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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 23rd, 2023

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  • From scratch it’s obviously not feasible, but having been a former Soviet state I’d imagine a good majority of the resources needed are floating around.

    The main challenges with nuclear weapons are 1. procurement of the fissile material, 2. yield efficiency, and 3. miniaturization. Once you have the first part done, as Ukraine very likely has the nuclear fuel processing facilities to do so, the second part is less important if you just want a bomb. Just look at the fact that they were so confident the Little Boy would work they didn’t even bother with a prototype, even if its yield ratio was quite low. It needed about 60kg of uranium for its 15kT yield, while Fat Man managed 21kT with only about 5kg of plutonium.

    So, it’s a tradeoff where if nuclear material is hard to come by and you need to get the bomb somewhere far away, making something really efficient is pretty important. However, if you have sufficient material and just want a decently big boom in the middle of a field, it’s quite literally something you could feasibly manage in a home workshop.

    The one other note on the importance of efficiency is in regards to fallout. Anything that isn’t used in the detonation is blasted every which-way, and isn’t really something you want as a normal military, since a nuclear wasteland isn’t strategically very useful. But, if you’re just trying to fuck up someone else’s day, then its less important and you can get into really “fun” stuff like dirty and cobalt bombs.











  • This is also what a lot of people forget how it was at the time, thinking “if only” they had been early adopters and how they’d be millionaires. I was one, and had found it was great for traveling said “trade route”, but also watched when Mt Gox collapsed and tanked the price 75% while stealing millions from people, and decided to take my winnings and leave the table.

    How many people would see that shit and be like “Yes, I’m going to hold onto this for the next 10 years when it’s worth something” and then sit through the number of 50+% loss events that happened?

    You would have done exactly what 99% of early adopters did, and considered yourself incredibly lucky that you managed to make 1000% returns and sold.




  • Yes, it will actually work. I know it’s very much not to code, but when we lost power for over 10 days, I did this to keep our furnace running and us from freezing to death since it was -10F out.

    I only have a small 120V generator, but hooked both legs to hot and backfed via our EV charger’s outlet, since its a 50A circuit. Like you said, nothing 240V worked, but that little 3kW generator did a great job powering basically the whole house with no issues.

    That winter was definitely a big driver for me to get a backup battery system so our solar could power the house.