You can't conjure the "kinetic energy of a small nuke" out of thin air - the launch vehicle has to provide it. Even with this rocket, you won't get more than ~40 tons of TNT equivalent per launch. That's a tiny nuke. And that's before accounting for atmospheric losses. And forget ground blasts (or low altitude airbursts), not gonna happen with such small masses. Not to mention how awfully impractical such a weapon would be from an operational perspective (target choice, attack timing etc.)

I did, because it's an accurate description of Vikas. The US equivalent of Indians adopting Vikas would be the US flying to the Moon with the V-2 engine - which obviously didn't happen. The Indian equivalent of replicating the US post-war engine development would be Indians letting French guys immigrate and develop a much improved new engine on Indian salary - which didn't happen either. That's why I considered the topic digression to post-war US completely inconsequential. Their new CE-20 engine is fully domestic, though - although that's exactly the one that hasn't flown yet. Which is unfortunate, because it seems really nice, I'll give them that. If it's cheap enough, it could become a real workhorse for ISRO.

Wernher von Braun isn't a name of a component of a German rocket. Viking IS a name of a component of a French rocket, though.

Very much incomparable. There was a lot of knowledge transfer from the German engineers, but mostly in the theoretical area, whereas Vikas is a case of virtually identical flight hardware. That wasn't the case in the US beyond some initial experiments with V-2s; all the US hardware had to be developed from the first principles. For example, the German regenerative cooling on V-2 sucked, so it couldn't be used, and even after that problem was solved, nobody in the world - not even Germans - really knew how to build really large engines, so US engineering had to step into an unmapped territory with the F-1. And essentially identical knowledge to what was transferred back then after the war plus a lot of new knowledge is now pretty much textbook material (and has been for a few decades) that you can buy from Amazon - where do you think Elon Musk learned it?

And again, what has that to do with me explaining why the core stage uses toxic fuels? How are Americans or Germans related to the problem of how GLSV Mk III ended up using those fuels?

What are you prattling about? I was clearly talking of the Viking engine . The similarly-named rocket has nothing to do with that.

No, they're not. There's nothing in German rockets that was copied in either American or Russian designs, post-1950. Whereas the Indian engine in question is pretty much identical to Ariane's engine. Furthermore, the reason I've mentioned it is because it explains how hypergolics got into the core stage (not for military reasons). I'm sorry that your reading comprehension sucks so badly. I hope you'll get better.

Well, in this case, it's because of Ariane (1-4). The engine is a rip-off of Viking.

They still haven't build the presumably rather expensive (deeply cryogenic) third stage, so don't count on the final version being so cheap. Plus the improving standards of living in India will inevitably push the price upwards, whereas Falcon development is definitely going to either push the price down or at least stabilize it at a rather low level, if at least one of 1) reusability or 2) increased launch frequency pans out. (The latter is almost certain.) And finally, the advertised Falcon 9 price tag is a market price (with profit margins included), whereas this is presumably just the total sum of expenses for this test (and without the third stage, it will be only a fraction of the launch expenses for the real thing).

Burger. Nuggets.

The population of Americas just before the contact with Europeans is estimated at up to 100M+ people.

That's actually not correct, several such crimes happen every. But as you say, that's why few people notice them: It's been like that for a very long time, and people become desensitized.

I think you wanted to say: "HTML, motherfucker, do you speak it?"

You can have a laser. I wonder how that fabric would react to intense illumination...

The most hilarious thing about this is that many people arguing that "Latin is a dead language" actually don't know what "dead language" means. Judging from what you seem to be suggesting, you don't know that either.