/sci/ - Science & Math

>>14518380
It's immensely exploitable and vastly modular in context. Hell, in theory, you can eschew the dual redundant airlocks on HLS Starship entirely and basically create an I design and keep scaling it out. Ever single I is either a Starship or a HLS Starship. It becomes a fully modular station that shares power and pressure across the full breadth of the structure. You could write into the software of the vehicle to essentially act like scaled nodes in a cluster that can increase and decrease in size on an as-needed basis. Over time, each HLS Starship that is attached to this station can become a specialized vessel and you can reconfigure the station relative to how things are setup over time. You'd just close a hatch, pressurize one side of the airlock and remove it from the other, have that one Starship decouple and then using maneuvering thrusters, move that ship to another part of the station, redock it and you're back in business.
The best part is that each HLS Starship comes with THREE docking ports/berth options, so really, the option for station scalability here is even bigger than what the picture would imply. Best of all. It would increase mission, lifecycle, and crew safety redundancy practically a 100 fold without any additional design complexity. If something goes wrong, the crew of this station can retreat to the nearest HLS Starship, decouple from their hub segment and float away from the station and dock with each other in the same orbit, but distanced from said station and the two or more ships can then do fuel transfers until you have sufficient dV for the Earth return for the entire crew complement. At point which the empty HLS lifeboats are kept in that same orbit, just empty, and the fully packed lifeboats engage in their Moon escape burns and back to LEO they go where other crew vessels are waiting in rescue to return said crew back to the Earth's surface.