Judge_Juche [she/her]

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  • 87 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 28th, 2020

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  • Lol, I remember when they invented this story years ago. The origin was literally a guy on Twitter seeing a picture from North Korea of one of those boards with different hairstyles at the barber that you can reference and just assuming that those were the only hairstyles that the government allowed.

    That somehow generated multiple years of insane made up stories around hairstyles in North Korea, like there were stories claiming it was either forbidden or mandatory for men to get Kim Jong Un’s signature cut, sometimes appearing in the same publication weeks apart.

    For whatever reason they keep printing stories about North Korean haircuts, possibly becuase they are frivolous enough that they don’t get any serious pushback despite how obviously absurd they are. Unlike other all-timer fake North Korea stories like nuclear testing creating zombies or their whole soccer team getting executed because they lost the World Cup.


  • Judge_Juche [she/her]@hexbear.nettourbanism@hexbear.netHmm,
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    3 months ago

    Most of these extremely long continuous truss bridges were built in the US in the 70s and 80s because they were pretty cheap for such a long bridge. And people have recognized that they are uniquely vulnerable becuase a single point of failure could potentially take down the whole bridge. However a lot of them haven’t had any retrofits to mitigate this issue.



  • NASAs version of this is called StarTram, it’s feasible but there are some major technical hurdles.

    In the prototype stage, the launch velocity at the end of the gun would not be anywhere near the 10 km/s you would need to achieve orbit. But you could reach a sizable fraction, say 3 km/s. Becuase the velocity gained during rocket flight is not linear with mass, having that 3 km/s inital boost would reduce your overall rocket mass by like 80%. The rocket would clear the atmosphere and then fire its motor to gain a stable orbit.

    We can achieve 3 km/s with current technology, it would require like a 100 km long maglev in a very low pressure tube, likely built on the side of a mountain. It could probably reduce space flight costs by a factor of 10 if completed.

    Building the proposed goal of a human rated version capable of reaching near 10 km/s at the end point would be much more difficult. The tube would have to span over 1,000 km and I don’t believe we have the technology yet to maintain the vacuum or supply enough power quickly enough to power it.

    China is likely proposing to build a testbed system to start researching the concept. Probably on a larger scale than NASA has but nowhere near a complete system.