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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2025

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  • “Missiles are shit, innacurate weapons”

    I would invite you to watch this video discussing the technology beyond one of the US’s old ICBMs. It could accurately strike from across the world, with no external reference, after being held in a silo for a long time. Obviously these aren’t the same missiles being used here, but it’s a good demonstration of the level of technology that the US defense industry can create.

    I don’t think it’s fair to say that we can’t build an accurate missile.

    Also, there have been reports of multiple strikes on the same location (to kill first responders responding to the first strike) - If this was down to random chance, the odds of hitting the same “incorrect” target twice are extremely slim.

    I think it’s pretty clear that the US has extremely capable weapons technology, and that this is entirely intentional.



















  • There’s a few things (I am an engineer, though not nuclear):

    1. Efficiencies don’t necessarily stack like that. For boiling water you’re dependent on kinetic energy as heat. I’m not familiar with running plasma through magnetic fields for power generation, but if you lose thermal energy, your overall efficiency may be worse.
    2. In power generation, reliability is obviously extremely important, and the nuclear industry is highly risk-averse. So doing something in a known, tested way is preferable. Any downtime is extremely expensive if things break, since it may be gigawatts of power you’re not selling.
    3. Big magnets and handling highly energetic plasma are both really expensive. Steam turbines and generators have existing supply chains since we use them everywhere. I think cost is a big part, since the people building power plants want to make their money back sooner, so may not want to pay millions to billions more for a few percent efficiency gain.