Off to the voting.

I will be voting for tricycles.

in reference to why we build these things, rather than tricycles. I Don't. But, unfortunately, I do know why the other one was charred, and what it was doing in (and out) of the atmosphere.

Ballistics is the physics of throwing stuff, and figuring out where it would land. We call them ballistic missiles because the rocket motor just burns long enough to get the thing going, and then it throws a warhead, like a ball. Naturally, when you want to throw a nuclear weapon, you need to know with minute accuracy where it is going to land...because if you don't you might miss Mrs. Pavlova's Kindergarten class, and accidentally hit the submarine pens next door. So the throwers do lots of math. You have to know how fast it will go when it is thrown. Many people know that F=ma...the force doing the throwing equals the mass of the missile, times it's acceleration. But with a missile, the mass is changing...the fuel is burning up. With changing mass, you have changing acceleration, and you need Differential Equations to figure out how fast the warhead will go when it is thrown. Diff-E-Qs as they are known, start with calculus, and then add some mystery ingredients that I have long forgotten. Then, you have to figure that not only is the missile, and the warhead moving...but the Earth too. That means the launch point is moving, and the target is moving, and not in the same direction, since their paths are curved. So you do some more math, called orbital mechanics. Throw in some basic gravitational acceleration (Newton figuring out how hard the apple would hit him on the head), and then account for the fact that part of the time the missile we be in the atmosphere, but then it will fly OUT of it...and sail along through space for a while. Then it will fall back in, going very fast, and get charred. Sometimes it chars unevenly, and that throws it off course, so they do more maths to make it fall at an angle that cooks it more evenly. After figuring all that out, you can predict where the warhead will land. I had to do this in school. I got an A. I promptly forgot most of it.

The people who do it for real, though, they have to go out and test it. Hecate, you mentioned the crazies at Vandenburg, recently. They launch these sorts of things (with the actual nuclear material removed), out over the Pacific, to some tiny islands where island people used to live, and see if they can hit their huts. If not, they adjust their math. And do it again. I never had to pay attention to that (except once, to fly a missile crew out to Vandenburg for a test. We stood around laughing at them, and said, "Gee, if their missiles are so cool, why are they afraid to fly them?") Usually, I only had to be concerned with the Russians, and their Evil Empire, and when they tested THEIR missiles. They would try to drop them on the Kamchatka Peninsula. I would sit in Fairbanks, Alaska, waiting to be told to go, with a tanker full of gas. Another airplane, that looked like a tanker, but was filled with cameras and optics and sensors and electronic widgets, sat on an island out in the Aleutians, waiting to go. When we were told to go, they hurried and flew out to Kamchatka, and burned lots of gas. I chased them, with more gas for them. We would meet, they would watch for missiles, and try to see how accurate the Russian missiles were, and I would wait until they could stop watching long enough to get some gas. We called this mission "Alpha Long"...which got mentioned in an earlier thread.

We also had to watch for the Russian fighters. They really didn't like us watching their tests. Both of our airplanes were made from modified Boeing 707s. That's why when a Korean Airlines 707 got lost and flew over the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Russian fighters shot it down. The Koreans weren't watching.

Needless to say, tricycles are much safer.