usually closed source with strong financial backing tends to fare better stability wise it doesn't always performance wise. Usually features can be pretty on par. For example LibreOffice and Microsoft office products. I guess where I was going with that train of thought, was this: are there any public domain knowledge repositories of what's possible now? Such as higher education research / publications or news site which aggregates advancements which happen outside the government sector? I'm guessing such info might be highly regulated, I don't know. And possibly not much use to the average civilian, so that niche of information is highly guarded / commercialized.
- jimmydorry 4y ago
  LibreOffice is less perfomant and has less features that its MSOffice counterpart (particularly Excel). I don't understand this comparison.
  - jdironman 4y ago
    To be honest, I use both daily. MSOffice for work, and LibreOffice for personal usage and I cannot tell a difference performance wise. However, my use case is limited to simple budgetary spreadsheets, simple docs, etc. If you are working with large datasets in excel or something than things might differ. Or maybe the performance depends on the hardware both are being run on possibly. Classic case of "it works on my computer" I guess.
  - unionpivo 4y ago
    Depending on what you do. We need to process, millions of documents a day, and headless libre-office is a lot faster (an order of magnitude) than driving word. So far no other library does what we need (I mostly just administers the cluster that does this). I know that's not what people mean when they compare "speed" of office suits, but some thing's libre office does are a lot faster than MS office. Another place where libre office is better than excel is opening and manipulating huge CSV files, with millions of rows.
- oceanplexian 4y ago
  I mean at this point we’re crossing over into conspiracy theory territory, but I think the most realistic scenarios are where we are doing things that are on the edge of what’s possible. For example we probably don’t have anti-gravity, or anything that’s a huge leap from our understanding of the laws of physics. But the military may have single-stage hypersonic aircraft and spacecraft, and are keeping it close to their chest, while putting on a “show” with far less capable demonstrators as a fake out.
  - jdironman 4y ago
    Wasn't trying to cross in to conspiracy territory at all, really wanted to gauge what others knew about resources determining where we are as a whole I guess. Well, as far as public domain knowledge goes. I don't believe the military / government has anything outside of what "known" physics allows of course. But at the same time we are always learning new things about how things interact and can be used.
jcfrei 4y ago
Why is this such a persistent meme that governments always have some crazy tech up their sleeves? Highly advanced military tech is mostly about intimidation so there's little benefit in keeping stuff secret for decades (actual war is mostly a numbers game so having a plane that's 2x better is not very useful if the other side has 10x as many). If anything militaries around the world tend to oversell their capabilities.
- y0ungarmanii 4y ago
  Lol without outting myself i worked in defense and although it could be mind numbingly slow we deff have tech at least a decade more advance than commercial sector. Mainly for the fact that there isn't a commercial market yet for the advanced stuff yet.
  - AustinDev 4y ago
    I was going to comment exactly this... There is a reason Google X and Microsoft R&D hire so many former DARPA PM's.
- walls 4y ago
  Probably because we get glimpses into how this is still true every once in a while. The gap might not be as large as it has been, but it's definitely still there in certain fields. Some examples that immediately come to mind are the stealth Black Hawks used in the Bin Laden raid, Stuxnet, and the NSA's TAO.
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    F-117 also comes to mind. Amazingly the first prototypes were complete in 1977, There were rumors about it but details about the plane and program were pretty well guarded for another decade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk#Background_and_Have_Blue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk#Backg...
    - deleted 4y ago
willis936 4y ago
It doesn't take much guess work. The Delta IV has been used for more military missions than public or commercial ones. That's the space vehicle of choice for military satellites. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Thor_and_Delta_launches_(2010%E2%80%9319) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Thor_and_Delta_launc... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(satellite) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(satellite)

I wonder what the best space vehicles today look like. We may only know decades from now. If having spy satellite photos reduces the chance of WW3 by even 1%, it’s worth the wait

adhesive_wombat 4y ago

What if it increases it by 1%?

moffkalast 4y ago
What if 73% of statistics get made up on the spot?
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  Well that's one stat in the world that you definitely want to know the sign of at least!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
FredPret 4y ago
Knowing where the other powers' silos and possibly subs are is better than worrying about it. Having them know that you know means it's not worth it for them to press the big red button. Military intelligence supports the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine, which is what's keeping us all alive.

jdironman 4y ago

This is an interesting thought experiment. Take open source vs closed source software for example. Usually closed source with strong financial backing tends to fare better stability wise it doesn't always performance wise. Usually features can be pretty on par. For example LibreOffice and Microsoft office products. I guess where I was going with that train of thought, was this: are there any public domain knowledge repositories of what's possible now? Such as higher education research / publications or news site which aggregates advancements which happen outside the government sector? I'm guessing such info might be highly regulated, I don't know. And possibly not much use to the average civilian, so that niche of information is highly guarded / commercialized.

jimmydorry 4y ago
LibreOffice is less perfomant and has less features that its MSOffice counterpart (particularly Excel). I don't understand this comparison.
- jdironman 4y ago
  To be honest, I use both daily. MSOffice for work, and LibreOffice for personal usage and I cannot tell a difference performance wise. However, my use case is limited to simple budgetary spreadsheets, simple docs, etc. If you are working with large datasets in excel or something than things might differ. Or maybe the performance depends on the hardware both are being run on possibly. Classic case of "it works on my computer" I guess.
- unionpivo 4y ago
  Depending on what you do. We need to process, millions of documents a day, and headless libre-office is a lot faster (an order of magnitude) than driving word. So far no other library does what we need (I mostly just administers the cluster that does this). I know that's not what people mean when they compare "speed" of office suits, but some thing's libre office does are a lot faster than MS office. Another place where libre office is better than excel is opening and manipulating huge CSV files, with millions of rows.
oceanplexian 4y ago
I mean at this point we’re crossing over into conspiracy theory territory, but I think the most realistic scenarios are where we are doing things that are on the edge of what’s possible. For example we probably don’t have anti-gravity, or anything that’s a huge leap from our understanding of the laws of physics. But the military may have single-stage hypersonic aircraft and spacecraft, and are keeping it close to their chest, while putting on a “show” with far less capable demonstrators as a fake out.
- jdironman 4y ago
  Wasn't trying to cross in to conspiracy territory at all, really wanted to gauge what others knew about resources determining where we are as a whole I guess. Well, as far as public domain knowledge goes. I don't believe the military / government has anything outside of what "known" physics allows of course. But at the same time we are always learning new things about how things interact and can be used.

jcfrei 4y ago

Why is this such a persistent meme that governments always have some crazy tech up their sleeves? Highly advanced military tech is mostly about intimidation so there's little benefit in keeping stuff secret for decades (actual war is mostly a numbers game so having a plane that's 2x better is not very useful if the other side has 10x as many). If anything militaries around the world tend to oversell their capabilities.

y0ungarmanii 4y ago
Lol without outting myself i worked in defense and although it could be mind numbingly slow we deff have tech at least a decade more advance than commercial sector. Mainly for the fact that there isn't a commercial market yet for the advanced stuff yet.
- AustinDev 4y ago
  I was going to comment exactly this... There is a reason Google X and Microsoft R&D hire so many former DARPA PM's.
walls 4y ago
Probably because we get glimpses into how this is still true every once in a while. The gap might not be as large as it has been, but it's definitely still there in certain fields. Some examples that immediately come to mind are the stealth Black Hawks used in the Bin Laden raid, Stuxnet, and the NSA's TAO.
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  F-117 also comes to mind. Amazingly the first prototypes were complete in 1977, There were rumors about it but details about the plane and program were pretty well guarded for another decade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk#Background_and_Have_Blue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk#Backg...
  - deleted 4y ago

willis936 4y ago

It doesn't take much guess work. The Delta IV has been used for more military missions than public or commercial ones. That's the space vehicle of choice for military satellites. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Thor_and_Delta_launches_(2010%E2%80%9319) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Thor_and_Delta_launc... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(satellite) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(satellite)