You really think he would know if they actually took out the warhead? The warhead is going to land a dozen kilometers downrange. Of course there was an explosion in the sky - they're shooting a missile up at it, you're pretty much guaranteed an explosion. The question is whether it worked.

Iron Dome isn't designed to hit rockets in the boost phase; when it hits them, the motor is not in operation. You could turn 90% of the rocket into swiss cheese, if you don't hit the warhead it's still going to explode when it comes down, and it's going to come down right where it otherwise would have (the Iron Dome interceptors work by shrapnel, not by concussive force that could push a rocket onto a different trajectory)

Here's a Qassam rocket. When they're new they often paint them up all fancy, but you can see how simple they are without the paint. They're just a steel pipe with fins crudely welded to the side. The engine is a steel plate with nozzles drilled out. They use multiple nozzles because the rockets are so crudely made, they keep on going even if a couple fail. They're literally sugar rockets - the fuel is sugar and potassium nitrate fertilizer. The warhead is a steel shell which they stuff with whatever smuggled explosives they can get ahold of. The trigger is a bullet cartridge with a nail and a spring.

Teenagers competing in model rocket competitions build more advanced rockets than that.

Given how incredibly lame this missile's fuse is, you could literally defeat it by sticking a broomstick on the front end of your missile and rebalancing. That is, if the system even worked in the first place.

I had no idea that's how they triggered the Iron Dome warheads. Just a broken, angled light field triggering a central explosive a short time later on the premise that it'll be near the warhead at that point? That's so incredibly stupid. I don't know whether this guy's data about how effective the system is or not is accurate, but I can clearly see the glaring theoretical problems with such a system.

And this is ignoring the fact that they're using $50k missiles launched from $55 million systems to shoot down $800 rockets launched from pieces of drainage pipe. Even as poor as Palestinians are compared to Israelis, those are some pretty awful ratios. The Palestinians might as well save money and skip the warheads altogether, just shoot off as many empty rockets as they can to waste Israel's money.

Orders of magnitude are used for approximations of scale, not exact figures. And the Russian R-36 missile can take a 20MT warhead (although I think they've eliminated all of the R-36s in that configuration in favor of the MIRVed version, I'd have to check).

You're right, though, I think two orders of magnitude would be a more accurate figure.

I'm an atheist. But I am happy when terrorists die. I don't need to rationalize it.

Yeah, those damned terrorist children in their terrorist-loving hospital beds. Good riddance!

Oh, but Israel warned them, right? Yeah, great how that goes down!

Israel: Hey, just being nice and friendly and letting you know we're about to bomb!
Palestinains: Great, we're on our way!
Israel: Um, no... you can't come here.
Palestinians: So... you're going to open up the border crossing to Egypt?
Israel: Certainly not!
Palestinians: Okay... so I guess we're not leaving then.
Israel: Okay, your call, but don't say we didn't warn you!

Gaza has been since the beginning like a giant open-air prison camp. Where the heck are the impoverished people trying to flee the conflict supposed to go? And for that matter, for everyone criticizing Hamas for fighting and storing weapons in or near civilian areas... there is nowhere in Gaza not near a civilian area, certainly nowhere further than a stray tank shell can fly - it's one of the most densely populated places on Earth, over 5 times denser than Taiwan and 11.6 times denser than Japan. Israel forced as many people as possible into as little land as possible. And not accidentally. What little farmland there is can be overrun in a matter of minutes. Israel could fill the entirity of Gaza with tanks and artillery at a density of over 100 per square mile.

I was in the same situation once. Laid off by Northern Telecom in the late '80s, I started work as a contractor at their head office three weeks later for double what I'd been paid as an employee. :)

Of course, the old Orion design has been significantly surpassed by a number of newer designs. Medusa, for example, is much better than Orion - the bombs explode in front of the craft behind a gigantic "parachute", which captures far more of the energy and the long cords on the parachute allow for a much longer, smoother acceleration pulse. The bombs are also able to be detonated much further from the craft, and the craft may be made a lot smaller.

Nuclear thermal - the first version that was being developed called Nerva - allows for "clean" (to varying degrees) fission propulsion from the surface. Or if what you want is high ISP in space, then a fission fragment rocket goes much higher than an Orion or Medusa design (and scales down a lot better)

It's not the human *touch* that people crave in a complicated interaction with a system. It's human *versatility*.

Thus more personnel does no good, if those personnel are rigidly controlled, lack information to advise or authority to act. The fact that they're also expected to be jolly and upbeat as they follow their rigid and unyielding rules only turns the interaction with them into a travesty of a social interaction.

What would work better is a well-designed check-in system that handles routine situations nearly all the time, along with a few personnel who have the training and authority to solve any passenger problems that come up.

I'm pretty sure birth control exists.

None of the content I watch on YouTube is paid for by advertising.

YouTube is just a file sharing site for a lot of users.

There are hundreds of university lectures on line, they haven't been paid for by advertising.

It may be a fallacy in your mind. But it does beg the question why such a huge number of poor people are in prison camp USA.

Increases in wealth in America have largely gone to the 1% since the 1970's rather than the poor or middle class. Basically the USA has reinvented feudalism.

You mean you run your economy on illegal cheap foreign labour and because criminal money is just as good as real money to you Americans you think its would be a good idea to stop providing welfare to the human beings you threw down the toilet in your own country because you displaced them with foreign slaves..

And you wonder why Putin is able to get worldwide support for his immensely successful propaganda?

He seems no worse than the US.

Decade or two to ramp up production for new vehicle sales. Plus a decade or so for consumer acceptance lag. Then two decades or more to phase out existing gas cars. We're talking half a century here.

Yes, at one point there were 5 cars per million people period. Around the year 1890. Today there's 0.15 cars per capita globally. It took over a century to scale up that much, so I don't think that's the sort of point you want to be making. Plus, not only do we have to scale up for existing car replacement, but also to handle the rapid growth of the third world, which will push that 0.15 cars per capita way up over the coming decades. It's simply something that will take decades to get the production capacity in place, and then decades at that level to phase out the existing vehicles on the road.

Biofuels are hardly a gap filler. Have you ever checked how much land they eat up even to meet today's tiny pathetic percentage of the market share? To meet the needs of the average American driver's 12k miles per year in an average 24mpg car (500 gallons) would require 3 million square miles of farmland dedicated to it, more than double the US total farmland for *all* crops - for human consumption, for animal feed, for clothing, for industry, everything combined. And that's just for passenger cars, let alone freight trucks, trains, airplanes, ships, etc.

It's not a gap filler. It's an environmental disaster on a greater scale than the oil it's trying to replace.

I can only go with the experience of my friends, who've gone both routes successfully.

It's true that traditional publishers expect mid-list authors to shoulder most of the promotion efforts these days. I never said they didn't. Fiction authors are now expected to maintain a platform, which used to be a non-fiction thing. Certainly traditional publishers have become more predatory and less supportive than they were twenty years ago. I don't have an inside track on why that is, but I suspect there are several causes. One is that POD allows publishers to make an reliable though modest profit from their mid-list authors, which ironically makes them more risk averse. But publishers still provide production and editing services on a MS that'd cost you maybe ten thousand dollars if you were contracting those services out. They also get your book in bricks-and-mortar bookstores, which is a bridge too far for most indy authors, even the successful ones.

A lot of the bad feeling that publishers get from indy authors comes from two sources. First, a long history with rejection. Second the lack of respect indy authors get relative to traditionally published authors. We can see it in this discussion elsewhere, where one poster puts "authors" in quotes when referring to indy authors. And it's easy to see why because most indy authors just aren't good enough to get traditionally published. *Some* indy authors put out a product that's every bit as good as the mid-list authors from the big publishing houses, but most just dump their terrible manuscripts on Amazon with a clip-art cover and no copy editing, much less developmental editing.

The statistic that most indy authors make their investment back plus 40% didn't impress me, because (a) that counts the author's labor as free and (b) most indy authors don't invest much cash in their projects. The percentage of indy authors that clear, say, five thousand dollars in profit are very small.

It's not that indy publishing doesn't have its points, and my traditionally published friends are certainly thinking about dipping their toe in the water. But it's not as cheap as it looks if you want a comparable product, and you give up certain things. I was in Manhattan recently and went to the 5th Avenue branch of the NYPL. My traditionally published friends' books were either on the shelves our out circulating. The NYPL had *none* of my indy author friends' books, even though at least one of them has made the New York Times best seller list.