The foot soldiers generally don’t want to be there. Russia has to use blocking troops to keep them on the front line. You retreat, you get shot by your own guys.

I know everyone has particular things they think are the worst part of war, but stating at a giant flying robot bomb and knowing you have no way to escape or even effectively surrender sounds like hell. Like, how do you tell the operator you want to be taken captive?

You generally do something like multiple gravity-assists perhaps coupled with going to a higher orbit first before coming back in. You have to remember that each individual space mission is centered around moving an object roughly the size of a minivan. It’s just completely not worth it to try and send our garbage or even just our space garbage anywhere far from where it is right now.

For a while they did nothing with space junk. These days low-earth orbit is actually getting kind of crowded and people realized we have to be a little more responsible. Each mission has plans for how every piece of debris will be handled. For some, that means sending back down to earth, for others, that means crashing it into whatever planetary body is nearby, and for others that means putting the object into a graveyard orbit. A graveyard orbit is just an orbit where we’ve decided to leave the junk in an “out of the way” place where it’s unlikely to change orbit or collide with anything.

These might help get you an intuitive understanding of how orbital mechanics works.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSL-UN9SB11jK2pNTDffUS7vU-hJn7-Zf&feature=share9

That’s just plain not how orbital mechanics works. The difficultly with falling into the sun is that we’re starting from a high energy state (orbit) and so in order to fall into the sun we have to scrub all our extra energy to get back to zero.

Think of it in reverse. If you were standing on the sun, it would take an absurd amount of energy to launch into an orbit, and only some of that energy actually goes into lifting your payload. Once your at your orbital height you have to keep adding energy in order to go sideways fast enough to maintain orbit.

It’s all the sideways momentum that you have to oppose in order to be able to actually hit the sun.

Edit: Orbital mechanics don’t follow your intuition, given that you didn’t evolve in an ecosystem where they impact your life. It’s actually less energy intensive to climb to a higher orbit first, then scrub your remaining horizonal velocity in order to fall into that sun.

Ah, my bad. I saw a game with complete shenanigans earlier so I thought that’s just what anarchy chess was.

Black and white knights switch places

There’s just something about Latin America that looks a certain kind of way.

So… Central or South America?

Did they not implement shadow bans for mentioning Lemmy?

Since two people replied, you get the screenshots and I’ll edit in a link to the other explanation.

Okay good, I just wanted to double check that what was in my head was correct.

Right now if you want to reply from your inbox you long press on the empty space to the right of the person’s username in order to get the action bar underneath to show up.

Yes, I know, it’s a dumb UI bug/implementation, especially since it’s inconsistent with the general thread behavior of the action bar, and the check box in the settings doesn’t seem to impact its behavior.

Anyway, once you’ve got the action bar you can reply directly in your inbox with the little conversation bubble in the lower right. You can also go directly to the reply in the post using the link icon to the left-ish. You can mark the message as read using the other conversation looking icon somewhere in between the two I just referenced.

I’ll come back in here and add screenshots in a second.

Go ahead and reply to this comment so I have something to reply to myself, then I’ll document the steps you need to reply directly to an inbox reply.