Carl's Word of the Day Calendar moment on The Simpsons is fantastic and seems appropriate here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjsQdV3VDUs

With the moon being what, about a hundred-thousand times further away than ISS when it's overhead, I have a doubt.

It's already tens of thousands of times as far out and realistically will still be hundreds of times as far away as ISS around the time the last population center passes out of view of it at night as it makes its approach.

Heh, I was trying to bust their chops for getting hung up on ‘oracle’ and I guess that upset a bunch of people.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I forget sometimes there are people who actually need the /s to understand sarcasm. That, or I just need to rite betterer.

I assume from your comment that english isn't your first language and before anything else, I'd like to commend you for your clarity. I speak a couple other languages but nowhere near as well as your english.

In english, it's common to use hyperbole or colorful imagery sometimes. In this case, calling someone who made an accurate prediction an 'oracle' is colorful imagery. They're praising the accuracy of a controversial statement made five years ago that ended up being correct. Calling them an 'oracle' in this context is like saying they've exercised super-human prescience (ability to see the future).

This is the kind of thing that wouldn't be obvious to a non-native speaker (or, I suppose, a native speaker who hadn't made it past middle school maybe) so it's completely understandable, I hope my explanation helped.

Could your question be interpreted as "even though it specifically says 5.01 years, what if maybe it's actually 5.00 years and the 1 was added for funsies"?

Ooh, I could see that, autocorrect error instead of unfamiliar term.

/u/phiggy if that's what you meant, then it depends. If it was fired in the direction of travel, it would have an increased apogee but would eventually slow down from atmospheric drag and re-enter but it could take years because it's dense.

If it was fired 'backwards' to the direction of travel, it would probably take a little under an hour to hit the ground assuming it didn't vaporize on re-entry (lead might not fare as well as another bullet materrial? I don't know what they fired). Going from memory, it was Nudelman 37mm that was adapted for use in space and a quick Google says that it had a muzzle velocity of just under 700 m/s. A re-entry burn for a vehicle in LEO is usually like less than half of that so that should be enough to put the perigee inside the atmosphere where it would slow until it was falling straight down at its terminal velocity.

> Two questions: 1. How long would a fired projectile take to reach going level?

What do you mean 'going level'?

> 2. How accurate could the gun be with the 1970s tech vs. 21st century tech?

1970s targeting and markmanship was very, very good. Add in that it could fire repeatedly and you could put a swarm of projectiles on an intercept that could hit a non-maneuvering vehicle far out.