The MOAB and bunker buster examples are really notable. In this context the recent US attack on the hardened nuclear sites in Iran had the sites hardened just enough that it was unlikely that the US weapons were going to successfully penetrate the deepest sites. If the bombs were twice as destructive that might not have been the case.

1) You seem to not understand how basic science works. No one is claiming this has some immediate application. 2) Superconductors have gotten much better over the last 40 years and are in fact being used all over. The oldest usage was in MRI machines which when they started were incredibly expensive, and are now cheap enough that there are even some in developing countries. Similarly, we now even have superconductors on parts of the regular electric grid. The first was the Holbrook project https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... but there are others as well. So no, superconductors are not vaporware.

I'm in math and there's been a noticeable growth in this sort of thing, either very low quality papers or papers which are just wrong. But almost universally these are in terrible journals that one isn't going to spend any time looking at. Within any given field, recognizing which journals are of reasonable quality should not be that tough. On the other hand, for at least some fields which have just massive numbers of journals, it may require more work. But by and large most of these papers and entire journals are just going to get ignored by the people doing serious research.

I'm struggling to see how there's a violation of the anti-trust laws. Admittedly, I'm not an expert, but states are allowed pretty large leeway in how they regular businesses, and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSherman_Antitrust_Act doesn't really interact with states doing something like this in any obvious way.

A law can be "outdated and anti-competitive"- but a court is not in general going to strike it down for that. They do claim that the law is irrational which does matter more; courts can and have struck down laws as having no rational basis. But that's an extremely tough burden, and the state just has to come up with some reasonably plausible rational reasons for the law. Reasons used to justify such laws include that they helped alleviate an imbalance in power between car manufacturers, dealers and customers, and that they made sure that there was an easy and natural way for warranties to handle cars. They were also seen as a way to promote local business. Now, in the modern age, all of those seem like pretty poor reasons that don't remotely justify the negatives. But that's exactly the sort of balancing that is the job of the legislator to decide, not the courts.

TNT pretty stable. C-4 burns hot but doesn't go boom when set on fire. Ideally explosives are stable except under the exact right circumstances. In fact, one of the major difficulties is balancing these issues. There are a lot of chemicals which are more explosive than the explosives we use but are too unstable to be used in weapons. As for the molecular formula, it is 6 nitrogens in a ring which is depicted in the last article. It is also the form you should guess since nitrogen normally forms two bonds.

Yeah that's all very valid and good expansions of the complexities of this and does a good job also of articulating a lot of problems with my analysis. My comment is currently at +5 informative, but your comment is a lot better than mine.

Yeah, but that by itself doesn't tell as that much. A lot of high temp superconductors were first synthesized in very tiny quantities and people later figured out how to synthesize them more efficiently, to the point where a lot them now can even be made in a decent quantity in a high school chem lab. And if this does turn out to be useful as an explosive (which requires it to not just be able to make a big boom but also to not want to go boom too easily) then my naive guess is that a fair bit of research into efficient synthesis will happen. It probably is going to turn out to be too unstable for military use though.

Sigh. You brought up SpaceX in a thread about the Australian company and said:

The point that you appear whether or not Musk or SpaceX existed, it is highly reasonable to for a first rocket launch attempt to be considered pretty successful if all engines ignite and you get off the pad. That was true before Musk and SpaceX even existed, and is still the case independent of whatever SpaceX is doing.

People have been trying to synthesize N6 for about a hundred years. In that regard it is similar to trying to synthesize tetrahedrane https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FTetrahedrane. But people also synthesized cubane a while ago https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FCubane and attempts to make it large enough quantities for rockets were not successful. In the 1960s through the 1980s there was a general tendency to want to have really extreme substances and use them either as rocket fuels or rocket oxidizers. FOOF https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FDioxygen_difluoride and ClF3 https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FChlorine_trifluoride are the two most infamous ones, and both of those are really easy to synthesize, but just insanely dangerous.

However, one of the major insights in rocket development in the last 25 years has been that even if you can get a few percentage points more of energy out of a rocket fuel, if the fuel or oxidizer is really hard to make or really hard to safely use, then the difficulties involved just aren't worth it. Thus, the cheaper, more reusable rockets were now seeing like SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Rocket Lab's Electron use fuels like kerosene and methane. N6 seems like it would not fit in this paradigm unless someone comes up with a really efficient synthesis method.

That's all the more the case because twice as energetic as TNT isn't that energetic. Methane has a specific energy about 10 times that as TNT. TNT is really good as an explosive not as much because of its high energy but because it easily releases it all at once. So if N6 does get a use, it might be for making missiles and bombs.

From my own experience:

> Was it mostly boiler plate?

A good bit of it was, but speeding that up without having to dig through a bunch of templates saves a ton of time.

> How much of the generate code was correct?

A lot of it, but I generally only use it to complete a few lines of code at once, and do the high level thinking on my own. If you use AI that way, it's a great productivity tool.

> How much of the Copilot code makes into production?

A lot of it.

Huh? The topic of this is about Gilmour Space Technologies's rocket, not SpaceX. Experimental rockets going boom is standard. In the particular case of SpaceX, multiple Starship launches resulted in debris outside the declared range. That was in fact bad, and for good reason resulted in FAA investigations and pauses on their launches. I'm not sure why you think this is a relevant topic when the entire discussion was about a separate Australian rocket. It seems like you are being a little bit obsessive about SpaceX.

This is pretty standard for rockets. That's why they have range restrictions and also have range-safety officers who send a self-destruct if the rocket fails to launch. Most rockets have failed to successfully launch on their first attempt, and that's been true for 80 years. One serious worry with the Space Shuttle initially was that there was no way to do any test launch without a crew.

Separate groups working on the same tech.

There were a bunch of people at NIH and NCI working on this also who were subject to the DOGE cuts.