this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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Au contraire, mon frere. "Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space."
if you have enough mass moving quickly enough, someone's gonna have a real bad day. Gravity is fantastic for getting a lot of mass moving very quickly, it's why space missions slingshot around planets to get from A to B instead of burning propellant straight there. Even dropping tungsten rods from orbit can get you atom-bomb-sized explosions, and if you had any means of (even weakly) accelerating them before that, gravity would help further accelerate them.
That, and have you seen the amount of propellant required to overcome gravity? Compare that to the amount of fissile material you need to make a viable nuclear device. It's peanuts. A (small) nuke might as well be a rounding error compared to the amount of fuel you need to overcome gravity and leave earths orbit, gravity is that much of a fuck.
You inadvertently argued against your point. It takes only a few kilograms of fissile material to generate the energy needed to escape the gravitation of the 6 billion trillion kilograms gravity of earth.
But not really because you only compared chemical energy to fission.
Yeah, but we have no useful way to channel the energy from nuclear fission into propulsion, so that's a moot point if we're talking in practical terms. At least, we don't without irradiating everything. My point was not that combustion-based propellants are energy efficient, merely that it takes a lot of energy to escape gravity, and while theoretically nuclear propulsion would be more efficient, in practice, burning shit is really the best we can do without giving someone cancer every time we want to put something in orbit, because gravity is a fuck.
You can do nuclear without irradiating everything Just like a nuclear plant doesn't irradiate everything. The only reason it isn't done is safety. Rockets fail too often.
The argument that gravity is in anyway a more powerful force than weak force (fission) or strong force (fusion) is wrong. The only thing gravity has is distance. The strong force is 100 trillion trillion trillion times stronger than gravity.
I was more just speaking to how it’s many orders of magnitude weaker than the other 3 forces. Though it does work on an infinite scale, so maybe it ought to be a tiny but unbelievably long vaguely dragon-shaped worm thing.
Upvoted for Mass Effect, my beloved.