Its a Bird
Its a Plane
Its Russia getting bombed again!
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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can you contextualise this? I thought it was about the flying manhole cover
During the Pascal-B nuclear test of August 1957,[8][9] a 900-kilogram (2,000 lb) steel lid was welded over the borehole to contain the nuclear blast, despite Brownlee predicting that it would not work.[8] When Pascal-B was detonated, the blast went straight up the test shaft, launching the cap into the atmosphere. The plate was never found. In a conversation with Bill Ogle, Brownlee estimated its velocity as "six times the escape velocity from the Earth"—approximately 67.2 km/s (150,000 mph).[10]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#cite_ref-Brownlee,_Harrington_9-0
hence this thing being posted here more than once.
I know that thing definitely got some fancy physics flavor of fucking vaporized, but in my heart it's out in space just still zooming at breakneck fuckin speed as a testament to human engineering hubris
I would just like to commend your phrasing of:
some fancy physics flavor of fucking vaporized
It gave me a hearty chuckle.
Only a tiny fraction of it probably melted. The atmosphere is really thin when you're moving at the velocity that cover seemingly achieved. Raw iron meteors that are much smaller, and moving significantly slower than that steel plate routinely reach the ground intact.
That's a real use of a time machine. Go back with ultra high speed film and camera so we can catch more than one frame of the thing and determine if it hit escape velocity of the solar system, or if it may be coming back to us in a few hundred thousand years.
A high-speed camera, which took one frame per millisecond, was focused on the borehole because studying the velocity of the plate was deemed scientifically interesting.[8] After the detonation, the plate appeared in only one frame. Regarding its speed Brownlee reckoned that "a lower limit could be calculated by considering the time between frames (and I don't remember what that was)", and joked that the best estimate was it was "going like a bat!"[10]
How many could we get now, 10? That would probably be enough. Time machine it is.
so you're saying there's a chance that if we ever encounter aliens, they might compliment us on our sick space yeet?
That probably depends on how litigious they are, and if we hit anything with it.
It's the floating roof of an oil storage tank outside Moscow, Russia that got destroyed earlier this week. The video makes that gigantic piece of steel look like it thinks it's Wash from Firefly. Just a leaf on the wind.
Terrifying.
It’s the floating roof of an oil storage tank outside Moscow, Russia that got destroyed earlier this week.
ok makes sense, thanks.
The video makes that gigantic piece of steel look like it thinks it’s Wash from Firefly.
I saw the video... wat? I don't watch firefly, I don't like westerns.
Wash was the pilot. "I'm a leaf on the wind," was one of his lines that was repeated a few times.
What's most interesting is that the Ukrainians didn't even hit that tank, it wqs hit by a anti air defense missile fired from Russia
Apparently smoke and fire confuse IR sensors, so you shouldn't use MANPADs near burning refineries
Who'd have predicted that heatseekers go towards fire.
not them, that's who
Still wondering if someone died from this. Kinda like the sky actually fell on their head