And the problem with your reasoning is the fact that China isn't bothered by them and isn't lacking in confidence despite what they do. In fact China has never been bothered or lacked confidence not even in the 1950s. They always went their way and did their thing regardless of how abusive and threatening the US was.
China Ballistic Missiles and Nuclear Arms Thread
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And the problem with your reasoning is the fact that China isn't bothered by them and isn't lacking in confidence despite what they do. In fact China has never been bothered or lacked confidence not even in the 1950s. They always went their way and did their thing regardless of how abusive and threatening the US was.
AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
There is no advancement without confidence and your thinking has a problem with that. If you don't have the confidence of doing something, why bother doing it?
an attractive hypothesis for the young and brave. I wish I could be young again to take up this challenge.
but can a human body withstand such M20 speed, at least for the uninitiated and untrained average traveller?
velocity doesn't mean anything in an inertial frame. hurtling through the air at 1000 kph at 15000 m sounds scary. but you pay for the privilege every day.an attractive hypothesis for the young and brave. I wish I could be young again to take up this challenge.
but can a human body withstand such M20 speed, at least for the uninitiated and untrained average traveller?
it's when you collide with something else that velocity becomes meaningful. But inside a sealed airplane? You'd never know the difference between flying or being on the ground, stationary, with a shake table. This is a fundamental law of even classical mechanics.
thank you very much, understand that.
but inside a hypervelocity vehicle, wouldn't the initial acceleration from zero to M20 and final deceleration from M20 to zero quite taxing on the human body, all this within one hour, talking about space travelling from X to Y?
I have no doubts that hypervelocity vehicles will never be used for Earth travel because of economic concerns like extremely low fuel efficiency, the very large airports required that add ground transport time to reach destination, etc.
it is also true that accelerating from 0 to M20 is hard - but not because of fundamentals, since IF you had an engine you can do it slowly. But there's no such engine. Rockets typically exert 3+ gs of acceleration which even strains fighter pilots and astronauts in pressure suits. A regular person would be squished like a bug. But if you want to go lower, there's no engine that will enable that speed. It's rockets or nothing.
Rockets also have extremely low reliability (1% failure) compared to jet engines (1 in 100 million failure) and price of failure is much higher (explosion) than price of failure of jet engines (not working but still being able to glide down).
escobar
Brigadier
Another reason to have silo...
Just want to add that the same happened to the railgun project.
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