• 6 Posts
  • 524 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle





  • There’s absolutely no way Russia can take and hold all of Ukraine – it would be a real challenge to keep the provinces they’ve already carved off if Ukrainians keep pressing the issue. I’m certainly not advocating for the end of Western support – au contraire – but it’s really, really hard to occupy and pacify a country, especially one the size of Ukraine with a population of nearly 40 million. The USSR had enormous resources to deploy in its imperial expansion and was mostly unopposed, whereas today’s Russia doesn’t benefit from either point and it’s harder to be a rogue state in today’s world.








  • Based on the renderings (as there are no actual photos of this thing, other than the blurry-ass pic of what appears to be a rocket taking off vertically) it’s nowhere near the size of a 747. It actually looks rather like an elongated SR-71, which makes me very skeptical that it can actually hit Mach 6.5 because ramjet engines have a hard limit due to something called “physics”. That fact, plus the rocket-like takeoff, are why I think this is more like the X-15 and can’t sustain its top speed for long.