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feedmegin posted:2.5 times is 2 orders of magnitude? Not necessarily, I've read that at some point after Tsar Bomba strength, the explosion will reach the border of the atmosphere and after that point, all additional energy will go towards channeling dirt into space. In other words, the reason eventually everyone stopped making ever larger warheads is that around the point of the Tsar Bomba it becomes loving pointless, as the destruction on the ground stops increasing. It also means Eisenhower probably would have been safe. Though the effects on the weather would have been horrible, of course. What with that huge wind funnel leading to space and all that
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Jan 29, 2021 12:00
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I guess monarchy was ruled out because history should be full of nice kings. They didn't have to kill anyone since their grandpa did all of that for them and they would be able to leave the throne for their son without any undue effort.
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Jan 29, 2021 12:09
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Libluini posted:Not necessarily, I've read that at some point after Tsar Bomba strength, the explosion will reach the border of the atmosphere and after that point, all additional energy will go towards channeling dirt into space. In other words, the reason eventually everyone stopped making ever larger warheads is that around the point of the Tsar Bomba it becomes loving pointless, as the destruction on the ground stops increasing. That doesn't sound right. I mean I think it'll scale more poorly at that point, but making single big bombs vs lots of little ones was always an inefficient (in both ICBM payload mass, and use of fissile material) way to gently caress things up.
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Jan 29, 2021 13:16
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Xiahou Dun posted:didn't do anything evil. You've set an impossible bar, I challenge you to name any temporal government that hasn't done anything evil. In terms of relatively not-bad dictators, I'll put Ismet Inonu on the table.
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Jan 29, 2021 13:35
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Fangz posted:That doesn't sound right. I mean I think it'll scale more poorly at that point, but making single big bombs vs lots of little ones was always an inefficient (in both ICBM payload mass, and use of fissile material) way to gently caress things up. A lot of things in physics "doesn't sound right"  Human intuition fails quite often
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Jan 29, 2021 13:47
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What's the deal with the German peasants and the boot-on-a-stick?
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Jan 29, 2021 13:54
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Fangz posted:That doesn't sound right. I mean I think it'll scale more poorly at that point, but making single big bombs vs lots of little ones was always an inefficient (in both ICBM payload mass, and use of fissile material) way to gently caress things up. Blast radius increases in proportion to the cube root of the yield
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Jan 29, 2021 14:00
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:In terms of relatively not-bad dictators, I'll put Ismet Inonu on the table. Comedy options: Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and Ataturk of Turkey. shame about the massacres and genocide, aside from that they did good things
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Jan 29, 2021 14:04
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:You've set an impossible bar, I challenge you to name any temporal government that hasn't done anything evil. That's an excellent point and well-received. I was using colloquial language to try and differentiate between something like Obama doing lots of stuff that I disagree with but he was president and that's a thing that happens vs. anything Stalin did on a Tuesday. And again, it's a bullshit and fuzzy question so I'm not really expecting a serious answer ; this is more me just wondering and y'all are smarter than me.
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Jan 29, 2021 14:15
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Libluini posted:A lot of things in physics "doesn't sound right" Lemme re-word. This sounds completely wrong according to my understanding of physics and I can only conclude that you misread completely. Firstly there is no clear "border of the atmosphere", secondly the Tsar Bomba's fireball radius was a mere 2.5 miles, not reaching the altitude of the plane it was released from, thirdly if there's a large shockwave, the parts of the shockwave near the ground sure as heck don't "know" that the top of the explosion has reached space and decide to stop expanding, fourthly you ignore direct thermal damage and all that fun stuff, and fifth there's ample evidence that large scale explosions can cause arbitrarily large amounts of damage on the ground, see e.g. the damage from asteroid impacts. So I think your claim is really citation needed. What I would theorize is actually true is that larger explosions than the largest nuclear explosion ever tested will lead to weird, untested dynamics with stuff like the upper atmosphere, which would cause conventional formulae about nuclear explosion effects to break down. This does not however imply there is a ceiling to the amount of boom. Crazy old Teller did in fact propose a 10 gigaton bomb. That's 100x the Tsar Bomba. http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-bigger-boom/ quote:The scientist Edward Teller, according to one account, kept a blackboard in his office at Los Alamos during World War II with a list of hypothetical nuclear weapons on it. The last item on his list was the largest one he could imagine. The method of “delivery” — weapon-designer jargon for how you get your bomb from here to there, the target — was listed as “Backyard.” As the scientist who related this anecdote explained, “since that particular design would probably kill everyone on Earth, there was no use carting it anywhere.” Fangz fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Jan 29, 2021 |
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Jan 29, 2021 14:17
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ChubbyChecker posted:wrt. duncan, he isn't a historian, he's just a guy with a microphone and internet connection I mean, he's literally published, I'd say he counts. Now whether he's a good historian is certainly debatable, but I feel like dismissing him outright is a bit harsh.
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Jan 29, 2021 15:26
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I think Duncan is pretty good about saying "look the record is really unclear, but here is my personal narrative on what I think likely happened". You get the caveat that it's his personal take.
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Jan 29, 2021 15:35
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Being published doesn't mean poo poo.
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Jan 29, 2021 15:36
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He's come a long way since History of Rome (which was what, 8 years ago?). He doesn't have a PhD but he's been spending the last while doing primary research in France for a book on Lafayette so he sure as hell is in a higher category then someone like Dan Carlin.
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Jan 29, 2021 15:36
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As someone who’s done the history PhD thing I’ll be the first to say you don’t need a PhD to do history. But it helps, because you learn a lot of the craft and technique of research, analysis, and writing. But you can 100% just learn that without getting the paper, the same way that you can teach yourself to play guitar or draw. The key is recognizing the difference between the historian versions of the self taught artist who has actually taken the time to develop the skills that other people learn at art school (or from a mentor etc) vs the person who traces anime all day and rejects any criticism because “that’s my style.”
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Jan 29, 2021 15:50
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If you forget all the bad things done by Hitler, you'll notice that Hitler did nothing wrong.
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Jan 29, 2021 16:25
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:You've set an impossible bar, I challenge you to name any temporal government that hasn't done anything evil. Castro and Tito? Lee Kuan Yew
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Jan 29, 2021 16:26
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Gaius Marius posted:Being published doesn't mean poo poo. Which as we've seen here is absolutely true and thus a little weird that Duncan is being criticized for not having credentials. ChubbyChecker posted:wrt. duncan, he isn't a historian, he's just a guy with a microphone and internet connection So what you're saying here is...the czar was unfairly treated by duncan in that episode? 
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Jan 29, 2021 16:29
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Cyrano4747 posted:But you can 100% just learn that without getting the paper, the same way that you can teach yourself to play guitar or draw. The key is recognizing the difference between the historian versions of the self taught artist who has actually taken the time to develop the skills that other people learn at art school (or from a mentor etc) vs the person who traces anime all day and rejects any criticism because “that’s my style.” Are there books you'd recommend to develop (at least some of) the skills properly? I definitely feel like I'm very slowly picking things up by just reading a lot of academic texts, but then it's easy to feel more competent than you are.
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Jan 29, 2021 16:30
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Nebakenezzer posted:Which as we've seen here is absolutely true and thus a little weird that Duncan is being criticized for not having credentials. dunno, haven't read much about that revolution, but i wouldn't trust duncan's works without further proof, because i'm familiar with his earlier works.
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Jan 29, 2021 16:54
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Fangz posted:Lemme re-word. Yeah obviously, the border to space isn't a literal magic wall, and I think it's really condescending of you to assume I meant that instead of something reasonable. But on your second point: It could be I misremember the details, most of my knowledge stems from books I've read or science articles I've casually read during lunch hour at work, so the details I remember may vary wildly in terms of reliability. You could say I'm more of a Dan than a Duncan.  Also the upper limit I was talking about was probably more something like 200 Mt, not just the 50-57 Mt of the Tsar Bomba. Again, unreliable memories. Too bad blindly googling didn't help, as there is a lot of stuff about nukes cluttering up the internet, and I can't really find anything related to upper limits of nuclear weapons that are talking about this. Edit: To add some further thoughts into my answer: a) A nuclear explosion isn't an asteroid strike b) What the shockwave on the ground knows or not is irrelevant if the blast becomes large enough the upper part suddenly vents into space, this simply means the shockwave can't grow larger after the limit is reached, or only grow larger very slowly, as most of the added energy is now harmlessly vented into space. Libluini fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Jan 29, 2021 |
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Jan 29, 2021 17:00
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Libluini posted:Yeah obviously, the border to space isn't a literal magic wall, and I think it's really condescending of you to assume I meant that instead of something reasonable. But on your second point: It could be I misremember the details, most of my knowledge stems from books I've read or science articles I've casually read during lunch hour at work, so the details I remember may vary wildly in terms of reliability. You could say I'm more of a Dan than a Duncan. this nuke talk reminded me of this site where you can see the blast radius on map: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
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Jan 29, 2021 17:27
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Libluini posted:Yeah obviously, the border to space isn't a literal magic wall, and I think it's really condescending of you to assume I meant that instead of something reasonable. But on your second point: It could be I misremember the details, most of my knowledge stems from books I've read or science articles I've casually read during lunch hour at work, so the details I remember may vary wildly in terms of reliability. You could say I'm more of a Dan than a Duncan. In terms of condescension, maybe don't do the "physics isn't always intuitive" bit when you've got nothing more than "I vaguely remember reading this somewhere". As another poster pointed out, the size of various nuclear effects scale according to the cube root of yield. Hence a 200 Mt nuke would reach up only 60% more than a 50 Mt nuke. In terms of the altitudes we are talking we're talking a decline in atmospheric pressure at the top of the fireball from about 0.6 atm to 0.45 atm. Far more significant to the decline of the megabombs is the fact that the Tsar Bomba weighed 27 tons and required a specialised aircraft to carry it, when the ICBMs that were coming online during this time had a payload capacity of a few hundred kilos. And like, Wellerstein in that article I linked mentions casually in apocalyptic terms the destructive capacity of the gigabombs, so he certainly doesn't seem aware of some kind of upper limit. Fangz fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Jan 29, 2021 |
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Jan 29, 2021 17:43
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ChubbyChecker posted:wrt. duncan, he isn't a historian, he's just a guy with a microphone and internet connection Gaius Marius posted:Being published doesn't mean poo poo. It means that he's in some way respected by somebody with some kind of money rather than some rando all on his own, which is a bar that filters out a lot of the chaff, even though there's plenty of garbage people who get past that point. Fact is, he's a guy who puts out a lot of words describing historical events for a living, that sounds like a historian. And even if you think he's made mistakes or whatever, that doesn't make him not a historian. There are lots of bad historians or even historians that have their own agenda and are mussing up the facts to those ends. With some very important events, we only have some unreliable biased sources to work with. A big part of learning about history is learning to sort through conflicting accounts because there are a whole lot of conflicting accounts, and developing methodology for dealing with that sort of thing. That's why historiography is even a thing. Vincent Van Goatse posted:Cincinnatus I guess quitting is one of the best things a dictator can do, but then you'd have to consider counting Pinochet too.
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Jan 29, 2021 17:51
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Bill o Reilly is also a published historical author. I'm not saying Duncan isn't fine. But I am saying being published means nothing
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Jan 29, 2021 18:42
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Jan 29, 2021 18:45
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SlothfulCobra posted:It means that he's in some way respected by somebody with some kind of money rather than some rando all on his own, which is a bar that filters out a lot of the chaff, even though there's plenty of garbage people who get past that point. 
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Jan 29, 2021 18:45
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Did you read what you quoted? They state explicitly that a lot of bad poo poo gets published, so pointing out that bad poo poo gets published doesn't argue against them.
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Jan 29, 2021 18:47
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Fangz posted:In terms of condescension, maybe don't do the "physics isn't always intuitive" bit when you've got nothing more than "I vaguely remember reading this somewhere". Sure you can keep on building larger and larger bombs but the point I believe the other poster is trying to make is that there is a point at which building larger bombs is pointless because the explosive “return on investment” is minimized by energy being lost/ tending to expend itself towards a path of least resistance. So you can conceptually build a 10 gigaton weapon but also realize that it would be pointless to do so based on factors of scale in both physical size and weight as well as an efficient use of fissile material and delivery platforms. As the weapon size as measured in megatons or gigatons increases at a certain point more of the explosive power is directed towards a path of least resistance as the atmosphere and crust exhibit different energy propagation rates.
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Jan 29, 2021 18:49
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There are some serious hacks that seep through the cracks even beyond just getting published. I've found Wontack Hong and Covell & Covell (prominent advocates of what veers more into Korean pseudo-history, basically) on the shelves of one of the best universities in the US.
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Jan 29, 2021 18:52
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The first historian was an bitter old man who was writing down speeches long after they were spoken that maybe (or probably?) he didn't even personally hear. Or maybe they were just intended to be a narrative device that other Greeks would've expected. He opened his work opining about the days of pirates who were free of any state and how much everybody loved that, which does indicate a sort of slant.
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Jan 29, 2021 19:08
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Gaius Marius posted:Bill o Reilly is also a published historical author. I'm not saying Duncan isn't fine. But I am saying being published means nothing I will be a published historical author within the next few months. Make of that what you will.
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Jan 29, 2021 19:09
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Xiahou Dun posted:Did you read what you quoted? They state explicitly that a lot of bad poo poo gets published, so pointing out that bad poo poo gets published doesn't argue against them. Yes, that was meant to be an example of a bad book that was published. I was posting something to agree with you. Jesus, you are so constantly hostile.
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Jan 29, 2021 19:12
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Cessna posted:Yes, that was meant to be an example of a bad book that was published. What? I wasn't even the original poster. Sorry if I'm coming off as hostile. My tone must not be coming through in text. I wasn't angry or anything, just confused.
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Jan 29, 2021 19:17
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Xiahou Dun posted:What? I wasn't even the original poster. So you weren't involved, you just figured you'd jump in to correct me for - for agreeing with someone? Xiahou Dun posted:Sorry if I'm coming off as hostile. My tone must not be coming through in text. I wasn't angry or anything, just confused. I was agreeing with the post, providing an example of a terrible history book that was published.
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Jan 29, 2021 19:20
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I just misunderstood what you meant. How on earth am I the one being hostile here. I'm sorry if I offended you. It wasn't my intention.
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Jan 29, 2021 19:22
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Xiahou Dun posted:How on earth am I the one being hostile here. Xiahou Dun posted:Did you read what you quoted? I've said my peace, I'll step out.
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Jan 29, 2021 19:24
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^^ffs, next time just use a smilie to help convey your tone. GotLag posted:Blast radius increases in proportion to the cube root of the yield Yeah, that's the critical component: for a nuclear weapon, the thermal kill radius/blast kill radius/radiation kill radius all vary at slightly different rates (for example, a low-yield nuclear bomb like the Davey Crockett can have a radiation kill radius that exceeds its blast kill radius, because those kill mechanisms don't all scale proportionally), but they're all approximately the cubic root. Use 1,000x as much boom to go from a 1kT nuke to a 1MT nuke? You'll increase the blast radius by a factor of 10, more or less. Similarly, that's why handheld grenades use fragmentation to kill - the blast kill radius still scales like a volume (1/radius^3), so you'd need a shitload of raw explosive power to kill at a fairly short radius, but fragmentation spreads out more like an area (1/radius^2), so it can kill at a much greater range.
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Jan 29, 2021 19:31
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I'm also published, and very handsome.
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Jan 29, 2021 20:05
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I got curious and tried to find more about nuclear blasts in atmosphere wasting their energy into space and I got nothing in from any source that seemed authoritative. I see it in Wiki/Wikia pages but that's about it. From the perspective of this search engine user, it seems like an idea that got out there and was accepted as fact without ever getting a proper attribution. The rule about the blast radius varying with the cube root of yield explains everything about the move to smaller weapons. If you double the accuracy of the delivery system, you can make the weapon one-eighth the size. That's more than enough reason to look toward small weapons, as long as your delivery system is better than minute-of-nation.
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Jan 29, 2021 20:24
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