I really should not work on visualizations of the night sky with thousands of naked-eye visible stupid "AI data center" sun-synchronous satellites at the end of the day. This sucks.
I should note that there's no freaking way we'd ever get this many satellites into this tight of a set of orbits. We'd be in full Kessler Syndrome way before that. I'm just trying to highlight the absurdity of what these awful companies are asking for. (Now up to 4 separate filings for copycat "AI data center" megaconstellations. Fuck you, SpaceX, for starting all of this rampant waste and destruction.)

@sundogplanets

Le Sigh. If only all these guns that us Americans love so much could somehow shoot all the way up to low earth orbit.

"Them things is movin' pretty fast. How far you figure you gotta lead 'em to hit one?"

"I dunno. Hold muh beer."

More fun than cow tipping.

A bullet has very low mass and surface area, and can't get squished like a human, so it's not infeasible to accelerate it to escape velocity, maybe with some sort of improvised backyard railgun. The problem really is aiming it, because of how long it takes a projectile to get up that high. You'd have to lead it to the point that you need to go do some literal rocket science, calculating orbital trajectories that intersect with something up there.

That kind of power and precision is starting to get to the point that only the US military has the capability of putting together. Deliberately. Because the US military wants to make sure nobody else in the nation can do anything dangerous and effective. There's a non-zero chance setting the thing off would get detected, and then there's a lovely room in El Salvador waiting for you.

@cy

Well, yeah, which is why the whole post was completely tongue in cheek ;-)

I was just imagining some drunk farm lads sitting on a hilltop some night and what they might do, should the physics actually be feasible.

Never underestimate the power of the boys, who've had a few!