One question I haven't seen an answer to yet: if this thing had been loaded with the maximum available warheads, although they presumably wouldn't have detonated, how large an area would have been contaminated with how much radioactive material from their rapid unscheduled disassembly? The Russian nuclear arsenal may be a bigger threat to the Russians than the people they want to attack, even without taking the possibility of wind blowing fallout from a successful strike back into Russia into account. Not that Putin cares.
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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laughs in Ukrainian
Good.
Huh, and Boeing wasn't involved, you say?
Maybe Russian hackers got into Boeing's servers and copied their plans.
That would make for a great comedy, bunch of engineers "defect" to USSR but just sabotage everything and are shit engineers.
The Bengineers
I can promise you it isn't the engineers fucking up Boeing. It's the old macdonald-douglas management / exec team.
Which might make an even better comedy honestly.
Not officially, anyway
The Sarmat missile is Russia's largest ICBM, with a height of 115 feet (35 meters). It is capable of delivering nuclear warheads to targets more than 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) away, making it the longest-range missile in the world.
On paper, it's impressive. In person, it's embarrassing.
11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers)
To put that into perspective, the circumference of the earth is ~24,000 miles. From my rough Google Earth calculations, the stated range covers the entire planet except for a tiny sliver of Antarctica and a bit of the ocean nearby.
Why would Russia need a missile with that range? Unless they just really want to take out New Zealand first, it kinda seems like they just picked the largest sensible range value (12,000 miles, halfway around the planet) and then fudged it down a bit because why would you need to fire a missile more than halfway around the planet? Just fire it in the opposite direction.
It would be impressive were it properly maintained using the funds allocated only for the stated goal.
But I'd expect that to not be the case.
And also when a significant part of the chain is interested only in stealing, there will be negative selection. Everybody capable of learning will leave for greener pastures. Those who remain will be dull and full of themselves.
Well, there's an impressive crater.
Yeah, but the trick is to form that crater away from your launchpad.
Russia going to run all of this high end shot into the ground even more due to funding shortages.
Maintaining that tempo ain't cheap money or people wise. At some point state and society starts seeing consequences first hand.
Yes, but optimism about that is unfounded.
I recognise that reference!
It's so smart it knew it didn't want to support Putin and sabotaged itself