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Merged Apollo "hoax" discussion / Lick observatory laser saga

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Patrick1000 said:
Last comment abaddon and others. From the HB side, I would imagine many if not most of us acknowledge a mirror, a LRRR up there. Those of us that do believe there is one would suggest it is not necessarily the one you see pictures of in the space books. Also, I believe an unmanned craft brought it to 00 41 145 north and 23 26 00 east.

If Wampler is correct, and that is an "IF", but an if that is figureoutable, then the thing simply cannot be passive and must have a mechanism whereby it is "turned off and on". Not hard to imagine actually.

Anyway, that is way way way too much forum for me guys. I won't be back for a while. But thanks, was a good time.
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So...your version of the LRRR isn't a corner reflector, isn't passive, doesn't look anything like the piece(s) of equipment actually designed and flown. It isn't located in the same place(s) as the ones deployed by Apollo and the Luna program, and it wasn't deployed and aimed by astronauts, and it wasn't placed on the same day as was reported, either.

So why are you even calling it "The LRRR?"

You might as well call it "The magic CIA robot mirror on the Moon." You aren't discussing the LRRR. You aren't discussing Apollo. You are discussing some fantasy contraption for which there exists no evidence outside of your own imagination.
 
excaza said:
To be honest, I am wondering how the Soviets knowing the distance from Moscow (or wherever) to the Moon helps them aim their payloads. Miller's statement was that the Soviets knew inter-city distances, but not the distance from the USSR to the US. Not only does this have absolutely no relevance to the validity of the moon landing, it also strikes me as a profoundly odd statement. What would knowing the Moon distance change?

Can someone (preferably sane) enlighten me?
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It really makes no sense. Cities don't move much, there are dozens of trivial ways for the soviets to get their positions with much more accuracy than was needed to aim a missile.
 
And much more accuracy than you can get via the Moon. 2-mile diameter circle, remember Patrick? Or is laser divergence another cunning NASA lie?

Plus, as a friend of mine put it, you don't need that kind of accuracy to target a city. What, you want to pick a specific door? ("I'm aiming the center of THIS 50 megaton MIRV cluster at the back door of the butcher shop on 5th and Main....")
 
excaza said:
To be honest, I am wondering how the Soviets knowing the distance from Moscow (or wherever) to the Moon helps them aim their payloads. Miller's statement was that the Soviets knew inter-city distances, but not the distance from the USSR to the US. Not only does this have absolutely no relevance to the validity of the moon landing, it also strikes me as a profoundly odd statement. What would knowing the Moon distance change?

Can someone (preferably sane) enlighten me?
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IIR my cartography classes, it would actually be of some use. By bouncing a laser off the moon it would allow a more accurate geodetic datum to be calculated and so allow the Soviets to make their coordinate systems more accurate. When it comes to tossing nukes around I'm not sure how much more accuracy is needed to hit a city than what they already had, hitting individual bases or US launch silos, maybe. It doesn't make Patrick1000's opinions any more connected to reality though.

To generate a better datum more than just the moon would be needed though, hitting a series of satellites is much better. wiki link on geodesy

Geodesy, also named geodetics, a branch of earth sciences, is the scientific discipline that deals with the measurement and representation of the Earth, including its gravitational field, in a three-dimensional time-varying space. Geodesists also study geodynamical phenomena such as crustal motion, tides, and polar motion. For this they design global and national control networks, using space and terrestrial techniques while relying on datums and coordinate systems.
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nomuse said:
And with a bound, Patrick's conspiracy grows once again to include every observatory that has used any one of the 5 target-able LRRR's on the Moon.
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How many thousands of people are involved in the kid's conspiracy now? I've lost count.
 
Laton said:
IIR my cartography classes, it would actually be of some use. By bouncing a laser off the moon it would allow a more accurate geodetic datum to be calculated and so allow the Soviets to make their coordinate systems more accurate. When it comes to tossing nukes around I'm not sure how much more accuracy is needed to hit a city than what they already had, hitting individual bases or US launch silos, maybe. It doesn't make Patrick1000's opinions any more connected to reality though.

To generate a better datum more than just the moon would be needed though, hitting a series of satellites is much better. wiki link on geodesy
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Thanks for this. I feel a little stupid; I should have realized that refining the geoid helps you to better map the horizontal distances.

Of course for a sub-orbital trajectory (aka ICBM) knowing elevations more accurately is a bonus, too.

Still, using satellites is better. They are closer. They also can pass over the poles, and otherwise image parts of the Earth that don't present themselves conveniently to the Moon over the system's service lifetime. Plus your basic spy-sat can take pictures as well, allowing you to match up the possible silo with the refined radar map/laser height map of the terrain.

The Moon just doesn't make sense in this scenario even with some kind of sophisticated machinery planted on it that looks entirely unlike the LRRR.
 
Given the cold war paranoia of the age I don't doubt that the issue of the Soviets using the LRRR came up. Still and all, it didn't really matter, nor does his random reinvention of the past have any weight.

Someone in another thread mentioned Abductive Reasoning yesterday.

"Abduction is a kind of logical inference described by Charles Sanders Peirce as "guessing".[1] The term refers to the process of arriving at an explanatory hypothesis. Peirce said that to abduce a hypothetical explanation a from an observed surprising circumstance b is to surmise that a may be true because then b would be a matter of course.[2] Thus, to abduce a from b involves determining that a is sufficient (or nearly sufficient), but not necessary, for b."

Very interesting -- I hadn't been introduced to that term before.
 
Have you heard the term "fractally wrong"?

"Fractal Wrongness is the state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person's worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person's worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview."
 
Laton said:
IIR my cartography classes, it would actually be of some use. By bouncing a laser off the moon it would allow a more accurate geodetic datum to be calculated and so allow the Soviets to make their coordinate systems more accurate. When it comes to tossing nukes around I'm not sure how much more accuracy is needed to hit a city than what they already had, hitting individual bases or US launch silos, maybe. It doesn't make Patrick1000's opinions any more connected to reality though.

To generate a better datum more than just the moon would be needed though, hitting a series of satellites is much better. wiki link on geodesy
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Given that any important targets would have had a spread of multiple warheads to look forwards to I don't think it would have made that much difference. A nuclear warhead isn't exactly a precision weapon.
 
Laton said:
IIR my cartography classes, it would actually be of some use. By bouncing a laser off the moon it would allow a more accurate geodetic datum to be calculated and so allow the Soviets to make their coordinate systems more accurate.
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I'm not entirely clear how that works. Wouldn't you have to do that from multiple points? Is getting a single datum useful?
 
ApolloGnomon said:
Someone in another thread mentioned Abductive Reasoning yesterday.
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Interesting. I hadn't come across that before. There is nothing wrong with abductive reasoning, per se; it is a useful way of generating hypotheses. But, as the article says:
WP said:
Peirce argues that good abductive reasoning from P to Q involves not simply a determination that, e.g., Q is sufficient for P, but also that Q is among the most economical explanations for P.
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Which hardly applies to Dr Sock's flights of fancy. Also, it provides a "guess" which needs to be tested or confirmed. And not by further abductive reasoning, for that way lies fractal wrongness...
 
Buckaroo said:
Interesting that when given another opportunity to answer the simple question I posed to you multiple times earlier in the thread, you choose to make a smart-ass remark instead. It's quite telling.
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Apparently that's the most intelligent part of his anatomy.
 
nomuse said:
And much more accuracy than you can get via the Moon. 2-mile diameter circle, remember Patrick? Or is laser divergence another cunning NASA lie?

Plus, as a friend of mine put it, you don't need that kind of accuracy to target a city. What, you want to pick a specific door? ("I'm aiming the center of THIS 50 megaton MIRV cluster at the back door of the butcher shop on 5th and Main....")
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Yep, close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and thermonuclear war.
 
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