Actually, most normal people don't obsess over their children winning at sports. A lot of us think that sports can be healthy, fun activities, but that obsessing over how well they rank is usually pretty unhealthy.

Ugh. Only just noticed that I forgot to reformat that chemical reaction when I copied and pasted it. The subscripts and arrow didn't copy. Should have been:
CH4 + 2O2 -> C02 + 2H2O. The part about the required oxygen having twice the mass of the methane (ignoring isotopic variation in atomic weights) obviously still stands

In military terms, that would be "insensitive munitions". Generally speaking, you want stable explosives for most practical uses. You generally don't want explosives that blow up too easily by dropping, rattling, being heated, being hit with bullets or shrapnel, etc. There's an old french movie: "The wages of fear" ("La saliere de la peur" an adaptation of the french novel of the same name with the novel later being remade as the file "sorcerer") about four truck drivers, desperate for money, driving 2 truckloads of nitroglycerin (technically I think it was straight nitroglycerin in the original and dynamite sweating nitroglycerin in "Sorcerer") along a dangerous road to reach an oil drilling site. One set of truck drivers blows up and there is one truckload with one survivor that reaches the site (incidentally, two of the truck drivers are Mario and Luigi). Technically, one of the truck drivers is killed not by unstable explosives going off like the other two, but in a desperate attempt to get the second truck through the oil-filled crater the first truck left behind. Still, basically all three of those deaths are attributable to the issues with unstable explosives. The last truck driver, Mario, after successful delivery is ultimately killed by a vicious turtle... wait, sorry, by driving recklessly on the way back once the pressure was off (details were different in "sorcerer" where the survivor who was not named Mario in that version may or may not be assassinated due to expanded character backstory subplots where he is a former Irish gang driver on the run after his gang killed a mafia priest in a bingo robbery.)

In any case, that rambling aside aside, there are very, very good reasons to want stable explosives. The whole point of dynamite (invented by Alfred Nobel who then created the Nobel prize) is that it takes dangerously unstable nitroglycerin and packages it to make it much more stable. For military applications, generally they want explosives that are both more stable and more brisant (basically how much of a shattering effect it has which is directly related to how fast the explosive shockwave propagates through it). While sometimes those can be conflicting goals, there are certainly explosives both more brisant and stable than dynamite and those features are preferred. You generally want explosives to go off exactly when you want them to and not before and not after. True in both military and civilian uses. Sure, that means needing specialized detonators, etc. but that's preferable to one accident blowing up an entire warehouse of explosives, or one piece of shrapnel detonating a bomb and blowing up an entire bomber and crew. Or, for that matter, the shells in a tank stored in the turret exploding and sending the turret flying a hundred feet in the air jack in the box style, while the crew and rest of the tank are also annihilated by a hit from an autocannon. Sometimes you just can't stop the latter, but sometimes you can and the shells can take a hit without going off.

So, in the end, you really can have it both ways, although there are limits.

As long as we're having fun with units, that would be 2.2 kilotons per kiloton! Note that this is a joke and kilotons and kilotons are different units (depending on context).

That is a good point. However, most likely, the AI is just regurgitating a summary of conversations that others have had on the subject. One thing lacking from most current AIs is an up front analysis on the likelihood that the information it is presenting is valid. It could be coming from actual rocket scientists and chemists discussing it somewhere, or from random Joe Schmoes. The standards for academic papers are fairly easily followed by even first year university students and high schoolers (even if writing up bibliographies can be a pain). The fact that AIs seem to have a really hard time doing that or even doing basic attributions really says something about how good they actually are.

However, in this case I will add as a regular Joe Schmoe that there is something to the AIs answer, wherever it really came from. If the exhaust is extremely hot nitrogen gas into an atmosphere containing oxygen, then some nitric oxide/nitrogen dioxide/etc. is certain to be produced. Of course, just secondary heating from any hot rocket exhaust is going to produce that since that oxygen containing atmosphere is largely a nitrogen/oxygen mix. It's just a question of how much more hot nitrogen exhaust would produce compared to say hot CO2 and so forth. That seems like a very complicated question to answer. On its face, it seems like more hot nitrogen should mean more binding with oxygen and therefore more nitrogen based gases, but all that heat will likely both create and destroy such molucules, so it is unclear how much will actually be left once the exhaust cools. Plus, how much does the exhaust displace the atmosphere as opposed to mixing with it, and how quickly does it cool as it expands? Plus all kinds of factors I have not really thought of. In the end, it is unclear what the ratio of nitrogen containing greenhouse gases would be produced versus CO2 produced. It might still be less of an issue, even with a higher warming factor due to a much lower quantity produced.

Then, of course, there's the question of other environmental effects other than greenhouse effects there might be. The big problem with the debate about greenhouse heating/global climate change, is that it tends to dominate the conversation on all sides and other environmental issues get ignored. For example the effects on the mesosphere and stratosphere including ozone reduction and particulates, etc. How to balance all the factors, especially when there are unknowns is pretty complicated. I certainly don't trust AI to do it.

That's an apples to oranges comparison though. The specific energy of methane that you're using there is almost certainly based on a paradigm where there's free oxygen everywhere to combine with the methane. Presumably, you are comparing a specific energy of 50 to 55 MJ/kg for methane (when burned) to a specific energy of 4.184 MJ/kg for TNT (when detonated). That is, as you said, about an order of magnitude higher than methane when you compare those numbers directly. However, the difference between "when burned" and "when detonated" is significant. TNT does not require any external substances to release energy through detonation. On the other hand, the reaction for methane is CH + 2O CO + 2HO. In other words, every methane molecules requires two oxygen molecules to burn. A methane molecule masses exactly the same as an oxygen molecule (ignoring isotopic variation for simplicity) So, a realistic comparison would be 4.184 MJ/kg for TNT with 16.66 to 18.33 MJ/kg for methane. That's still around 4 times the energy, so, theoretically methane plus oxygen would still be around twice as energy dense.

As you say, it definitely might make more sense as an explosive than a rocket fuel. However, there's more to consider than just the pure energy density for use as a rocket fuel. The above shows that methane plus oxygen would be technically about twice as energy dense by mass than hexanitrogen. However, there are other practical considerations

The most obvious place to start is the fact that methane and oxygen are both gases at room temperature, whereas hexanitrogen is a solid at room temperature. That means major differences in how you handle them. You can either compress the gases, which means very heavy tanks. Typically compressed gas tanks mass something like 5X as much as the gas they hold (don't use propane tanks as a mental example, because that is actually a liquid when compressed) A lot of that mass can be shaved off for applications like rocketry through more exotic composition, and tricks like using spherical tanks (which can hold the equivalent mass of pressurized gas of a cylindrical tank with about half the mass), but those tricks and materials present their own cost and practical concerns. Even then, it is unlikely to be able to use compressed methane and oxygen without adding significant mass, negating the benefit of its high specific energy.

The alternative to compression is using cryogenic liquid. That still presents containment challenges and all sorts of tradeoffs between the mass of extra insulation vs. the structural problems inherent in containing a cryogenic liquid in tanks (not to mention some of the weird behaviors of cryogenic liquids). Plenty of rocket explosions have happened due to the compromises inherent in trying to contain such liquids while keeping the mass under control. The density of liquid oxygen is about 1.14X that of water, while the density of liquid methane is about 0.42 that of water, so the average is about 0.9X that of water. So it is reasonable in terms of volume (which relates to how heavy the rest of the rocket has to be). The density of hexanitrogen, however is about twice that, which can mean that the rest of the rocket can be a lot smaller as well as not needing to either withstand a lot of pressure or require a lot of insulation, or special structural requirements for cryogenic temperatures, or requirements for built in mixers to prevent explosive gas pockets from forming, etc.

I should also mention that you can still use non-cryogenic liquids. Obviously there's kerosene, for example. That still needs an oxidizer though, so that means you're mostly stuck with things like cryogenic oxygen or other gases like nitrous oxide (which can be prone to self-deflagration in large quantities). There are liquid oxidizers that can be used (generally fluorine compounds), but those tend to also have properties like being incredibly corrosive, prone to issues like self-deflagration and/or extreme reactions to contaminants/their holding vessels/air. Some of them can burn oxygen. Not burn _in_ oxygen, but literally combust oxygen as in the oxygen is the thing that burns and the fluorine compound is the thing acting as the oxidizer (actually oxidizing oxygen). So, significant handling problems with many of those to say the least.

Then there are the engines. Hexanitrogen would presumably be a monopropellant. It's not entirely clear how you would run a rocket engine with it. It might be a solid rocket engine (a design that also adds significant mass since the whole fuel stack needs to be inside a pressure vessel, unless you take an approach where a solid stack of fuel is gradually fed into a pressurized combustion chamber), or possibly it could be fed in the form of either dry crystals, or crystals in some sort of superfluidizer or something like that into an engine. It also isn't clear if it would be ignited/detonated simply by the shockwaves from crystals of hexamethane detonating in a controlled continuous detonation, or if some sort of catalyst would be used or some other chemical agent that promotes detonation fed into it (or more exotic systems like laser compression or something that generates shock waves through some other means, etc.). Ultimately though, it could potentially be a lot lighter than conventional engines and the pumps needed for conventional liquid or gaseous rocket fuels.

Ultimately, the jury is obviously still out, but it does seem like this could potentially be a competitor against fuels like methane with their requirements for an additional oxidizer and all the handling problems that add mass and a lot of other complications for the fuel and its oxidizer. It might turn out that large volumes of hexanitrogen are not stable enough and also create all kinds of handling issues. If not though, the mass savings of being able to keep the stuff in a single, simple, non-compressing, non-insulated tank and use a light engine might make it a functionally higher energy density fuel. Obviously lots more to learn about it, and it simply may never be practical to produce it in sufficient quantities.

Not any comment on this discussion itself. It does not actually appear that you were trolling, etc. However, you have to admit that calling yourself a troll in your username doesn't help a lot when it comes to people accusing you of trolling.

I'm pretty sure that ball was not supposed to be rubber. Of the things to object to there, that seems like a silly thing to object to. A more problematic thing to worry about would be the electric net gun that easily takes down the god of thunder. Not to mention the tiny little electric disk that can zap him into submission. I get that it's supposed to be advanced alien technology and that maybe more is going on than just an electric shock, but it's still a bit silly when a superhero goes from being who can withstand the full force of a star to being neutralized by a tiny little device that's apparently a dime a dozen.

Of course I've always been bothered by that kind of thing in and out of comics. Stuff like power cancellation collars. You can be the mightiest, most invulnerable super-being but oops, get this collar around your neck and that's it. It's power-neutralizing you see. Doesn't matter what power or how it's achieved, it just neutralizes it. Regardless of how much actual power, a commodity, off the rack device will cancel it.

Bothers me a heck of a lot more than Thor knocking himself over with something he threw because he wasn't paying attention. Also, MCU Thor was pretty much always played like that.

Off topic but, in relation to your .sig, I remember a joke from Steve Wozniak's joke book (he co-wrote it with someone but can't remember the other guy offhand). It went something like:

A programmer had as his epitaph: Let it be known that, although he was bent, spindles and mutilated. He did not fold!

"Hollywood accounting" like that is why stars insist on percentages of box office receipts (as well as disc sales, streaming sales, etc.) in any profit sharing arrangement these days.

They're full on calling empathy a sin now. I mean, how much more far gone can they get?

Warner Brothers Discovery and the Safran company, who are behind this movie, are publicly traded companies. Those profits from the stock market are predicated on actual investment in actual products somewhere along the line.

Creating a world where everything breaks if the Internet goes down simply to make greater profits is not "the right thing". It's an atrocity.

Which functionally bricks the product. Because Nintendo and most console makers and games companies (as well as all sorts of providers of various software, not to mention hardware) have quite intentionally created a situation where what were once products have been converted into services. Even when there's a one time payment for a "product" it is tied to a service that artificially limits its lifespan, etc.

Yeah. It's pretty sad, but I am feeling like I'm done with Nintendo at this point. At least for new stuff. I could always potentially change my mind, but I do kind of get sick of companies with rabid legal departments.