PinheadSlim posted:

Played too much Skyrim and think that if you accidentally kick someones chicken the entire town will murder your rear end

PainterofCrap posted:

We’re way ahead of Russia in the tire-plane race

dennyk posted:

For some reason some people keep thinking real-world geopolitics work like some sort of 4X video game and are baffled when NATO doesn't go all Ghandi and launch the nukes because one random Russian drone crashed one pixel over the border of a NATO country.

PinheadSlim posted:

Played too much Skyrim and think that if you accidentally kick someones chicken the entire town will murder your rear end

Dwesa posted:

zone posted:

Presented without comment.

tiaz posted:

putting my engine as far from the centers of gravity and lift as possible

ME: wow, what's your workout routine?
PILOT WITH ARMS LIKE HE'S SMUGGLING CANTELOUPES IN THERE: my what?

Tai posted:

https://twitter.com/anyamrch/status/1699839163443605736?s=20

lmao

zone posted:

Presented without comment.

Schweinhund posted:

I find it hard to believe that Elon had inside knowledge of Ukraine's secret military plans. It's more likely he just shut it off and it happened to be when they were about to attack the Navy. But Ukraine is always in the middle of attacking something of Russia's since they're at war and stuff.

Tai posted:

https://twitter.com/anyamrch/status/1699839163443605736?s=20

lmao

Schweinhund posted:

I find it hard to believe that Elon had inside knowledge of Ukraine's secret military plans. It's more likely he just shut it off and it happened to be when they were about to attack the Navy. And Ukraine is always in the middle of attacking something of Russia's since they're at war and stuff so it's not some big coincidence.

Willo567 posted:

Hasn't Ukraine attacked the Russian navy in Crimea several times by now? How the gently caress is this supposed to scare anyone other than Musk who's loving stupid

Dwesa posted:

CoffeeQaddaffi posted:

This is going back to either last year or very beginning of this year and when the drone boats washed ashore. This was to be the first drone boat attack at Sevastapol.

CoffeeQaddaffi posted:

This is going back to either last year or very beginning of this year and when the drone boats washed ashore. This was to be the first drone boat attack at Sevastapol.

Dick Bastardly posted:

I wonder if some technical data obtained via a process similar to radio triangulation or possibly timing the speed of data transfer relative to satellite positioning could give up geolocations on terminals and/or connected devices and this would give Musk a certain virtual picture of the battle space where his tech is being used, or maybe I just made all that up having no actual knowledge of how any of this poo poo works.

Schweinhund posted:

I find it hard to believe that Elon had inside knowledge of Ukraine's secret military plans. It's more likely he just shut it off and it happened to be when they were about to attack the Navy. And Ukraine is always in the middle of attacking something of Russia's since they're at war and stuff so it's not some big coincidence.

quote:

By September, however, both Musk and military leaders in Ukraine and the United States were realizing the complexity of their relationship. One Friday evening that month, just after spending a week with Musk, I was back home in New Orleans watching a football game at my old high school. (The occasion was that it was one of the final games for the school’s superstar quarterback, Arch Manning.) My phone started vibrating with messages from Musk.

“This could be a giant disaster,” he texted. I went behind the bleachers to ask him what the problem was. He was in full Muskian crisis-hero-drama mode, this time understandably. A dangerous issue had arisen, and he believed there was “a non-trivial possibility,” as he put it, that it could lead to a nuclear war — with Starlink partly responsible. The Ukrainian military was attempting a sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet based at Sevastopol in Crimea by sending six small drone submarines packed with explosives, and it was using Starlink to guide them to the target.

Although he had readily supported Ukraine, he believed it was reckless for Ukraine to launch an attack on Crimea, which Russia had annexed in 2014. He had just spoken to the Russian ambassador to the United States. (In later conversations with a few other people, he seemed to imply that he had spoken directly to President Vladimir Putin, but to me he said his communications had gone through the ambassador.) The ambassador had explicitly told him that a Ukrainian attack on Crimea would lead to a nuclear response. Musk explained to me in great detail, as I stood behind the bleachers, the Russian laws and doctrines that decreed such a response.

Throughout the evening and into the night, he personally took charge of the situation. Allowing the use of Starlink for the attack, he concluded, could be a disaster for the world. So he secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.

tiaz posted:

Starlink almost certainly has this capability by virtue of how it works, though I don' t know if they've built in tooling to make it easy. Low earth orbit means the satellite can only "see" a relatively small horizon of about 2500km. That sounds like a lot but remember that's the absolute limit: for it to be usefully high and unobstructed in the sky for your terminal to talk to it, it'll have to be closer than that, and at orbital speed the satellite will cross that entire 2500km in a few minutes. Even if you did away with signal strength calculations entirely, "what satellite is this terminal talking to?" can relatively quickly (I'm guessing 20-60m so you see a number of satellite transits) give you a pretty good idea of where it is. With signal strength over time it'll be even faster, because you can tell when the satellite was probably closest to the terminal.

And that's all assuming the terminal doesn't phone home its GPS coordinates anyway in a nicely formatted json message.

Baronjutter posted:

How the gently caress does this man still have a security clearance???

Tai posted:

https://twitter.com/anyamrch/status/1699839163443605736?s=20

lmao

vaginite posted:

Anyone else think it's odd that a big chunk of our space program and communications infrastructure is controlled by a private citizen that's gakked on ketamine all the time

fatherboxx posted:

"we have the big rocket aimed at your ballz mister mask" - russian ambassador to the absolutely terrified reddit man