Went down a rabbit hole to see if the Apollo "thumpers" were named so because of Dune. Apparently there were a few terrestrial thumpers in use by oil and gas surveyors prior to the book and missions... whomp whomp.
"The mortar package is activated by the "arm grenades" and "fire grenades" commands from Earth. The arm grenades command is applied to and gated through
the command gating to the grenade arming circuitwhich charges the regulaz and
sequential firing capacitors of the four grenades by applying a Z4-volt arming signal. A grenade arm pulse is also applied to the data handling function indicating receipt of the command."
Salyut 3 also had a "self-defence gun" derived from an aircraft autocannon mounted to the station, enabling them to shoot at approaching enemy spacecraft
I would guess having any sort of teeth would be meaningful to dissuade whatever type of manned craft might have been able to approach them at the time.
They already had a makarov pistol with them from the start. They made this custom short barrel double shotgun with a third rifle barrel.
This was to fend off wild life and maybe hunting while waiting for the recovery team to get to them if they came down far from the designated recovery zone.
Yeah thats why you invent small 2 barrel shotgun with big ammo and carry it all the way into space, while even small makarov pistol would fulfill that role
I imagine you can't take turns easily once there's a hole in the ship.
On the other hand, there are legitimate predators that will hunt and eat humans in Siberia. One team encountered wolves that they had trouble fending off, so they upgraded the pistol to a more formidable shotgun/rifle combo.
Unlikely that a handgun bullet passing through a skull will still have enough velocity to breach the hull? Even if it did, they'd just need to be deliberate with their aim vis-a-vis a steel plate.
26 fatalities due to bear attacks this year:
https://tass.ru/obschestvo/28211259https://eia.media/ru/article/society/6aa937759a7947f75201876...https://www.rbc.ru/society/15/09/2026/6aa937759a7947f7520187...
This year bear encounters made headlines in Russia, but the number of fatalities isn't unusual. Records is 80/year in 1985, 1986 and 1996.
Brown bears don't see us as food as long as there is some other food available. If food is scarce this year (some random dude on the internet says that there were an early thaw followed by freeze in 2024 that cause pine cone yield in 2026 to fail) they might attack. Either out of desperation or when encountered over a food source (i. e. garbage dump) and mistakes a human for a competitor.
You might be underestimating how remote some Soviet capsules landed. If they overshot their landing site they might be alone in the wilderness for days until rescue teams arrived
"Kosmonaut survives space mission, gets mauled by bear protecting her cub" is not a great headline. Bringing gun was relatively cheap insurance
That works if you have absolute trust the rescue team will reach you on schedule. If you are unsure whether few days won't turn into few weeks, or whether there will be a rescue team at all, it's best to secure food and shelter while you still have the energy to do it.
I think it's important not to overgeneralize with something that might potentially kill you. The brown bears in Japan can be deadly. A 380 kg and 2.7-m-tall brown bear, which twice attacked the village of Tomamae, killing 7 people.
If you’re a pilot or cosmonaut in Siberia, you might not have come down as planned and might be there for a while. An injured, possibly bleeding human could be easy prey. They also have tigers…
Sky marshals have weapons and the TSA allows them.
Being an astronaut means you are trusted with extreme responsibilities and it also means extreme oversight. That's part of why the selection process is so thorough and stress response is so well evaluated before NASA will put a person in space.
Reading the parent's comment pedantically is useless and against this site's guidelines. Reading it more charitably + less literally makes more sense.
The question is pretty unnecessary given that it references the "ALSEP Flight System Familiarization Manual" [1] which also goes into detail about the purpose of the grenade launcher.
nasa employee: oh hey u guys are back early
astronaut: moon's haunted
nasa employee: what?
astronaut: *loading a pistol and getting back on the rocket-ship* moon's haunted.
Because I am sympathetic to the idea that they offer a service paid for by ad revenue. If want the service, it has to be paid for somehow. I don't mind ignoring a few innocuous ads if it means the service remains "free."
yeah but that's the point: 'innocuous ads' have never been tested on the net.
it started as attention seeking eye-knifes, transitioned into the sex sells & hardcore gamer crap, and ended up as 'legal' reverse mortgages/fake charities/malware/data-harvesting.
I think it's safe to say that experiment has been tried.
There are a few guns that exist that could achieve the necessary velocity (just shy of 4,000 mph) but they’re not handheld. But yes, it would be possible for the right gun to fire a bullet that went around the moon and hit you in the back of the head.
Probably was both. NASA got a COTS component for their seismologic experiment, saving some time/budget on R&D, and military got to have a grenade launcher tested on the Moon, providing data for whatever "future warfare" programs they were surely running back then.
First thought: were these fragmentation grenades? Second though: nope: not useful for seismic research. Third though: on the moon, thrown fragmentation grenades wouldn't be safe for the thrower.
All grenades have a casing the "fragments" when they go off, but some use thicker, heavier, scored metal casings to maximize the anti-personel effects of the resulting shrapnel. If you don't want shrapnel, then you make the casing light and arrange for it to break into fewer pieces. So grenades designed to produce more, heavier, sharper fragments are called fragmentation grenades.
The alternative to me seems to be becoming like a lot of subs on Reddit. It's part of why I like HN so much too, where the signal to noise is so much better.
It actually is, on Reddit you need to collapse and scroll down a bit to get a real non-joke answer to something, over here low effort jokes tend to get pushed down.
This was a solved problem by Slashdot decades ago: You introduce a simple tagging system: "Insightful", "informative", "funny", etc. then you let the community tag comments accordingly. Then if you want to filter out jokes, or only see them, you can do so via a simple UI switch.
Agree. I’m here because discussions are not padded left and right with memes and people trying to farm karma with humor tailored for maximum engagement.
Yes its in a death spiral with the new account based infinite scroll feed direction they're going to go in. Soon you'll see ai generated, or reposted, content perfectly tailored to what your unconscious shadow wants to see. Just like the rest of the apps
I dislike censorship in general. Someone else decides whether I
may read comment xyz from another human being (assuming it is
a human being). I don't want censor-in-the-middle people, be it
on HN or reddit. Old reddit was easier to use than HN though;
on HN we get time-locked as well as jokes-eliminated. That forces
a more serious tone. I do not think it really improves the
signal to noise ratio though; usually it means that there are
fewer comments in general, including potentially interesting comments. I mean, if HN were serious about joke-censorship, any funny story shared by someone else on HN, even if historically accurate, would also have to be censored. After all you can not evaluate whether a claimed story to be true, to NOT be a "joke in disguise". I could go on and on here, but at the end of the day it just boils down as to whether people like censorship or not. You may reason that you prefer it, to "pre-filter away content you never want to read", such as a joke, but for me, I just dislike that someone else sits in the driver seat and tells me what I am allowed to read and what not. I want to decide on that on my own and I have no issue with "noise ratio"; I don't read all comments anyway, simply due to lack of time. I can only glimpse at some of them. Do you really have the time to go through all comments on each entry on HN?
I dislike (nay, find absurd) the idea that private people should provide for free a platform for random people that they’re not allowed to moderate because "censorship" and "free speech". Also, Reddit is probably the least censored mainstream discussion platform on the open internet, even after expelling all kinds of terrible people.
>Also, Reddit is probably the least censored mainstream discussion platform on the open internet
Absolutely not.
There are instant banned topics on Reddit. AI banned topics site wide. Go write something like “the USA imported the third world” and enjoy your instant 3-day ban.
X however, actually has some semblance of free speech. Like it or not.
Nicely editorialised there, skipping the second half:
> However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!
On HN many purely jokey comments are often discouraged, being down-voted and getting replies along the lines of "this isn't Reddit". Is HN dying, by the same measure?
I think there’s a distinct difference between a community collectively deprecating something, versus individual members of a community deciding what will and will not be deleted. The first means the comments just fall away, while the second (and a statement of “we will delete your content it is not welcome here”) is actively off-putting not only to those who post that sort of content but others passing by who may be put off posting anything in case they unknowingly “break the rules”.
I don't see a problem there. “I won't post a jokey comment here as it'll just be deleted” is the system working. Much better than what has become the norm elsewhere: “delete if not allowed” which more-often-than-not means “I know this is not what is wanted here, but screw you and your rules”. They have explicitly stated that such content is welcome, just a little further away from the business end.
I was going to say the same. They did follow up with “However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!” but the bolded comment above significantly outweighs this.
At least this earlier comment was deemed relevant and not too jokey:
> Even more fun, Apollo 14 didn't use their grenades, and they are still on the lunar surface.
God forbid resource doesn’t turn into a group rewarding regurgitated jokes for internet points, it would insane. Every time I read some serious (ughhrr) book, I write trite irony on margins because I can’t process information like a normal human being anymore without turning everything into shit.
Went down a rabbit hole to see if the Apollo "thumpers" were named so because of Dune. Apparently there were a few terrestrial thumpers in use by oil and gas surveyors prior to the book and missions... whomp whomp.
"The mortar package is activated by the "arm grenades" and "fire grenades" commands from Earth. The arm grenades command is applied to and gated through the command gating to the grenade arming circuitwhich charges the regulaz and sequential firing capacitors of the four grenades by applying a Z4-volt arming signal. A grenade arm pulse is also applied to the data handling function indicating receipt of the command."
Page 2-170 (179 of the PDF) of reference [1].
[0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19710014816 [1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19710014816/downloads/19...
The soviets did regularly carry a gun. For survival purposes, as they were landing in Siberia which has wolves and pretty big bears.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TP-82
Salyut 3 also had a "self-defence gun" derived from an aircraft autocannon mounted to the station, enabling them to shoot at approaching enemy spacecraft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3#On-board_gun
> The gun was fixed to the station in such a way that the only way to aim would have been to change the orientation of the entire station.
Are these stations easier to maneuver than I imagine? Sounds like someone was imagining age of sail type of combat.
I would guess having any sort of teeth would be meaningful to dissuade whatever type of manned craft might have been able to approach them at the time.
tbf, docking attempts would not be that fast either
I believe people involved in the program have since admitted that this was mostly to commit suicide in case they got stuck with no way home
Source?
Over the years at least 7 soviet missions landed off-target including Yuri Gagarin.
And not like 100-500 meters off target, but 200-600 kilometers. Having a gun in such cases make perfect sense.
They already had a makarov pistol with them from the start. They made this custom short barrel double shotgun with a third rifle barrel.
This was to fend off wild life and maybe hunting while waiting for the recovery team to get to them if they came down far from the designated recovery zone.
feels like you just invented this lie on the spot
Surely a chemical/biological solution would have been easier, cheaper, lighter, and less likely to fail.
The solution is you need no solution, air is gonna run out, they will fall unconscious and die.
It would but that would have gone against the image that the soviets were trying to convey internally and externally
> chemical/biological solution
both massively unpleasant
Who said what's in the gun :)
Yeah thats why you invent small 2 barrel shotgun with big ammo and carry it all the way into space, while even small makarov pistol would fulfill that role
I imagine you can't take turns easily once there's a hole in the ship.
On the other hand, there are legitimate predators that will hunt and eat humans in Siberia. One team encountered wolves that they had trouble fending off, so they upgraded the pistol to a more formidable shotgun/rifle combo.
Unlikely that a handgun bullet passing through a skull will still have enough velocity to breach the hull? Even if it did, they'd just need to be deliberate with their aim vis-a-vis a steel plate.
Feels a bit excessive. Wolves and brown bears generally avoid humans. Polar bears see us as food but brown bears do not.
26 fatalities due to bear attacks this year: https://tass.ru/obschestvo/28211259 https://eia.media/ru/article/society/6aa937759a7947f75201876... https://www.rbc.ru/society/15/09/2026/6aa937759a7947f7520187... This year bear encounters made headlines in Russia, but the number of fatalities isn't unusual. Records is 80/year in 1985, 1986 and 1996. Brown bears don't see us as food as long as there is some other food available. If food is scarce this year (some random dude on the internet says that there were an early thaw followed by freeze in 2024 that cause pine cone yield in 2026 to fail) they might attack. Either out of desperation or when encountered over a food source (i. e. garbage dump) and mistakes a human for a competitor.
You might be underestimating how remote some Soviet capsules landed. If they overshot their landing site they might be alone in the wilderness for days until rescue teams arrived
"Kosmonaut survives space mission, gets mauled by bear protecting her cub" is not a great headline. Bringing gun was relatively cheap insurance
Might need something to eat if you have to wait a few days for the rescue team to reach you.
Want, not need. A few days without food is quite survivable for a healthy human. And if you get selected for a space flight, you are healthy.
That works if you have absolute trust the rescue team will reach you on schedule. If you are unsure whether few days won't turn into few weeks, or whether there will be a rescue team at all, it's best to secure food and shelter while you still have the energy to do it.
Gun and bear solves that problem too.
"So the bad news is we're responsible for our next meal, but the good news is Ivan's space food farts will lead the meal right to us"
A gun helps with that, too.
> "Kosmonaut survives space mission, gets mauled by bear protecting her cub" is not a great headline.
Let's be honest here: the Soviets were never going to print that anyways.
It would certainly be printed for KPSS Politburo and someone would end up far away in Siberia.
Brown bears attack people in Russia quite frequently [1].
[1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2026/09/11/russia-has-a-bear-pr...
I think it's important not to overgeneralize with something that might potentially kill you. The brown bears in Japan can be deadly. A 380 kg and 2.7-m-tall brown bear, which twice attacked the village of Tomamae, killing 7 people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ussuri_brown_bear#Interactions...
There was a brown (North American Grizzly) predation attack on Nov 2. It’s rare, but not unheard of.
Wolf predation attacks on humans are rare, but far more common than brown bear attacks.
If you’re a pilot or cosmonaut in Siberia, you might not have come down as planned and might be there for a while. An injured, possibly bleeding human could be easy prey. They also have tigers…
What about lunar bears or Saturn bears? Those seem to be heavily armed.
https://youtu.be/pvjgIxuVdo4?is=7sF64RM0qTNqJguw
"Generally" implies there are exceptions. Would hate to be unprepared.
Of course there are exceptions but ticks kill more people than bears and wasps kill way more people.
Ticks and wasps are much, much more common than bears.
Landing in remote part of Siberia is not a typical situation and many typical assumptions do not apply.
It's never excessive to carry a gun.
(P(365))
TSA says no.
Sky marshals have weapons and the TSA allows them.
Being an astronaut means you are trusted with extreme responsibilities and it also means extreme oversight. That's part of why the selection process is so thorough and stress response is so well evaluated before NASA will put a person in space.
Reading the parent's comment pedantically is useless and against this site's guidelines. Reading it more charitably + less literally makes more sense.
There also might be some unfriendly people. Like escaped convicts living in the woods, in the middle of nowhere.
They most certainly have a shank stashed on ISS somewhere
The question is pretty unnecessary given that it references the "ALSEP Flight System Familiarization Manual" [1] which also goes into detail about the purpose of the grenade launcher.
1: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19710014816
Normally, I am glad that Hacker News policies meme references. There is already a reddit.
But I liked this comment be caused of its know your meme link. I learned something.
Well, I learned two things. One, I learned about the meme. Two, I learned not to trust Know Your Meme when it asks me to turn off my adblocker!
> I learned not to trust Know Your Meme when it asks me to turn off my adblocker
Now why on Earth would you comply with that request?!
Because I am sympathetic to the idea that they offer a service paid for by ad revenue. If want the service, it has to be paid for somehow. I don't mind ignoring a few innocuous ads if it means the service remains "free."
yeah but that's the point: 'innocuous ads' have never been tested on the net.
it started as attention seeking eye-knifes, transitioned into the sex sells & hardcore gamer crap, and ended up as 'legal' reverse mortgages/fake charities/malware/data-harvesting.
I think it's safe to say that experiment has been tried.
Yeah, but many humans have a way of thinking this time will be different!
And it never is. Not just about ads, either.
> Two, I learned not to trust Know Your Meme when it asks me to turn off my adblocker!
don't you know that correct way is to treat any "turn off your adblocker" notification as another ad?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Cjo1MWGZg
I refrained from posting a humorous comment otherwise my reply would have been “becase you never know”
Doom 3 motto: "The UAC is making safer worlds through superior firepower."
> We and our (263!!!) partners perform the following based on your settings:
> Use precise geolocation data.
Why does this site need to share my precise geolocation with 263 partners? It's madness.
Now I'm wondering how far a regular military grenade launcher could lauch grenades on the moon
About six times further with zero drag. So 3.6Km, or from Buckingham Palace to St Paul's Cathedral.
We could also say it's about a 15 minute run for a healthy person
Few people run at 13 km/h. Your qualification regarding health is doing a lot of work here.
> Few people run at 13 km/h.
on Earth or on the Moon tho?
Have you ever tried to run on the moon? Bloody difficult.
My (wildly uneducated) guess is that on the moon the real issue is not much acceleration but rather deceleration.
Since there is no atmosphere even a bit further.
That's already what zero drag meant
And the follow-up question: Could it put one into a moon orbit if done right?
There are a few guns that exist that could achieve the necessary velocity (just shy of 4,000 mph) but they’re not handheld. But yes, it would be possible for the right gun to fire a bullet that went around the moon and hit you in the back of the head.
Like it was just a default for the game engine they were using.
> They were part of an active seismic imaging experiment
That is what we call plausible deniability.
(Everyone complaining about this topic inviting jokes, and I’m the first to have posted one. Drama sells more than silly jokes these days.)
I'm sure it's the literal truth.
Never know when you need to seismically image some hostiles for scientific verification of threat elimination.
Probably was both. NASA got a COTS component for their seismologic experiment, saving some time/budget on R&D, and military got to have a grenade launcher tested on the Moon, providing data for whatever "future warfare" programs they were surely running back then.
I think these days we call this "synergy"?
Because the howitzer wouldn't fit?
First thought: were these fragmentation grenades? Second though: nope: not useful for seismic research. Third though: on the moon, thrown fragmentation grenades wouldn't be safe for the thrower.
Without fragmentation, isn't it just going to fly off in one direction with very little damage in any other direction?
All grenades have a casing the "fragments" when they go off, but some use thicker, heavier, scored metal casings to maximize the anti-personel effects of the resulting shrapnel. If you don't want shrapnel, then you make the casing light and arrange for it to break into fewer pieces. So grenades designed to produce more, heavier, sharper fragments are called fragmentation grenades.
To gun down the aliens. The answer is so obvious.
Hmm
> Due to an influx of joke comments, all joke comments on this post will be deleted.
And then they wonder why the whole group is dying
The alternative to me seems to be becoming like a lot of subs on Reddit. It's part of why I like HN so much too, where the signal to noise is so much better.
It’s not you’re just fooled but garbage people with false bravado.
It actually is, on Reddit you need to collapse and scroll down a bit to get a real non-joke answer to something, over here low effort jokes tend to get pushed down.
This was a solved problem by Slashdot decades ago: You introduce a simple tagging system: "Insightful", "informative", "funny", etc. then you let the community tag comments accordingly. Then if you want to filter out jokes, or only see them, you can do so via a simple UI switch.
Agree. I’m here because discussions are not padded left and right with memes and people trying to farm karma with humor tailored for maximum engagement.
Yes its in a death spiral with the new account based infinite scroll feed direction they're going to go in. Soon you'll see ai generated, or reposted, content perfectly tailored to what your unconscious shadow wants to see. Just like the rest of the apps
On reddit there was a ton of censorship.
I dislike censorship in general. Someone else decides whether I may read comment xyz from another human being (assuming it is a human being). I don't want censor-in-the-middle people, be it on HN or reddit. Old reddit was easier to use than HN though; on HN we get time-locked as well as jokes-eliminated. That forces a more serious tone. I do not think it really improves the signal to noise ratio though; usually it means that there are fewer comments in general, including potentially interesting comments. I mean, if HN were serious about joke-censorship, any funny story shared by someone else on HN, even if historically accurate, would also have to be censored. After all you can not evaluate whether a claimed story to be true, to NOT be a "joke in disguise". I could go on and on here, but at the end of the day it just boils down as to whether people like censorship or not. You may reason that you prefer it, to "pre-filter away content you never want to read", such as a joke, but for me, I just dislike that someone else sits in the driver seat and tells me what I am allowed to read and what not. I want to decide on that on my own and I have no issue with "noise ratio"; I don't read all comments anyway, simply due to lack of time. I can only glimpse at some of them. Do you really have the time to go through all comments on each entry on HN?
I dislike (nay, find absurd) the idea that private people should provide for free a platform for random people that they’re not allowed to moderate because "censorship" and "free speech". Also, Reddit is probably the least censored mainstream discussion platform on the open internet, even after expelling all kinds of terrible people.
>Also, Reddit is probably the least censored mainstream discussion platform on the open internet
Absolutely not.
There are instant banned topics on Reddit. AI banned topics site wide. Go write something like “the USA imported the third world” and enjoy your instant 3-day ban.
X however, actually has some semblance of free speech. Like it or not.
Yet, Reddit is alive and SE is... "struggling". Good jokes also carry information, that's why they work.
AI is likely a much bigger cause of struggle than lack of memes/jokes.
Have you read Reddit – where are the good jokes? There is just crap memes
"Reddit" as it's a single forum. Of course if you don't spend time there, I understand this take, but every subreddit is different.
Nicely editorialised there, skipping the second half:
> However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!
On HN many purely jokey comments are often discouraged, being down-voted and getting replies along the lines of "this isn't Reddit". Is HN dying, by the same measure?
I think there’s a distinct difference between a community collectively deprecating something, versus individual members of a community deciding what will and will not be deleted. The first means the comments just fall away, while the second (and a statement of “we will delete your content it is not welcome here”) is actively off-putting not only to those who post that sort of content but others passing by who may be put off posting anything in case they unknowingly “break the rules”.
I don't see a problem there. “I won't post a jokey comment here as it'll just be deleted” is the system working. Much better than what has become the norm elsewhere: “delete if not allowed” which more-often-than-not means “I know this is not what is wanted here, but screw you and your rules”. They have explicitly stated that such content is welcome, just a little further away from the business end.
I was going to say the same. They did follow up with “However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!” but the bolded comment above significantly outweighs this.
At least this earlier comment was deemed relevant and not too jokey:
> Even more fun, Apollo 14 didn't use their grenades, and they are still on the lunar surface.
At least here it's jokes, sometimes they ask people to put valuable comments inside the chat, which is of course not publicly accessible so it's lost
Maybe they are courting the AI agent demographic...
God forbid resource doesn’t turn into a group rewarding regurgitated jokes for internet points, it would insane. Every time I read some serious (ughhrr) book, I write trite irony on margins because I can’t process information like a normal human being anymore without turning everything into shit.
Curious, I checked that person's homepage. Looks about right for the 'no fun allowed' attitude:
https://called2voyage.github.io/