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posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 24 2020, @06:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the better-than-semper-sub dept.

Space Force unveils logo, 'Semper Supra' motto - SpaceNews:

The U.S. Space Force revealed its new logo and motto as the service seeks to build branding and cultural identity.

The black-and-silver service logo unveiled July 22 has the delta wing as its central element that is also found in the Space Force seal and flag. There is a "Space Force" horizontally shaped logo and a USSF vertical logo.

The Space Force motto "Semper Supra" means "always above." It represents the service's role in establishing, maintaining and preserving U.S. freedom of operations in the ultimate high ground, a Space Force spokesman said.

The logo was designed by the Department of the Air Force's advertising agency GSD&M.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by RamiK on Friday July 24 2020, @06:38PM (20 children)

    by RamiK (1813) on Friday July 24 2020, @06:38PM (#1025884)

    Too close to the Marine Corps' Semper Fidelis and gets rather ridiculous if you know your Games Workshop Warhammer 40k Space Marines fluff.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 24 2020, @07:50PM (10 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday July 24 2020, @07:50PM (#1025901)

    it is just so embarrassing. It's only purpose is to appease one idiot's ego

    The U.S. has defacto held the high ground in space since 1969 - to have to strut around a special branch of the military to reiterate that smacks of a creeping insecurity that it may no longer be true.

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    Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @08:47PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @08:47PM (#1025931)

      "The U.S. has defacto held the high ground in flight since 1903 - to have to strut around a special branch of the military to reiterate that smacks of a creeping insecurity that it may no longer be true."
      -- someone in 1947

      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 24 2020, @08:57PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday July 24 2020, @08:57PM (#1025941)

        In 1947 we were far from "in control of the air..." My grandfather was drafted into the Army Air Corps shortly before the Air Force was branched off.

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        Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday July 24 2020, @08:57PM (5 children)

      by HiThere (866) on Friday July 24 2020, @08:57PM (#1025940) Journal

      It isn't clearly true anymore of the US military. SpaceX might reasonably claim to currently be pretty securely in the lead among the non-military, but when it comes to the military, the US has been dragging it's feet. (Not that that's an inherently bad thing. Kessler syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome [wikipedia.org] is a real possibility. And many possible space based weapons are indiscriminately destructive. It isn't too good if a strike on your opponent on the other side of the world boils a cubic mile or two of ocean in a couple of minutes. [For that one think asteroid impact.])

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      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday July 25 2020, @10:59AM (4 children)

        by c0lo (156) on Saturday July 25 2020, @10:59AM (#1026130) Journal

        It isn't too good if a strike on your opponent on the other side of the world boils a cubic mile or two of ocean in a couple of minutes.

        Let's take 1.5 cubic miles at 25C as the starting temperature.
        To evaporate that water, you'll need to bring it to boils () then evaporate it - water is a bitch, latent heat of evaporation (2.26 MJ/kg) is so much higher than the specific heat (4.184 KJ/Kg·K - for a ΔT = 75K, you only need 0.3138 MJ/kg) that I'm going to ignore it.

        So how may kg in a 1.5Mile3? Well that's about 6.25222611849·109m3 (at 1609.34m/mile) of water, or 6.25·1012 kg of water.

        So to evaporate 1.5Mile3, one will need 14.125·1012MJ or 14.125·1018J. To put it in perspective, that's the energy of a matter/antimatter bomb with a total mass of 157kg.

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        Let's suppose you stop an asteroid in the belt from orbiting the Sun (a valiant display of energy control on its own) and let it free-fall onto Earth - what mass that asteroid need to be? Ceres has an orbital radius of 413.7·109m (and Earth's orbit is about 150·109m in radius. At a Sun mass of 2·1030kg and the gravitational constant of 6.673middot;10-11, a kg in freefall between the two orbits will net you a paltry 0.567·109J. So your freefalling asteroid will need a mass of 24.9·109kg.

        (I'll let you ponder what energy you'll need to spend to alter the orbit of an asteroid in the asteroid belt on a collision course with Earth's orbit. If you are capable of such a feat, a much better use of that energy would be to dump it directly on your enemy).

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        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
        • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday July 25 2020, @01:48PM (3 children)

          by HiThere (866) on Saturday July 25 2020, @01:48PM (#1026153) Journal

          Excellent calculations that miss the point. 1/16 of a cublic mile of water is still so bad that it doesn't stay localized, and targeting it is difficult. I didn't want to pick any place in particular, but most plausible targets are close to an ocean. The Chicxulub impactor was about 10 – 15 km (6 – 10 miles) in diameter, and I was envisioning something considerably smaller. And it's still overkill.

          Many space based weapons are overkill with wide dispersion and difficult to target. Precision targeting isn't usually really a plausible assumption. As for "dumping the energy directly on the enemy", that's pretty much was a meteor impact is...if your aim is good. Lasers are a lot less efficient, and building them gives warning.

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          Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
          • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday July 26 2020, @12:11AM (2 children)

            by c0lo (156) on Sunday July 26 2020, @12:11AM (#1026364) Journal

            Excellent calculations that miss the point...

            As for "dumping the energy directly on the enemy", that's pretty much was a meteor impact is...if your aim is good.

            Speaking about missing the point - as of today, no nation is capable of energies required to deflect a meteor towards Earth, much less doing it with enough precision.

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            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
            • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday July 26 2020, @01:43PM (1 child)

              by HiThere (866) on Sunday July 26 2020, @01:43PM (#1026563) Journal

              I think you overestimate the energy required. I'll admit that application is beyond current state of the art, but small amounts of energy applied at appropriate points of the orbit could do it even with the modest amounts of energy currently available. (Of course, it might take a few decades to do the job.)

              Actually, I'd need to study the matter a bit but I think that if the asteroid is rotating (which almost all are) that there are angles at each rotation that could be usefully used to perturb the orbit in many directions. Thinking a bit more, though, it might be more like centuries.

              Still, if you're only considering near-term dangers I'll admit that something like "rods from god" is potentially much more near term. And again I figure that it would have a huge circular error, though it's not going to directly cause a global disaster. Indirectly, however, even setting something like that up is likely to cause someone to trigger a Kessler syndrome.

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              Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
              • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday July 26 2020, @02:03PM

                by c0lo (156) on Sunday July 26 2020, @02:03PM (#1026570) Journal

                I think you overestimate the energy required.

                No, I don't think so. If you pick an asteroid from the belt, you'll need to "convince" it to change its momentum (at least as direction) to intersect Earth's orbit - in other words, to push it towards the Sun. That Δv (as vector) is going to cost somewhere the same order of magnitude with the difference in the potential energy between the two orbits.

                When it comes to the time required to deliver the energy, if it takes decades, not only it's useless as strategy, but aiming it with enough precision against your enemy is totally out of the picture.

                Still, if you're only considering near-term dangers I'll admit that something like "rods from god" is potentially much more near term.

                Even Lazy Dogs [wikipedia.org] launched from stratospheric balloons has better chances to deliver some damage to your enemy that asteroid bombardment. Be it only that you'll need to spend a multimillion rocket to down it and the attacker only needs a few $1000 to launch it from international waters on a wind that will get it over your territory somewhere.

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                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
    • (Score: 3, Touché) by jelizondo on Friday July 24 2020, @09:46PM (1 child)

      by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 24 2020, @09:46PM (#1025966) Journal

      The U.S. has defacto held the high ground in space since 1969

      Except the almost 10 years U.S. astronauts had to use Russian rockets [wired.com] to get to space!

      Quoting Santayna: "Those who can not remember the past are condemn to repeat it."

      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 24 2020, @10:29PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday July 24 2020, @10:29PM (#1025990)

        Manned space travel always has been political showboating... the real power is in remote controlled systems.

        --
        Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 24 2020, @09:10PM (7 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 24 2020, @09:10PM (#1025949) Homepage Journal

    Got no idea what all that Warhammer stuff is - but it's still ridiculous. Semper Fi has been bought and paid for with Marine blood. When those space cadets bleed some, maybe I'll agree that they've earned the use of some high-sounding slogan. Go ahead, boys, paint the moon red. Oh, wait, is blood still red when exposed to vacuum, or near vacuum? Rust red maybe?

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    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday July 24 2020, @09:29PM (3 children)

      by VLM (445) on Friday July 24 2020, @09:29PM (#1025959)

      Got no idea what all that Warhammer stuff is

      Whew... you've got acres and acres of tasty memes to learn about. Like... you probably don't get the "God Emperor" memes at all... Luckily there's probably 500000 pages of ebook lore available for reading. Its very light stuff, but often entertaining.

      Imagine if you and a million of your friends played Monopoly the board game and liked it so much, that the market currently supports 10K pages of fan fic lore each for the boot token, the thimble token, the little car token, each spot on the game board for example Ventnor Avenue, etc.

      The lore authors are skilled enough that its not bad for light entertainment. Better than watching TV although thats a pretty low bar LOL.

      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 24 2020, @09:40PM (2 children)

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 24 2020, @09:40PM (#1025965) Homepage Journal

        I always thought the God Emperor referenced the Dune series of stories. Ehhh, Maybe I go look.

        --
        Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
        • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday July 24 2020, @09:59PM (1 child)

          by VLM (445) on Friday July 24 2020, @09:59PM (#1025977)

          Yes there is a God Emperor in Dune.

          Much like faster than light travel, the meme of god-leader is popular idea in sci fi.

          Apparently the ancient Egyptians started the meme quite awhile ago and it spread thru the world, its not strictly sci fi LOL.

          How the ancient Egyptians came up with that weird idea is a good one to ponder when you're bored. Its a strange idea if you've never heard of it... Of course they also came up with weird stuff like humans with heads of jackals and making really freak'n huge piles of stacked bricks, so who knows where those weirdos got their ideas.

          • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday July 26 2020, @01:50PM

            by HiThere (866) on Sunday July 26 2020, @01:50PM (#1026566) Journal

            I call it the "big baboon theory". Many troops of primates are usually lead by a dominant male, with nominally absolute authority. (The nominal is because they are often overthrown if those lead get too unhappy. In some groups they often survive the loss of authority. [I don't remember whether that's true of baboons.])

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    • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday July 24 2020, @10:50PM (2 children)

      by RamiK (1813) on Friday July 24 2020, @10:50PM (#1025996)

      Got no idea what all that Warhammer stuff

      WH40K's Space Marines are "humanity's elite fighting forces" that so happen to be a bunch of genetically modified sterile cyborgs that had their memories wiped before having their base instincts rewired to find ecstasy in murder and indoctrinated into leading an endless genocidal war against the enemies of the too-slow-to-collapse authoritarian theocracy Imperium Of Man: Aliens, Heretics and Mutants.

      Essentially the entirety of WH40K's universe is a grim dark humanity-gone-horribly-wrong future with anything remotely "good" being a macabre dystopian parody in a Heinlein's Starship Troopers vain so while the "bad" is just tragic failures so any real world military that finds itself connoting to anything from that fiction should seriously ask itself are we the baddies? [youtube.com].

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      • (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Saturday July 25 2020, @12:55AM (1 child)

        by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Saturday July 25 2020, @12:55AM (#1026034) Journal

        On the table, Tau nearly always beat the Marines to dust.
        Superior ships, superior technology, superior tactics, superior religion.
        Well, maybe superior players too ;)

        --
        The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
        • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday July 25 2020, @09:39AM

          by RamiK (1813) on Saturday July 25 2020, @09:39AM (#1026121)

          Superior players pick the best army the rules provide for competitions so that much is a given :D

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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday July 25 2020, @04:08PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday July 25 2020, @04:08PM (#1026179) Journal

    "Semper" is used in the mottos of other branches. The Coast Guard's is "Semper Paratus." The Navy's is "Semper Fortis." I think there are others.

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    Washington DC delenda est.