NonCredibleDefense @sh.itjust.works threelonmusketeers @sh.itjust.works 2 mo. ago

Satellite images suggest test of Russian “super weapon” failed spectacularly

arstechnica.com Satellite images suggest test of Russian “super weapon” failed spectacularly

All that's left of the Russian missile silo is a big hole in the ground.

61 comments

I’m as much a fan of schadenfreude as the next guy, but every test brings this weapon closer to the battle field.
- Still i bet russia would prefer that they had Sarmat working so they could use it as a threat.
  
  Of course! I’d also like all my programs to run fine without bugs the first time. But that’s just not the nature of things. What we’re seeing here is, ummm, hardware debugging. It’s the process of getting to a reliable delivery system unfolding in real time.
  
  That said, this quest for a Super Weapon that will force the West to finally recognize Russia as a Real Power Once and For All is super fucking creepy. It’s equal parts Bond villain and the final years of another famous European dictator. Neither are exciting prospects for world security.
- ∞ - 1 = ?
  
  Sadly that's not how it works, especially with government money. A good example is SpaceX, they succeeded so fast because they failed fast and learned fast. Failure is always progress as long as you don't give up
  
  That being said the Russians should totally give up
James Acton, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote on X that the before-and-after imagery of the Sarmat missile silo was "very persuasive that there was a big explosion."

Glad they got an expert to weigh in on this...
- I mean, how am i supposed to know if there's an explosion happened just because it happen to have a giant-ass crater?
  
  It's weird how explosions often take place where craters are
  
  TBF it could have just been an underground facility collapsing due to the stress from a rocket launch.
It’s very funny to me how much nonsense is in this article.

What I mean by that is that the satellite photos - they look like Cuban missile crisis photos. I understand why they would mask the capability of spy tech, but I can get clearer imagery of my house from google.
And they don’t know when the launch failure occurred? There are plenty of seismographs that would pick up a large explosion like that. Psh.
- You sure you're not comparing it to Google's airplane footage, instead of their satellite footage?
  
  ….
  
  In two hours I have a reoccurring leadership-type meeting where finding replacement vendors for Nearmap has been a topic of discussion for a few years. (TBF, my focus is on data accessibility and interoperability. I kind of zone out for that part of the meeting.)
  
  I honestly don’t know why I have never considered that Google flies its imagery.
- I understand why they would mask the capability of spy tech
  
  Then why are you confused?
  
  My comment said I was amused.
  
  What point are you trying to make, or what angle are you trying to get at?
- This is from a commercial satellite though.
  
  Are you trying to say the Google maps imagery is not commercial satellite data?
Goddamn liquid fueled ICBM, and they think this is new tech?
- Say what you like about the Sovs, they glorified engineers and scientists. Modern Russia both treats and portrays them as trash (as opposed to just treating them as trash) without the slightest bit of respect for their trade, and then are confused when all the smart lads and lasses go to the degenerate globalhomo West.
  
  At least in the Soviet Union the risk of GULAG was balanced out slightly by the prospect of getting legit accolades from the government for being good with the designing and the thinky-numbers. In modern Russia, all you get is poisoned tea, shit pay, and no respect.
  
  Say what you like about the Sovs, they glorified engineers and scientists.
  
  I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. When engineers and scientists couldn't do what Stalin asked he convicted them of sabotage and espionage and threw them into gulags. And it happened a lot. Also, much like the US, most of the Soviet engineering knowledge was gained from the Nazis during their version of Operation Paperclip.
  
  It was just propaganda though. USSR didn'r treat their scientists and engineers a lick better than Russia does. It was just lip service.
  
  The USSR did at least attempt to do the right thing by it's citizens most of the time. Or at least they cared enough to pretend.
- Well, they're burning UDMH, which is some scary fucking shit. I can't imagine being in an underground ~~tomb~~bunker with several dozens of tons of it.
  
  UDMH
  
  At least that stuff is stable while in a tank. Imagine sitting next to tons of rocket grade hydrogen peroxide, slowly decomposing, just waiting for an excuse to go boom.
- TBF the USA has idiots like Jeff Bezos and Musk making Natural Gas Fueled rockets still in development.
  
  Pretty sure Starship has more successful launches than Sarmat at this point.
@threelonmusketeers When you test that superweapon of you:
Where did the roads go? These are very weird pictures imo. Instead of before and after it looks like an after and before, with edits.
- Turns out that blowing up a hundred tons of rocket fuel underground will make some dirt land on top of roads.
  
  The ones closer to the silo are probably part of the rubble, the ones further away are likely just buried.
  
  If you want some idea of what blowing up an ICBMs worth of rocketsfuel will do: in 1980, a US serviceman dropped a spanner in a nuclear missile silo. That led to a fuel leak and the explosion from it sent the warhead flying THROUGH the 750 ton silo door and over threehundred meters away. There are some amazing books on the Damascus Silo incident.
  
  I totally forgot about dirt. I was only thinking of rubble and the initial blast.
  
  The book. Command and Control about the incident is like 600 pages and it was so good I read it in a weekend. Highly recommended.
- Yes, totally a psyop. No way an underground explosion could have spread soil in the streets around! /s

You've viewed 61 comments.