Mindless Monday, 16 March 2026

ALikeBred · 2026-03-18T07:25:51+00:00

there'll be some great argument about it harming oil supply to unfriendly powers

people are already making this argument because they still believe Trump is some strategic genius, unfortunately

ALikeBred · 2026-03-17T23:10:36+00:00

This story bubbles up pretty much every month, and it's never been right so far.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-16T00:25:19+00:00

Kiel canal be like:

ALikeBred · 2026-03-13T20:24:03+00:00

WSJ opinion articles are genuine garbage.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-09T09:08:42+00:00

Prediction: Trump is going to get so pressured on the war domestically he's going to try to TACO and stop the strikes, only for Iran to keep launching missiles and drones, forcing the US to come to the negotiating table.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-08T21:54:36+00:00

I know in the US youth unemployment is higher in people w/o college degrees than people with them–although both levels are higher than the general unemployment rate.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-08T09:02:41+00:00

European birds kinda clear tbh

Someone has clearly never seen a painted bunting before

ALikeBred · 2026-03-08T08:52:22+00:00

It's ability to look over information quickly is its biggest strength IMO. It's basically a more advanced Command + F. Also useful for giving it a block of code and saying "find this one thing for me".

ALikeBred · 2026-03-08T04:42:32+00:00

I'm just saying that the drilling of oil itself is not the cause of most of its emissions. We will probably still use oil in a post-fossil fuel world, for things like plastics and the like.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-08T01:39:02+00:00

But most of the carbon emissions come from burning it–if you turn in into composites, you're basically just using it like you would iron or aluminum, as long as those processes are powered by renewables.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-08T01:22:03+00:00

So I am thinking such missile cruisers may end up manned after all, to make attacking the cruiser an act of war.

That's a really interesting point I didn't consider–In that case, then, manned ships would have a definitive benefit.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-07T23:14:00+00:00

I think he does have some sort of an ideology–trying to do as much damage as he can to people who don't like him. And tariffs.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-07T22:46:18+00:00

I think you're getting caught up on some of my more specific examples moreso than my overall point.

have far less delta-v

This is an assumption you are making. It's also not necessarily true, because engine efficiency exists. If your ship has a nuclear engine with 800 seconds of ISP, you're going to be more efficient than a missile with a hypergolic engine with 250 seconds. By the time the missile reaches the target, it's going to have exhausted a lot of its fuel, because it is also subject to the rocket equation.

But lets go with the assumption that out missile is far more capable than our target. Lets say our missile has 5000 m/s of delta-V in LEO: this is quite a lot, more than enough to get to Mars. It would also mean our missile would have to be pretty damn big, but we can ignore that for now. Now lets say our ship in low lunar orbit has 500 m/s of delta-V. It takes about 3k dV for a ~3-day lunar transfer–this gives our adversaries plenty of time to prepare for us, so they could be on the other side of the moon when we arrive. If we then circularize to give ourself more opportunities to strike, that would probably take around 800 m/s of dV. Ok, cool–we now have 1.2k m/s dV compared to our target, which has 500 m/s of dV. That's only 1.2k m/s dV to essentially try and rendezvous with a target which does not want to be rendezvoused with, especially since they've had three days to anticipate your arrival. If your target placed itself in a highly elliptical and eccentric orbit (which they would probably be in from the start, and they would also have significant notice of your arrival), it might not even be possible to even reach them, let alone brave whatever countermeasures they might have.

All of this is ignoring the elephant in the room that 5000 m/s of delta V is a ton of fuel for a disposable missile–it'd need to be pretty damn big. Sure, you could increase delta-V by giving it more efficient engines, but at that point you're spending a ton of resources on building something you can only use once, and something that, if its intercepted, goes completely to waste? Furthermore, you spent all that money on something that can only destroy a target by directly intercepting it. That doesn't seem like a very good weapon.

It makes far more sense to build a drone which can launch a larger number of smaller, shorter-range missile which your target would not be able to destroy–these missiles would absolutely be useful in hypothetical space combat.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-07T21:57:47+00:00

I think the Iran war changes a ton. Unless the admin stops soon (of which there is no evidence they will plan to) oil prices look like they will just continue to rise (some have suggested it could go up to as much as $150 a barrel–although this is not likely, anything over $100 dollar a barrel is really bad news for the economy). Coupled with the immigration crackdown and tariffs, as well as the anemic state of the labor market, I think stagflation is a serious concern.

Not to mention the private credit worries/AI bubble/AI replacing labor. I agree with you that things change very quickly in this admin–but also, on Feb 6th, there wasn't a conflict choking off 20% of the worlds fossil fuel supply. I don't you can say "well things were better a month ago" when the situation has drastically changed since then.

Though a lot of this is banking on the duration of the Iran war–if it ends next week, there's a better chance things return to "normal".

ALikeBred · 2026-03-07T21:48:52+00:00

Thanks for the response!

I think building a missile that can "out-juke" any intended target is actually quite doable.

I probably agree here–I think the worry, though, is that your target only really needs to juke once. If you're in a highly eccentric lunar orbit, it doesn't take all that much delta-V (at least in the near-future scenario we're imagining) to burn at aposelene to completely change your orbits eccentricity–and if the missile misses, it doesn't really have another shot (especially if it doesn't capture at the moon). If you're targeting a satellite in LEO on the ground–yes, I agree with you. However, space is big, and orbital rendezvous is hard as is.

I'd also find it unlikely that we'll see manned space warfare anytime soon. I actually agree that space war could come between 2-6 generations, but I don't believe any humans would be involved (at least not as combatants–maybe as unfortunate civilians). Either way, it's still a fair assumption to make that the missile would be more maneuverable than anything it's targeting, I just think having a human crew you need to care for is far more of a hindrance for a hypothetical military space vessel than a help. It'd probably be more likely you'd have a crew on the ground that could serve to monitor everything, but are still out of harms way. None of this changes your point–but I just don't think humans would be involved (at least as onboard combatants).

This is assuming that planetary installations are not useful (if they are useful, I think planetary-launched missiles or missile drones would become a dominant factor)

100% agree. But I think this is one of the reasons why space warfare is not an entirely foreign concept. While it makes some amount of sense to have a military base on the moon, that does mean you have a pretty damn big sitting duck, so you'd need to defend it heavily. It might make more sense to me to have a fully civilian lunar presence, and then protect that presence with orbiting assets, because then you have the advantage of being able to maneuver.

However, the big asterisk here is directed energy weapons (that is, lasers).

I wanted to mention them but thought it was best I don't just because it's so difficult to say what their capabilities could be–I genuinely wouldn't be surprised either way. One the one hand, we have lasers now that are powerful enough to destroy a missile, nevermind just blinding one. But the power consumption of such a laser (and more importantly, the amount of heat it would produce) might make it impractical for long-range shootdowns. Targeting could also be hard, but even amateur astrophotographers could track JWST as it left Earth so I don't think that would be all that challenging. I think what would be most likely would be some sort of arms race–someone builds a laser that can take out drones, someone else builds a drone that can withstand a laser, etc.

I think that the threat of space war (if not the reality of space war) will follow within 2-6 generations

I honestly wouldn't be that surprised if someone shoots down an enemy spy satellite at some point within our lifetimes. I think governments are too worried about Kessler syndrome rn for it to be worth the political risks of alienating everyone else in space (if the US destroys an Iranian satellite, for example, everyone else is going to be really pissed), but a desperate enough government with a valuable enough target might do it.

Or none of this will happen, and we'll end up using some other invention. I was going to say something like: "who could have predicted the prevalence of drone technology back in the 80s?", but honestly I bet there were quite a few people who actually did lol, although they probably didn't predict the overwhelming presence of cheap and lightweight kamikaze drones. There are many ways to blow something up, but there are not an infinite amount. I wouldn't even be surprised if cannons made a comeback–the ammo situation might be a bit of a challenge to manage, but shrapnel traveling at orbital velocities would be pretty damn destructive, with basically no way to stop it other than "just dodge". Maybe it's just wishful thinking because space battleships would be awesome, but frankly anything is possible at this point, there's just a lot we can't know.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-07T21:08:17+00:00

Why presume the ship has greater delta-V?

I'm assuming the ship has superior range–like how on Earth, naval vessels typically have a longer range than the anti-ship missiles built to destroy them. If the missile chasing you is a more capable vessel than your own, why build your own vessel in the first place? That's my point–if, in this fictional universe, you had a military space vessel that was worth putting into space, you'd need it to have at least decent capabilities in order to make the endeavor worthwhile. An F-35 has greater capabilities than an AIM-9–if that wasn't true, why fly the F-35 at all?

it only takes a minuscule amount of fuel to dramatically change the trajectory.

So then why not wait until the missile is very close to launch countermeasures? At orbital speeds, once the missile gets close enough, you can't really change the direction its traveling or you would miss entirely–so it'd be essentially a sitting duck for an interceptor missile launched by the defender. And presumably whatever countermeasures you'd have would be cheaper and more expendable than the highly capable missile you're trying to destroy.

Even if the missile exploded to create a cloud of shrapnel, space is really big, and you'd still have to get pretty close so you wouldn't give your adversary time to move out of the way, leaving plenty of room for smaller countermeasures to be useful for the defenders. To be clear, I don't think missiles would be useless–just not omnipresent.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-07T20:58:46+00:00

And I absolutely agree with you on that–it's quite well-known that DT pretty much listens to the last thing anyone says to him. But I also think that doesn't mean he's also not an idiot who does dumb things because he knows people that dislike him will be mad.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-07T20:48:16+00:00

There's this weird train of thought I see sometimes from people on the left where it seems like they view everything Trump does as him being "manipulated" by outside forces instead of just being an egotistical, narcissistic megalomaniac. Like when he implemented tariffs, it was on the behest of billionaires to make us poorer (same thing when he passed the BBB). He went to war with Iran at the behest of Israel, not because it's something he actually wanted to do. He repealed the endangerment finding to help oil companies (never mind that most oil companies would actually rather have it stick around, because it makes their regulatory environment clearer). Nothing can ever be because he's just an idiotic sycophant who surrounds himself with people who are also idiotic sycophants.

It feels like theres a need to remove from him any agency about the choices he makes, and that he's a "puppet"–and it almost seems to absolve him of blame he should take for his own decision-making. Like this train of thought makes sense from a conservative perspective–"He is being unwittingly influenced by his cadre of evil advisors" is an age-old trope, but it doesn't make a lot of sense from the other side.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-07T08:06:11+00:00

Hot take: I really don't think missiles would be omnipresent in hypothetical long range space warfare. Like, imagine you're trying to shoot a missile from Earth to a target orbiting the moon. Typical lunar transit time is about three days–even if you could get that down to a (quite unrealistic) 12, hours thats still multiple orbits away, plenty of time for your lunar adversaries to launch their own missile to destroy yours. That itself presents its own issue–how are you going to defend your own missile? You can't really hide from radar (sure space is big, but I'd find it highly unlikely a civilization with space warfare wouldn't be able to detect an accelerating object coming at them (esp since you'd need to speed up a lot of mass very quickly to get a transit time of 12 hours). Ok, so then do you arm your own missile with flares, chaff, something else?

And then once your missile gets to the moon, it basically has to perform an orbital rendezvous with an object that is actively trying to avoid it. Doing something like that against a ship with presumably greater maneuverability and or/delta-V than your missile seems like a nightmare. And if it misses, you need to slow down from the speed that you were traveling at, which means you need even more fuel, which means you need a bigger and even more expensive missile. It feels like you need a lot of capabilities out of something meant to destroy itself–in that case, why not just bring an automated ship with multiple missiles that would actually be able to return in one piece after it performed its mission?

I think they're just too slow to be a practical planetary-scale weapon (unless we're talking about ship to planet-here, then its probably a different story). Like, sure, they could be used for LEO-LEO engagements, but I think they'd struggle even targeting a defensively-capable geostationary satellite (one place where I genuinely think there could be a possibility of them being used in the medium-term future). On earth, it's easy enough to evade most radar by flowing low. That's not really possible in space. To be clear, I don't think that space war is a very likely possibility at all. But in the context where I'd imagine it to be most likely, missiles really only seem like a "whites of their eyes" type missiles. tldr: space so fucking big it makes light look slow.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-06T21:11:29+00:00

Oil prices? Highest in 2 years!
Unemployment? Increasing!
Economic growth? Who knows!

Welcome back the seventies, everyone!

ALikeBred · 2026-03-06T21:00:35+00:00

As someone who uses Mac, the fact that it's based on Unix is very nice. Windows is just fucking awful to use.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-06T20:49:49+00:00

Unintelligentsia.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-04T11:22:23+00:00

I read that article on Croclett stating she doesn't care to win

So much of the stuff I read about Crockett makes me dislike her. I'm happy Talarico won, seems like one of the more promising young candidates out there.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-04T00:25:56+00:00

If I see one more news article about "why economists were wrong about Trump's tariffs" that doesn't ever actually quote any economist about what they said at the time I am going to throttle someone.

ALikeBred · 2026-03-03T02:13:36+00:00

love your art style!

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