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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2026-163
Last week’s posts on Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
World War:
USraeli Attack On Spain:
China:
SoAm:
Real World Stupidity:
Blogging:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Iran) thread …
Following on from a previous comment, and to go off the well beaten track a little, I might ask how much do we really know about ourselves? About our societies and countries and others, or our cultures and why they are like they are? The maxim “Know Thyself” (Ancient Greek: gnothi seauton) originated not from a single philosophical school, but as a sacred inscription at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in Ancient Greece. Socrates also believed the first step to true wisdom is to “know thyself” because only then can one appreciate what one understands and what remains to be learned. These are ancient questions.
How difficult is it for our generation and future generations to even know what is true? Or does the truth even matter? The truth, of course, matters very much. It is the basis for everything. The problem throughout history is that in the contest between truth and fiction—and fantasy—fiction has inherent advantages.
The truth is costly. If you want to know the truth about anything, you need to spend a lot of time, energy, and effort looking for it, fact-checking, and investigating. Fiction, on the other hand, is very, very cheap. You just write anything you want.
The truth has another problem: it tends to be complicated, and people don’t like complicated stories. Fiction can be made as simple as you would like it to be. Finally, the truth is often not just complicated; it is also painful. There are many things people don’t really want to know about themselves, about their nation, about their group, whatever. Fiction can be made as flattering and pleasant as you want it to be.
So, in a competition between the truth—which is costly, complicated, and sometimes painful—and fiction—which is cheap, simple, and very attractive—fiction tends to win, unless we make a special effort to support the truth. Throughout history, humans again and again made the effort to build institutions to search for the truth and to protect it. Journalism, for instance, is one such institution. The scientific establishment is another.
There are huge advantages, of course, to knowing the truth. In the end, everybody wants to know at least some truths, at least about yourself. You want to know the truth about your life, otherwise you will never be happy. If you don’t know yourself, for instance, you will never know what are the sources of misery and what are the sources of happiness in your life. Then, even if you are the most powerful person in the world, if you don’t know the truth about yourself, you’ll be miserable, because you will not know how to use all your power to make yourself happy.
So there is an inherent yearning in human beings to know the truth. But it is difficult. There are challenges. Some people fantasize that AI will tell us the truth about the world. It will not. It will create a much more complicated world in which it will be much more difficult to know the truth.
And this is not something new. If we look at the trajectory of history, from the Stone Age until today, what we see is that humans have learned a lot of things about the world. We know all kinds of things about physics and biology that people in the Stone Age didn’t know. But our advances in knowledge also lead to creating more and more complicated systems that make it more difficult to understand our lives. If you ask who understands their lives better—an average hunter-gatherer from 50,000 years ago or the average person today—the average hunter-gatherer understood their lives much better.
So did the communities in the many tribal cultures and civilizations of the Americas, the Indian sub-continent, and Africa understood their lives much better before the white man showed up and conquered them by force.
Around the same time as Delphi and Socrates self-knowledge was on the radar elsewhere:
~ In this age of scepticism and materialism few people care to know their real Self, which is Divine and immortal. But the knowledge of the true Self has always been the principal theme of the philosophy and religion of Vedanta. Even in its most ancient writings, the Upanishads, which form portions of the Vedic Scriptures, we find how earnestly Self-knowledge or Atma-jnana was sought after and extolled. The great inspired seers mentioned in these Upanishads discovered and taught that knowledge of the Self lies at the root of all knowledge, whether of science, philosophy or religion. Every sincere seeker after knowledge, therefore, who desires intellectual, moral or spiritual development, must first learn to discriminate between spirit and matter, soul and body, and then realize the all-knowing Divine Self who is the eternal foundation of the universe.
~ Vedanta Philosophy – Self Knowledge by Swâmi Abhedânanda 1905
“Time evolves and comes to a place where it renews again. There is first a purification time, then there’s renewal time. We are getting very close to this time now.” Indigenous Native American Prophecy (Elders Speak part 1/6)
Posted by: Asian Tiger | Aug 3 2026 10:19 utc | 103
I mentioned ‘going back to the beginning’. Can we set the parameters on the NRER requirements, and the limitations imposed by the fundamental laws of physics. If we cannot totally agree on those two items, there is absolutely no point in trying to proceed further. Here is my attempt.
Two comments on the Burevestnik matter:
Firstly, there appears to be some ongoing confusion with respect to the rocket/jet engine distraction. It may help to observe that, in his work which I quote, Anatoly Lanin makes frequent reference to the “NRER“. I believe this is an acronym that he uses for Nuclear Rocket Engine Reactor.
Secondly, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prove that any particular conjecture is correct when the actual structure and function from which that conjecture arises, is completely unknown. However, it is a rather straightforward process to eliminate total impossibilities based on careful considerations of the fundamental physics involved. A simple BOTE may help to understand this claim, or statement. The following argument is for the sake of illustration alone – I am not proposing any particular configuration.
Let’s assume we have a missile that requires a 30MW power source to fulfill its mission. Lanin conveniently describes such an engine, or power source – irrespective of rocket or jet constraints or distractions – the core of which occupies a volume of 1 litre, and which operates at a temperature around 3,000K. Even more conveniently, and for simplicity, let’s assume this core can be fashioned as a solid prismatic block (cube) with sides 10 cm, and with a surface area of 600 cm^2.
Now, 30MW power is an energy flow rate of 30MJ/s (by definition), so the thermal energy flux, assumed to be uniform for simplicity, at the surface of the prismatic block is 30,000,000/600 or 50KW/cm^2. For comparison, the thermal energy flux at the surface of the Sun is 63MW/m^2, or 6.3KW/cm^2.
Admittedly, a solid prismatic cube of 10cm side length is simpler than a hammer, but I don’t think anyone would disagree with my apprehension that a prismatic solid with a surface thermal energy flux eight times that of the surface of the Sun could pose a significant engineering problem….
So – we have formally identified a problem – or THE FUNDAMENTAL problem, to which I alluded months ago when this topic first arose. Remember the unclaimed prize:
Posted by: General Factotum | Oct 30 2025 3:10 utc | 375
Energy conversion, thermal conductivity, heat flux, thermal energy transfer, energy transport considerations… And that is all before we get to control rods, nuclear materials, radioactive sources and isotopes, cermet/ceramics, self-regulating thermal control by Doppler broadening, or ultra reliable Rube Goldberg hammers (sorry – I might be confused about the hammers… 🙂 ). We absolutely need to resolve this fundamental problem before venturing on to any other consideration. Mr. Gruff kindly states a simple and eloquent position:
It is a no-brainer, but then as AIs themselves will tell you, they don’t have a brain anyway. The Russian nuclear powered cruise missile’s power plant is absolutely not some esoteric Rube Goldberg device. It is simple and reliable as a hammer. All of its complexity is in the engineering, none of it is in the execution or manufacture. It is just a turbine engine with blocks of ceramic/metal (with embedded nuclear fuel) in the combustion chamber. No coolant loops and heat exchangers and control rod actuators and power monitoring systems feeding back to the actuators and coolant pumps and so on. William Gruff | Aug 2 2026 20:53 utc | 31
Recognising the constraints imposed by the thermal conductivity of air; the heat capacity of air; the surface area of the energy source operating within the limits of energy flux per unit area governed by allowable temperature gradients for materials stability in consideration of stress management; the volumetric flow rate of air required to manage heat flux – and the consequent velocity of the air in restricted space imposed by thermal conductivity constraints; the allowable temperature limits of the operating materials; the operating temperature range/s, the thermal gradients within the energy source as governed by energy conversion, energy flux, thermal conductivity, and transport distance within the core material/s… and so on impose unavoidable design constraints. Fundamental physics is a hard master; it does not offer a range of options!
I am very interested in Mr. Gruff’s solution to these very simple and very basic (fundamental!!) problems identified in the preceding paragraph. If he accepts the basic physics described above in my BOTE, then he should be able to provide an equally simple and understandable explanation of the thermal management of his proposed design (accompanied by figures and equations to support the explanation/s). There is no need at this stage to complicate matters by considering the source of the energy – just assume it is presented, and we can concentrate solely on how to deal with it. If he does not accept the basic physics I presented, then I request that he identifies and correct my errors. Had he taken the time to read Lanin’s work before his routine response of “AI slop”, “rocket/jet confusion”, “good faith/bad faith”, and “intellectual honesty” considerations, he may have been able to produce a less absurd proposal.
But don’t listen to me – read Lanin’s work and explain why his efforts are unnecessarily complicated. “Gruff’s Hammer” should be able to demolish such nonsense with ease??
Posted by: General Factotum | Aug 4 2026 11:09 utc | 172
The Burevestnik missile is powered by a jet engine.
By definition, a jet engine is characterised as an open-cycle air-breathing, thermal propulsion system that generates forward thrust. Basically, the Burevestnik nuclear jet engine uses nuclear-derived thermal energy to function directly as a continuous-flow thermal power-plant that processes atmospheric air, rather than consuming stored propellants, to propel the missile forwards by Newton’s Third Law; in physical function directly analogous to a conventional jet engine.
The technical basis for classifying the Burevestnik reactor assembly as a jet engine is definitively constructed on four solid engineering pillars. The defining characteristic of any jet engine is that it takes in ambient atmospheric oxygen, incorporated in air, to use as its working mass. The Burevestnik jet engine uses a ventral air intake to scoop up external atmospheric air while in flight. Unlike a nuclear rocket engine (for example, the U.S. NERVA project), which must carry an onboard tank of liquid hydrogen to expel into the vacuum of space, the Burevestnik jet-powered missile cannot function without the surrounding atmosphere. It is entirely dependent on ambient air to produce thrust.
In a conventional jet engine (including variations and derivatives such as a turbojet or ramjet), chemical fuel is injected into a combustion chamber and ignited to heat the air. The Burevestnik jet engine uses an open-cycle miniature nuclear reactor to directly replace, or substitute for, the traditional jet-engine combustion chamber. Instead of burning conventional jet fuel (kerosene or other hydrocarbon fuels), the Burevestnik jet engine passes incoming air directly through the super-heated nuclear reactor core. The intense thermal energy generated by nuclear fission heats the air to extreme temperatures in milliseconds, causing rapid thermal expansion.
A jet engine produces forward motion by accelerating a fluid mass and expelling it rearward at high velocity through a nozzle, satisfying Newton’s Third Law of motion. The air inside the Burevestnik jet engine, having been super-heated by the un-shielded reactor core, experiences massive pressure expansion. The high-pressure, super-heated air is blasted out of the exhaust nozzle at the rear of the missile. The nuclear-powered jet-engine design converts thermal energy into kinetic thrust exactly like a conventional jet pipe.
Attempts to classify the Burevestnik nuclear jet engine as a rocket engine fail at a technical level because the Burevestnik jet engine is not self-contained like a conventional rocket engine. Aerospace analysts evaluate the classification of the Burevestnik jet engine through two possible jet engine frameworks; both of which legally classify it under jet propulsion, in similarity with RAMJet, nuclear RAMjet, and nuclear turbojet analogs. Ultimately, whether configured as a RAMjet or a turbojet, the Burevestnik’s jet propulsion unit operates as a thermal jet engine. The reactor core acts not as a passive power grid, but as the active, air-heating component of a self-contained jet cycle.
On the basis of a strict engineering definition, a rocket engine must be entirely self-contained and carry all of its own working mass. The Burevestnik jet engine is an air-breathing thermal engine that relies entirely on the surrounding atmosphere in order to generate thrust. Attempts to classify it as a rocket fail at the fundamental level because it violates the fundamental laws of aerospace rocket propulsion.
The architectural, thermodynamic, and physical features that definitively disqualify the Burevestnik jet engine from being classified as a rocket engine include any or all of the following:
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The defining characteristic of any rocket engine, whether chemical, electric, or nuclear, is that it does not interact with the outside environment to gather its reaction mass.
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A rocket engine operates on the principle of conservation of momentum using onboard expendable mass. It carries 100% of its propellant inside its own tanks. Because of this, a rocket’s thrust actually increases in the vacuum of space because there is no atmospheric back-pressure.
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A rocket engine is a closed system relative to the fluid it expels. The Burevestnik jet engine is structurally open to ambient air, on which it relies for propulsive force.
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Rocket engines feature a sealed combustion chamber or heating plenum fed by high-pressure turbo-pumps connected to internal tanks with no external forward-facing openings, whereas the Burevestnik jet engine explicitly requires an air intake.
The mathematical framework governing all rocket flight is the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. For a traditional rocket, mass rapidly decreases over time as propellant is burned. For the Burevestnik missile, the mass of the missile remains practically constant from the moment the nuclear engine starts until it hits its target. It does not lose weight by expelling onboard propellant because it is expelling nuclear heated ambient air. Because its flight physics cannot be calculated using the rocket equation, it cannot be classified as a rocket.
Clearly, the Burevestnik missile is powered by a jet engine.
Posted by: General Factotum | Aug 4 2026 22:26 utc | 200
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