This is normal and expected activity. We encouraged our users to write canonical answers, that could be run as community wikis (not everything got converted to a wiki, but many things did). One of the reasons was to take a spot in the top 3 on a search engine, in an attempt to displace some horrendous / ad riddled website that at best a bad user experience, and frequently was subtly wrong or incomplete.
Some examples: we settled on a canonical answer for “how to install packages in Ubuntu”, or when there was a particularly interesting question that was discussed in the chat rooms, someone might volunteer to consolidate that information and publish the Q&A as a wiki.
It’s just internet points. They’re not worth much.
Activity simulators, they're called. A good way to make a web site feel alive even with no or few human visitors. 4chan does this. Reddit. X/Twitter. And others...
"The mortar package is activated by the "arm grenades" and "fire grenades" commands from Earth. The arm grenades command is applied to and gated through
the command gating to the grenade arming circuitwhich charges the regulaz and
sequential firing capacitors of the four grenades by applying a Z4-volt arming signal. A grenade arm pulse is also applied to the data handling function indicating receipt of the command."
Salyut 3 also had a "self-defence gun" derived from an aircraft autocannon mounted to the station, enabling them to shoot at approaching enemy spacecraft
I would guess having any sort of teeth would be meaningful to dissuade whatever type of manned craft might have been able to approach them at the time.
I'm guessing that pivoting the gun and firing would impart spin to the station, is the greater concern. And then pivoting the gun to stay on target would impart even more spin on subsequent shots.
In a modern system you'd just have the RCS thrusters fire based on the positioning of the gun, to counteract the force.
OTOH, if all piloting was manual back then, you'd have to have one guy aiming and another guy piloting to cancel out the angular momentum, so you might as well make the gun point away from the center of mass and let the pilot do the aiming.
Inteestingly, a lot of military aircraft at the time carried similar guns. They were meant for use by the pilot in case the landed in the wilderness after bailing out of the plane, for hunting and defending from stuff like bears.
Henry Repeating Arms (apparently no relation to the original designer of the lever action) still makes the AR-7[0]. As near as I can tell it was designed for this purpose, but never actually issued to USAF aircrews. There are a handful of other USAF aircrew survival weapons linked from there.
They already had a makarov pistol with them from the start. They made this custom short barrel double shotgun with a third rifle barrel.
This was to fend off wild life and maybe hunting while waiting for the recovery team to get to them if they came down far from the designated recovery zone.
"Since Apollo 13 many people have asked me, 'Did you have suicide pills on board?' We didn't, and I never heard of such a thing in the eleven years I spent as an astronaut and NASA executive," - Jim Lovell, commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission.
For this scene, from the movie "Contact", based off his book, I guess Carl Sagan got inspiration from the Soviet Voskhod 2 mission. Cosmonaut Alexey Leonov said he was given a suicide pill by the authorities, in the event that he might get stuck outside of the Voskhod spacecraft while attempting the very first "spacewalk" or EVA (extra-vehicular activity).
For NASA's options, Gerry Griffin, a former director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, corroborated Lovell's statement, bluntly adding that if an astronaut truly wished to end his or her life, space provides plenty of opportunities. Outer space is just as effective a suicide agent as a cyanide capsule, perhaps even more so. Exposure to its empty vacuum often results in a blissful loss of consciousness in a matter of seconds. Death by asphyxiation usually follows within two minutes. (from http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2013/10/astronauts-and-suicide-pills.html)
Uploaded on Oct 23, 2016 at 5:36 am
As for the 2013 link, it reads that although the Americans weren't issued suicide capsules, at least one Soviet had one (although he didn't say if it was issued by the space program vs him just carrying it with him of his own accord).
> It may be invented, but not by him. It is at least as old as the 1997 film Contact.
What part of this quote is about a gun? It seems that this quote is about how they wouldn't need a gun, because they may have been issued with pills. It is nearly the opposite of the justification that you say it is.
And how would that suicide pill work exactly? It's not like they could reach into their pocket and pop it in their mouth. That means it has to be in the suit and specifically in the helmet. Again, how would that work? Where's the pill located so that it is accessible in the helmet? Did they replace a tooth so they could just bite down really hard like other nonsense spy movies? So much of this doesn't track
> It's not like they could reach into their pocket and pop it in their mouth.
Why not? I think the failure youre defending against is "Retrorockets have failed but the capsule is still pressurized", so you could easily just take the pill and have a nicer death than suffocating.
I think he is referring to the soviet in the 2013 link. He was in his suit when he got pinned.
> Though no NASA astronaut has ever taken a suicide pill into space, the same cannot be said for their Russian cosmonaut colleagues. Alexey Leonov, the first man to conduct a spacewalk, took one with him on his historical 12-minute stroll on March 18th, 1965, just in case he was unable to return to the spacecraft and his colleague Pavel Belyayev was forced to leave him adrift in orbit. He almost needed it. When trying to reenter his spacecraft, Leonov's stiffened suit became stuck in the entryway. He was forced to depressurize his suit slightly in order to dislodge himself, slide inside the craft, and close the hatch.
Even the most venomous spiders aren't that venomous that you could use them to sui. They're more like "you can die from that bite, after hours or days", not "you will die".
If you wanted an animal to do it you're much better of taking a nasty viper species or a black mamba.
True, but the rocket equation forces lighter biters. There's presumably a Pareto frontier where speed of death, effectiveness, and payload weight converge on just a few candidate organisms. Perhaps a scorpion? Some of those are quite nasty, at least that's what I learned from Diamonds are Forever.
I imagine you can't take turns easily once there's a hole in the ship.
On the other hand, there are legitimate predators that will hunt and eat humans in Siberia. One team encountered wolves that they had trouble fending off, so they upgraded the pistol to a more formidable shotgun/rifle combo.
Unlikely that a handgun bullet passing through a skull will still have enough velocity to breach the hull? Even if it did, they'd just need to be deliberate with their aim vis-a-vis a steel plate.
Yeah thats why you invent small 2 barrel shotgun with big ammo and carry it all the way into space, while even small makarov pistol would fulfill that role
26 fatalities due to bear attacks this year:
https://tass.ru/obschestvo/28211259https://eia.media/ru/article/society/6aa937759a7947f75201876...https://www.rbc.ru/society/15/09/2026/6aa937759a7947f7520187...
This year bear encounters made headlines in Russia, but the number of fatalities isn't unusual. Records is 80/year in 1985, 1986 and 1996.
Brown bears don't see us as food as long as there is some other food available. If food is scarce this year (some random dude on the internet says that there were an early thaw followed by freeze in 2024 that cause pine cone yield in 2026 to fail) they might attack. Either out of desperation or when encountered over a food source (i. e. garbage dump) and mistakes a human for a competitor.
You might be underestimating how remote some Soviet capsules landed. If they overshot their landing site they might be alone in the wilderness for days until rescue teams arrived
"Kosmonaut survives space mission, gets mauled by bear protecting her cub" is not a great headline. Bringing gun was relatively cheap insurance
That works if you have absolute trust the rescue team will reach you on schedule. If you are unsure whether few days won't turn into few weeks, or whether there will be a rescue team at all, it's best to secure food and shelter while you still have the energy to do it.
I think it's important not to overgeneralize with something that might potentially kill you. The brown bears in Japan can be deadly. A 380 kg and 2.7-m-tall brown bear, which twice attacked the village of Tomamae, killing 7 people.
If you’re a pilot or cosmonaut in Siberia, you might not have come down as planned and might be there for a while. An injured, possibly bleeding human could be easy prey. They also have tigers…
Sky marshals have weapons and the TSA allows them.
Being an astronaut means you are trusted with extreme responsibilities and it also means extreme oversight. That's part of why the selection process is so thorough and stress response is so well evaluated before NASA will put a person in space.
Reading the parent's comment pedantically is useless and against this site's guidelines. Reading it more charitably + less literally makes more sense.
The question is pretty unnecessary given that it references the "ALSEP Flight System Familiarization Manual" [1] which also goes into detail about the purpose of the grenade launcher.
Went down a rabbit hole to see if the Apollo "thumpers" were named so because of Dune. Apparently there were a few terrestrial thumpers in use by oil and gas surveyors prior to the book and missions... whomp whomp.
nasa employee: oh hey u guys are back early
astronaut: moon's haunted
nasa employee: what?
astronaut: *loading a pistol and getting back on the rocket-ship* moon's haunted.
Because I am sympathetic to the idea that they offer a service paid for by ad revenue. If want the service, it has to be paid for somehow. I don't mind ignoring a few innocuous ads if it means the service remains "free."
yeah but that's the point: 'innocuous ads' have never been tested on the net.
it started as attention seeking eye-knifes, transitioned into the sex sells & hardcore gamer crap, and ended up as 'legal' reverse mortgages/fake charities/malware/data-harvesting.
I think it's safe to say that experiment has been tried.
Acceleration and deceleration are both basically the same thing.
You'd have less grip under the soles of your shoes (less friction due to less normal force aka weight). You'd also probably have to fix your technique so you don't keep launching yourself 6 ft into the air on each stride.
Bloody difficult is probably an accurate description.
There are a few guns that exist that could achieve the necessary velocity (just shy of 4,000 mph) but they’re not handheld. But yes, it would be possible for the right gun to fire a bullet that went around the moon and hit you in the back of the head.
Does anyone know why they had the grenade launcher? stackexchange decided a few false positives humans getting blocked was okay if they could mitigate the corporate bots and block most of them. The end result is that I can't read the page.
First thought: were these fragmentation grenades? Second though: nope: not useful for seismic research. Third though: on the moon, thrown fragmentation grenades wouldn't be safe for the thrower.
All grenades have a casing the "fragments" when they go off, but some use thicker, heavier, scored metal casings to maximize the anti-personel effects of the resulting shrapnel. If you don't want shrapnel, then you make the casing light and arrange for it to break into fewer pieces. So grenades designed to produce more, heavier, sharper fragments are called fragmentation grenades.
Probably was both. NASA got a COTS component for their seismologic experiment, saving some time/budget on R&D, and military got to have a grenade launcher tested on the Moon, providing data for whatever "future warfare" programs they were surely running back then.
The alternative to me seems to be becoming like a lot of subs on Reddit. It's part of why I like HN so much too, where the signal to noise is so much better.
It actually is, on Reddit you need to collapse and scroll down a bit to get a real non-joke answer to something, over here low effort jokes tend to get pushed down.
This was a solved problem by Slashdot decades ago: You introduce a simple tagging system: "Insightful", "informative", "funny", etc. then you let the community tag comments accordingly. Then if you want to filter out jokes, or only see them, you can do so via a simple UI switch.
Agree. I’m here because discussions are not padded left and right with memes and people trying to farm karma with humor tailored for maximum engagement.
Yes its in a death spiral with the new account based infinite scroll feed direction they're going to go in. Soon you'll see ai generated, or reposted, content perfectly tailored to what your unconscious shadow wants to see. Just like the rest of the apps
I dislike censorship in general. Someone else decides whether I
may read comment xyz from another human being (assuming it is
a human being). I don't want censor-in-the-middle people, be it
on HN or reddit. Old reddit was easier to use than HN though;
on HN we get time-locked as well as jokes-eliminated. That forces
a more serious tone. I do not think it really improves the
signal to noise ratio though; usually it means that there are
fewer comments in general, including potentially interesting comments. I mean, if HN were serious about joke-censorship, any funny story shared by someone else on HN, even if historically accurate, would also have to be censored. After all you can not evaluate whether a claimed story to be true, to NOT be a "joke in disguise". I could go on and on here, but at the end of the day it just boils down as to whether people like censorship or not. You may reason that you prefer it, to "pre-filter away content you never want to read", such as a joke, but for me, I just dislike that someone else sits in the driver seat and tells me what I am allowed to read and what not. I want to decide on that on my own and I have no issue with "noise ratio"; I don't read all comments anyway, simply due to lack of time. I can only glimpse at some of them. Do you really have the time to go through all comments on each entry on HN?
I dislike (nay, find absurd) the idea that private people should provide for free a platform for random people that they’re not allowed to moderate because "censorship" and "free speech". Also, Reddit is probably the least censored mainstream discussion platform on the open internet, even after expelling all kinds of terrible people.
>Also, Reddit is probably the least censored mainstream discussion platform on the open internet
Absolutely not.
There are instant banned topics on Reddit. AI banned topics site wide. Go write something like “the USA imported the third world” and enjoy your instant 3-day ban.
X however, actually has some semblance of free speech. Like it or not.
Nicely editorialised there, skipping the second half:
> However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!
On HN many purely jokey comments are often discouraged, being down-voted and getting replies along the lines of "this isn't Reddit". Is HN dying, by the same measure?
I think there’s a distinct difference between a community collectively deprecating something, versus individual members of a community deciding what will and will not be deleted. The first means the comments just fall away, while the second (and a statement of “we will delete your content it is not welcome here”) is actively off-putting not only to those who post that sort of content but others passing by who may be put off posting anything in case they unknowingly “break the rules”.
I don't see a problem there. “I won't post a jokey comment here as it'll just be deleted” is the system working. Much better than what has become the norm elsewhere: “delete if not allowed” which more-often-than-not means “I know this is not what is wanted here, but screw you and your rules”. They have explicitly stated that such content is welcome, just a little further away from the business end.
I was going to say the same. They did follow up with “However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!” but the bolded comment above significantly outweighs this.
At least this earlier comment was deemed relevant and not too jokey:
> Even more fun, Apollo 14 didn't use their grenades, and they are still on the lunar surface.
God forbid resource doesn’t turn into a group rewarding regurgitated jokes for internet points, it would insane. Every time I read some serious (ughhrr) book, I write trite irony on margins because I can’t process information like a normal human being anymore without turning everything into shit.
From November 2 to Nov 22 2018 the "DrSheldon" account asks exactly one question per day. https://space.stackexchange.com/users/drsheldon?tab=question...
Like this one, most of the questions are worded to enable an easy answer from a primary source.
In one instance the account answers its own question within the same minute: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/31279/how-was-the-...
In another instance, the account replies to a comment with "Nonetheless, this would be the question to document any examples."
Hi, former stack exchange moderator here.
This is normal and expected activity. We encouraged our users to write canonical answers, that could be run as community wikis (not everything got converted to a wiki, but many things did). One of the reasons was to take a spot in the top 3 on a search engine, in an attempt to displace some horrendous / ad riddled website that at best a bad user experience, and frequently was subtly wrong or incomplete.
Some examples: we settled on a canonical answer for “how to install packages in Ubuntu”, or when there was a particularly interesting question that was discussed in the chat rooms, someone might volunteer to consolidate that information and publish the Q&A as a wiki.
It’s just internet points. They’re not worth much.
Indeed. The user later gets permission and community participation for future series of questions and identifies them as such: https://space.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1498/any-oppo... https://space.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1746/60th-ann...
That’s pretty cool.
Answering one's own question is encouraged on stack exchange sites.
Activity simulators, they're called. A good way to make a web site feel alive even with no or few human visitors. 4chan does this. Reddit. X/Twitter. And others...
Remember the guy that was hyper active wrt C# questions maybe 10 years ago?
People were amazed he would answer every C# and WPF questions minutes after they were posted.
I am convinced to this day he did the same thing.
Jon Skeet?
https://stackoverflow.com/users/jon-skeet
Yes! Was he really a super human or was he cheating?
Jon legitimately was (is) superhuman with answering questions.
Some people just want to watch the world learn.
Does he still feel the motivation?
"The mortar package is activated by the "arm grenades" and "fire grenades" commands from Earth. The arm grenades command is applied to and gated through the command gating to the grenade arming circuitwhich charges the regulaz and sequential firing capacitors of the four grenades by applying a Z4-volt arming signal. A grenade arm pulse is also applied to the data handling function indicating receipt of the command."
Page 2-170 (179 of the PDF) of reference [1].
[0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19710014816 [1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19710014816/downloads/19...
OCR is letting you down a little bit here. Neat that you found this though!
The soviets did regularly carry a gun. For survival purposes, as they were landing in Siberia which has wolves and pretty big bears.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TP-82
Salyut 3 also had a "self-defence gun" derived from an aircraft autocannon mounted to the station, enabling them to shoot at approaching enemy spacecraft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3#On-board_gun
> The gun was fixed to the station in such a way that the only way to aim would have been to change the orientation of the entire station.
Are these stations easier to maneuver than I imagine? Sounds like someone was imagining age of sail type of combat.
I would guess having any sort of teeth would be meaningful to dissuade whatever type of manned craft might have been able to approach them at the time.
I'm guessing that pivoting the gun and firing would impart spin to the station, is the greater concern. And then pivoting the gun to stay on target would impart even more spin on subsequent shots.
What if you pivoted in the opposite direction?
In a modern system you'd just have the RCS thrusters fire based on the positioning of the gun, to counteract the force.
OTOH, if all piloting was manual back then, you'd have to have one guy aiming and another guy piloting to cancel out the angular momentum, so you might as well make the gun point away from the center of mass and let the pilot do the aiming.
tbf, docking attempts would not be that fast either
Russian paranoia at its finest
Inteestingly, a lot of military aircraft at the time carried similar guns. They were meant for use by the pilot in case the landed in the wilderness after bailing out of the plane, for hunting and defending from stuff like bears.
Henry Repeating Arms (apparently no relation to the original designer of the lever action) still makes the AR-7[0]. As near as I can tell it was designed for this purpose, but never actually issued to USAF aircrews. There are a handful of other USAF aircrew survival weapons linked from there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArmaLite_AR-7
I believe people involved in the program have since admitted that this was mostly to commit suicide in case they got stuck with no way home
They already had a makarov pistol with them from the start. They made this custom short barrel double shotgun with a third rifle barrel.
This was to fend off wild life and maybe hunting while waiting for the recovery team to get to them if they came down far from the designated recovery zone.
Source?
Over the years at least 7 soviet missions landed off-target including Yuri Gagarin.
And not like 100-500 meters off target, but 200-600 kilometers. Having a gun in such cases make perfect sense.
feels like you just invented this lie on the spot
It may be invented, but not by him. It is at least as old as the 1997 film Contact.
https://vimeo.com/188517388
The description blurb reads:
As for the 2013 link, it reads that although the Americans weren't issued suicide capsules, at least one Soviet had one (although he didn't say if it was issued by the space program vs him just carrying it with him of his own accord).> It may be invented, but not by him. It is at least as old as the 1997 film Contact.
What part of this quote is about a gun? It seems that this quote is about how they wouldn't need a gun, because they may have been issued with pills. It is nearly the opposite of the justification that you say it is.
And how would that suicide pill work exactly? It's not like they could reach into their pocket and pop it in their mouth. That means it has to be in the suit and specifically in the helmet. Again, how would that work? Where's the pill located so that it is accessible in the helmet? Did they replace a tooth so they could just bite down really hard like other nonsense spy movies? So much of this doesn't track
> It's not like they could reach into their pocket and pop it in their mouth.
Why not? I think the failure youre defending against is "Retrorockets have failed but the capsule is still pressurized", so you could easily just take the pill and have a nicer death than suffocating.
I think he is referring to the soviet in the 2013 link. He was in his suit when he got pinned.
> Though no NASA astronaut has ever taken a suicide pill into space, the same cannot be said for their Russian cosmonaut colleagues. Alexey Leonov, the first man to conduct a spacewalk, took one with him on his historical 12-minute stroll on March 18th, 1965, just in case he was unable to return to the spacecraft and his colleague Pavel Belyayev was forced to leave him adrift in orbit. He almost needed it. When trying to reenter his spacecraft, Leonov's stiffened suit became stuck in the entryway. He was forced to depressurize his suit slightly in order to dislodge himself, slide inside the craft, and close the hatch.
Surely a chemical/biological solution would have been easier, cheaper, lighter, and less likely to fail.
It would but that would have gone against the image that the soviets were trying to convey internally and externally
The solution is you need no solution, air is gonna run out, they will fall unconscious and die.
Eventually yes but if they are unable to scrub CO2 they will die in one of the worst ways possible.
> chemical/biological solution
both massively unpleasant
Cyanide pill I get. Tried and tested.
But a biological solution?! I imagine a little jar full of extremely venomous spiders, one for each cosmonaut. Perhaps they'd give them names.
Is that you Boris?
Even the most venomous spiders aren't that venomous that you could use them to sui. They're more like "you can die from that bite, after hours or days", not "you will die".
If you wanted an animal to do it you're much better of taking a nasty viper species or a black mamba.
"In case of emergency, break viper terrarium"
True, but the rocket equation forces lighter biters. There's presumably a Pareto frontier where speed of death, effectiveness, and payload weight converge on just a few candidate organisms. Perhaps a scorpion? Some of those are quite nasty, at least that's what I learned from Diamonds are Forever.
Who said what's in the gun :)
I imagine you can't take turns easily once there's a hole in the ship.
On the other hand, there are legitimate predators that will hunt and eat humans in Siberia. One team encountered wolves that they had trouble fending off, so they upgraded the pistol to a more formidable shotgun/rifle combo.
Unlikely that a handgun bullet passing through a skull will still have enough velocity to breach the hull? Even if it did, they'd just need to be deliberate with their aim vis-a-vis a steel plate.
If you're committing suicide in space, why do you care if there's a hole in the hull of the spacecraft?
If there's explosive decompression, you might leave the survivors with a longer, more stressful and painful death.
If the gunshot creates shrapnel or propels the gun away, it might create additional hardship for the remaining crew.
I don't think this is an ideal mechanism.
> I imagine you can't take turns easily
Seems like a problem they could solve if they just put their heads together. /s
Yeah thats why you invent small 2 barrel shotgun with big ammo and carry it all the way into space, while even small makarov pistol would fulfill that role
Feels a bit excessive. Wolves and brown bears generally avoid humans. Polar bears see us as food but brown bears do not.
26 fatalities due to bear attacks this year: https://tass.ru/obschestvo/28211259 https://eia.media/ru/article/society/6aa937759a7947f75201876... https://www.rbc.ru/society/15/09/2026/6aa937759a7947f7520187... This year bear encounters made headlines in Russia, but the number of fatalities isn't unusual. Records is 80/year in 1985, 1986 and 1996. Brown bears don't see us as food as long as there is some other food available. If food is scarce this year (some random dude on the internet says that there were an early thaw followed by freeze in 2024 that cause pine cone yield in 2026 to fail) they might attack. Either out of desperation or when encountered over a food source (i. e. garbage dump) and mistakes a human for a competitor.
You might be underestimating how remote some Soviet capsules landed. If they overshot their landing site they might be alone in the wilderness for days until rescue teams arrived
"Kosmonaut survives space mission, gets mauled by bear protecting her cub" is not a great headline. Bringing gun was relatively cheap insurance
Might need something to eat if you have to wait a few days for the rescue team to reach you.
Want, not need. A few days without food is quite survivable for a healthy human. And if you get selected for a space flight, you are healthy.
That works if you have absolute trust the rescue team will reach you on schedule. If you are unsure whether few days won't turn into few weeks, or whether there will be a rescue team at all, it's best to secure food and shelter while you still have the energy to do it.
Gun and bear solves that problem too.
"So the bad news is we're responsible for our next meal, but the good news is Ivan's space food farts will lead the meal right to us"
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZegZy5QgRrI
A gun helps with that, too.
> "Kosmonaut survives space mission, gets mauled by bear protecting her cub" is not a great headline.
Let's be honest here: the Soviets were never going to print that anyways.
It would certainly be printed for KPSS Politburo and someone would end up far away in Siberia.
Brown bears attack people in Russia quite frequently [1].
[1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2026/09/11/russia-has-a-bear-pr...
I think it's important not to overgeneralize with something that might potentially kill you. The brown bears in Japan can be deadly. A 380 kg and 2.7-m-tall brown bear, which twice attacked the village of Tomamae, killing 7 people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ussuri_brown_bear#Interactions...
There was a brown (North American Grizzly) predation attack on Nov 2. It’s rare, but not unheard of.
Wolf predation attacks on humans are rare, but far more common than brown bear attacks.
Landing in remote part of Siberia is not a typical situation and many typical assumptions do not apply.
If you’re a pilot or cosmonaut in Siberia, you might not have come down as planned and might be there for a while. An injured, possibly bleeding human could be easy prey. They also have tigers…
"Generally" implies there are exceptions. Would hate to be unprepared.
Of course there are exceptions but ticks kill more people than bears and wasps kill way more people.
Ticks and wasps are much, much more common than bears.
What about lunar bears or Saturn bears? Those seem to be heavily armed.
https://youtu.be/pvjgIxuVdo4?is=7sF64RM0qTNqJguw
"generally". A hungry bear or wolf might be tempted to mess with an injured cosmonaut.
It's never excessive to carry a gun.
(P(365))
TSA says no.
Sky marshals have weapons and the TSA allows them.
Being an astronaut means you are trusted with extreme responsibilities and it also means extreme oversight. That's part of why the selection process is so thorough and stress response is so well evaluated before NASA will put a person in space.
Reading the parent's comment pedantically is useless and against this site's guidelines. Reading it more charitably + less literally makes more sense.
There also might be some unfriendly people. Like escaped convicts living in the woods, in the middle of nowhere.
>> wolves and pretty big bears.
So the pistol was presumably for the astronaut to use on himself?
They most certainly have a shank stashed on ISS somewhere
The question is pretty unnecessary given that it references the "ALSEP Flight System Familiarization Manual" [1] which also goes into detail about the purpose of the grenade launcher.
1: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19710014816
Closed as duplicate. Your question is bad and you should feel bad.
~Every StackExchange mod ever.
Went down a rabbit hole to see if the Apollo "thumpers" were named so because of Dune. Apparently there were a few terrestrial thumpers in use by oil and gas surveyors prior to the book and missions... whomp whomp.
Normally, I am glad that Hacker News policies meme references. There is already a reddit.
But I liked this comment be caused of its know your meme link. I learned something.
Well, I learned two things. One, I learned about the meme. Two, I learned not to trust Know Your Meme when it asks me to turn off my adblocker!
> I learned not to trust Know Your Meme when it asks me to turn off my adblocker
Now why on Earth would you comply with that request?!
Because I am sympathetic to the idea that they offer a service paid for by ad revenue. If want the service, it has to be paid for somehow. I don't mind ignoring a few innocuous ads if it means the service remains "free."
yeah but that's the point: 'innocuous ads' have never been tested on the net.
it started as attention seeking eye-knifes, transitioned into the sex sells & hardcore gamer crap, and ended up as 'legal' reverse mortgages/fake charities/malware/data-harvesting.
I think it's safe to say that experiment has been tried.
Yeah, but many humans have a way of thinking this time will be different!
And it never is. Not just about ads, either.
you have to touch the stove at least once to know they are not lying to you about it being hot before learning it is hot
> Two, I learned not to trust Know Your Meme when it asks me to turn off my adblocker!
don't you know that correct way is to treat any "turn off your adblocker" notification as another ad?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Cjo1MWGZg
I refrained from posting a humorous comment otherwise my reply would have been “becase you never know”
Doom 3 motto: "The UAC is making safer worlds through superior firepower."
Now I'm wondering how far a regular military grenade launcher could lauch grenades on the moon
About six times further with zero drag. So 3.6Km, or from Buckingham Palace to St Paul's Cathedral.
We could also say it's about a 15 minute run for a healthy person
Few people run at 13 km/h. Your qualification regarding health is doing a lot of work here.
> Few people run at 13 km/h.
on Earth or on the Moon tho?
Have you ever tried to run on the moon? Bloody difficult.
My (wildly uneducated) guess is that on the moon the real issue is not much acceleration but rather deceleration.
Acceleration and deceleration are both basically the same thing.
You'd have less grip under the soles of your shoes (less friction due to less normal force aka weight). You'd also probably have to fix your technique so you don't keep launching yourself 6 ft into the air on each stride.
Bloody difficult is probably an accurate description.
Since there is no atmosphere even a bit further.
That's already what zero drag meant
I'd like to hear more about the alternate reality in which this ballistics exchange is taking place
And the follow-up question: Could it put one into a moon orbit if done right?
There are a few guns that exist that could achieve the necessary velocity (just shy of 4,000 mph) but they’re not handheld. But yes, it would be possible for the right gun to fire a bullet that went around the moon and hit you in the back of the head.
Lunar gravity field is very uneven - that one orbit might be enough for it slighly change where the bullet shows up again.
Like it was just a default for the game engine they were using.
Does anyone know why they had the grenade launcher? stackexchange decided a few false positives humans getting blocked was okay if they could mitigate the corporate bots and block most of them. The end result is that I can't read the page.
First thought: were these fragmentation grenades? Second though: nope: not useful for seismic research. Third though: on the moon, thrown fragmentation grenades wouldn't be safe for the thrower.
Without fragmentation, isn't it just going to fly off in one direction with very little damage in any other direction?
All grenades have a casing the "fragments" when they go off, but some use thicker, heavier, scored metal casings to maximize the anti-personel effects of the resulting shrapnel. If you don't want shrapnel, then you make the casing light and arrange for it to break into fewer pieces. So grenades designed to produce more, heavier, sharper fragments are called fragmentation grenades.
From the comments:
> Due to an influx of joke comments, all joke comments on this post will be deleted
I think this is pretty much the story of late Stack Exchange.
to show the moon people who's boss
Because the howitzer wouldn't fit?
Michael Bay added it so that the official Apollo Mission action figures would sell better.[1]
[1] https://forum.dvdtalk.com/movie-talk/257651-armageddon-gatli...
To gun down the aliens. The answer is so obvious.
> They were part of an active seismic imaging experiment
That is what we call plausible deniability.
(Everyone complaining about this topic inviting jokes, and I’m the first to have posted one. Drama sells more than silly jokes these days.)
I'm sure it's the literal truth.
Never know when you need to seismically image some hostiles for scientific verification of threat elimination.
Probably was both. NASA got a COTS component for their seismologic experiment, saving some time/budget on R&D, and military got to have a grenade launcher tested on the Moon, providing data for whatever "future warfare" programs they were surely running back then.
I think these days we call this "synergy"?
There were some quite insane wepon studies done for Project Horizon back in 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Horizon
IIRC the "claymore on a stick" option looked the best back then.
> We and our (263!!!) partners perform the following based on your settings:
> Use precise geolocation data.
Why does this site need to share my precise geolocation with 263 partners? It's madness.
Hmm
> Due to an influx of joke comments, all joke comments on this post will be deleted.
And then they wonder why the whole group is dying
The alternative to me seems to be becoming like a lot of subs on Reddit. It's part of why I like HN so much too, where the signal to noise is so much better.
It’s not you’re just fooled but garbage people with false bravado.
It actually is, on Reddit you need to collapse and scroll down a bit to get a real non-joke answer to something, over here low effort jokes tend to get pushed down.
This was a solved problem by Slashdot decades ago: You introduce a simple tagging system: "Insightful", "informative", "funny", etc. then you let the community tag comments accordingly. Then if you want to filter out jokes, or only see them, you can do so via a simple UI switch.
Agree. I’m here because discussions are not padded left and right with memes and people trying to farm karma with humor tailored for maximum engagement.
Yes its in a death spiral with the new account based infinite scroll feed direction they're going to go in. Soon you'll see ai generated, or reposted, content perfectly tailored to what your unconscious shadow wants to see. Just like the rest of the apps
On reddit there was a ton of censorship.
I dislike censorship in general. Someone else decides whether I may read comment xyz from another human being (assuming it is a human being). I don't want censor-in-the-middle people, be it on HN or reddit. Old reddit was easier to use than HN though; on HN we get time-locked as well as jokes-eliminated. That forces a more serious tone. I do not think it really improves the signal to noise ratio though; usually it means that there are fewer comments in general, including potentially interesting comments. I mean, if HN were serious about joke-censorship, any funny story shared by someone else on HN, even if historically accurate, would also have to be censored. After all you can not evaluate whether a claimed story to be true, to NOT be a "joke in disguise". I could go on and on here, but at the end of the day it just boils down as to whether people like censorship or not. You may reason that you prefer it, to "pre-filter away content you never want to read", such as a joke, but for me, I just dislike that someone else sits in the driver seat and tells me what I am allowed to read and what not. I want to decide on that on my own and I have no issue with "noise ratio"; I don't read all comments anyway, simply due to lack of time. I can only glimpse at some of them. Do you really have the time to go through all comments on each entry on HN?
I dislike (nay, find absurd) the idea that private people should provide for free a platform for random people that they’re not allowed to moderate because "censorship" and "free speech". Also, Reddit is probably the least censored mainstream discussion platform on the open internet, even after expelling all kinds of terrible people.
>Also, Reddit is probably the least censored mainstream discussion platform on the open internet
Absolutely not.
There are instant banned topics on Reddit. AI banned topics site wide. Go write something like “the USA imported the third world” and enjoy your instant 3-day ban.
X however, actually has some semblance of free speech. Like it or not.
Yet, Reddit is alive and SE is... "struggling". Good jokes also carry information, that's why they work.
AI is likely a much bigger cause of struggle than lack of memes/jokes.
Have you read Reddit – where are the good jokes? There is just crap memes
"Reddit" as it's a single forum. Of course if you don't spend time there, I understand this take, but every subreddit is different.
Nicely editorialised there, skipping the second half:
> However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!
On HN many purely jokey comments are often discouraged, being down-voted and getting replies along the lines of "this isn't Reddit". Is HN dying, by the same measure?
I think there’s a distinct difference between a community collectively deprecating something, versus individual members of a community deciding what will and will not be deleted. The first means the comments just fall away, while the second (and a statement of “we will delete your content it is not welcome here”) is actively off-putting not only to those who post that sort of content but others passing by who may be put off posting anything in case they unknowingly “break the rules”.
I don't see a problem there. “I won't post a jokey comment here as it'll just be deleted” is the system working. Much better than what has become the norm elsewhere: “delete if not allowed” which more-often-than-not means “I know this is not what is wanted here, but screw you and your rules”. They have explicitly stated that such content is welcome, just a little further away from the business end.
I was going to say the same. They did follow up with “However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!” but the bolded comment above significantly outweighs this.
At least this earlier comment was deemed relevant and not too jokey:
> Even more fun, Apollo 14 didn't use their grenades, and they are still on the lunar surface.
At least here it's jokes, sometimes they ask people to put valuable comments inside the chat, which is of course not publicly accessible so it's lost
Maybe they are courting the AI agent demographic...
God forbid resource doesn’t turn into a group rewarding regurgitated jokes for internet points, it would insane. Every time I read some serious (ughhrr) book, I write trite irony on margins because I can’t process information like a normal human being anymore without turning everything into shit.
Curious, I checked that person's homepage. Looks about right for the 'no fun allowed' attitude:
https://called2voyage.github.io/