/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12028168
Muzak tiem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTH3mq7SsK4

And there's also this very nice render of the SN8 mission profile https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdTYMry7fq0

>>12028168
It's driving me mad knowing some people think space is fake and the earth is flat. It's a complete insult to the millions of engineers since the industrial revolution, whose work culminated into what we have today, which allows these faggots to go on the internet and spout shit like "space is fake!".

>>12028168
>>12028197
>Muh resolution
Anyone got some 4k images of spacex stuff? Got a new monitor and I need adequate wallpaper material.

Has anybody got any high resolution pictures of the Challenger explosion?

I love space!

>>12028312
Baced.

>>12028300
There’s this from Wikipedia.

“Take off your engineer hat and put on your management hat”

Elon and Shotwell need to do a lunar sample return. Just to flex on Jeff Bozo and Roscosmos. They could auction off the moon samples to pay for it. Excpet for the pieces they keep and give to Bozo and Roscosmos.

>>12028541

How would /sci/ design an actual serious shuttle replacement?

Must include:

>reusable spaceplane with 50% greater payload capacity than the original shuttle
>all hardware, including boosters and external tanks must be fully reusable, not just the orbiter
>avoid using solid boosters and fragile ceramic tiles, which each caused 1 fatal shuttle loss
>orbiter's crew compartment must have launch abort capability (or alternatively the entire orbiter if you don't mind fuckhuge abort engines)
>orbiter must have slower landing speed than the shuttle to a point where it can use the vast majority of the world's commercial runways instead of just a few specialized runways for the shuttle

>>12028656
Scaled up venturestar. Strapped to 4 falcon 9 boosters.

>>12028197
OOOOOH I'M HOOOOOPPING.

>>12028230
Same thing with the anti-mask retards. It's an insult to all the health care workers risking their lives to save people from a disease that some people think is fake.

>>12028656
Nuclear Thermal SSTO Sea Dragon

>>12028312
Many such cases!

>>12028230
Don't worry about it so much. That leaves more space for you and me! :D

>>12028583
how the fuck are public space agencies and the bald man of wagecages getting BTFO by an autistic South African so regularly?

>>12028656
Unfortunately cost overrun means that we now require an additional 400 million in funding.

/Sci/ is an important source of employment during a difficult economic year with an election to be held where every vote counts. Our staff are so passionate that they often work for free underscoring it's value to communities.

>>12028656
Starship
>fully reusable
check
>no solid boosters or fragile tiles
check (if you think starship's tiles are fragile, you don't know shit about shuttle)
>launch abort
Starship *is* the launch abort for the stack. If there's a problem with SS after separation, you're way beyond "launch" abort. Ejecting after you've already left most of the atmosphere would be... problematic.
>runways
Who needs runways when you can land on your butt?

>>12028735
go home Karen

>>12028746
Because he's the only one trying, probably. Everything he's doing is the obvious step forward, it's just no one else is willing to do it.

>>12028746
lack of funding for public agencies and Bezos is a fucking snake

>>12028656

coke + mentos boosters

>>12028656
X 3 3 X
3 3 3 3
3 X 3 3

>>12028656

How would retractable canards help landing performance?

>>12028656
Literally a SS with wings and wheels, GG wp

>>12028656
>50% greater payload.
Ok, so about 40 tons theoretical maximum.
>Hardware and boosters must be reusable.
Ok, it will be a vertical stack autogenously pressurized LOX/CH4 core made up of stirr welded stainless steel hoops and large single piece dish-formed bulkheads. Main stack engines will be composed of four LOX/CH4 engines each developing about 625 tons of thrust, two aerodynamic boosters with switchblade wings will each sport an additional two engines of the same variety with crossfeed to the primary tank. They'll be drained quickly and break away to return unpowered to conventional landing strips. The booster core will break away after MECO and use it's remaining propellant for a landing on a static landing pad set up off the coast in international waters. The second stage spacecraft will be more rocket-like with an upturned shovvel shaped nose but larger, fold-out wings. Yaw control will be granted by split control surfaces instead of a single tail surface, eliminating the need for a tail fin. Vacuum optimized LOX/CH4 engines will provide primary propulsion, autogenously pressurized common RCS will provide maneuvering. Reentry will be made by atmo-skipping to bleed off speed during multiple passes.
>orbiter's crew compartment must have abort capability.
The "nose" of the vehicle can be a sepparate spacecraft, this is fundamentally wastefull since you're not working with TPS that's as delicate as glass or Suicide Rocket Boosters, but it can be done, solids or a small internal LPRE set can hurl the capsule free of the rest of the stack.

>>12028656
Why not build a passenger only shuttle to be launched by a Methalox EFT(with engines on) assisted by two reusable side boosters. The shuttle would have two SABRE-like dual mode engines allowing it to land basically anywhere in the world. Bonus points for 15+ passenger capacity.

Will Starlink work on the ISS?

>>12028230
Treat them like the trolls they are.
I do not believe a single one of them buys that crap.

>>12028848
I don't know man, some people literally spend their entire day for years on end arguing for it.

>>12028838
>maximizing the efficiency of the thing than making it even a little bit serviceable.
I honestly hate that kind of mentality in space flight. Where somehow using a rare expensive material is more sensible than scaling up a design using a common cheap material.

Can someone explain to me how the fuck stainless steel could be better than carbon fibre when carbon fibre has 62 times better specific strength than stainless steel?

>>12028890
Temperatures. This was discussed many times already.

>>12028890
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a25953663/elon-musk-spacex-bfr-stainless-steel/

>>12028890
Stainless steel gets stronger at cryogenic temperatures. Carbon fiber composites get weaker and more brittle.
Stainless steel can handle direct exposure to heating north of 800 degrees without any issues. Carbon fiber composites can't go much higher than 100 celsius before starting to break down. This means a vehicle made of steel can use much thinner thermal protection system tiles, and needs nothing at all in some areas, which saves on mass fraction even more.

>>12028890
Stainless steel has the following advantages over carbon fiber
>cheaper
>can handle higher temperatures
>gets stronger at cryogenic temperatures
>easier to build with, less throwaway
>better scalability

Carbon fiber has the following advantages over stainless steel.
>much lighter for a given strength

>>12028868
Even better, when you refuse to believe those people aren't merely pretending it upsets them greatly to not be taken seriously.
They WANT to argue with people they think are brainwashed, or rile people for fun if they're trolling, and denying them satisfaction neuters them and their argument.

>>12028890
Because stainless will work out fine when really thin whereas carbon steel will last for 2 weeks at a couple of millimeters before mother nature eats through it. Carbon steel is also rather soft.
There's a reason carbon steel bulkheads on ships are inches thick.

>>12028833
I think it's too high up.

>>12028936
>carbon steel
He said carbon fiber, as in the carbon fiber composites they were planning on building Starship out of before they switched to using metal (stainless steel in particular). Obviously carbon steel would be full retard for building a rocket.

>>12028988
Ah shit, my apologies. I'm tired and half reading.

>>12028656
I would pull a convenient anti-gravity engine out of my ass.

The right stuff is being remade into a new Disney mini series.
What the FUCK

>>12029057
Indian rockets are all methalox, I assume?

Nufag
Why is spacex so ahead of everyone else, especially in pricing? ULA charges like 100 million more for launches and Musk is claiming once raptor engines are operational launches will cost as little as 2 million. How is anyone supposed to compete with that? The USA government keeps handing out contracts to ULA but Spacex is way better in terms of cost.

>>12028230
Their descendants should be prohibited from going to future space colonies.

Imagime bashing a proposed tech/science for most of your life and then benefiting from it after it becomes reality.

Spaceflight will never be a thing and this new spacerace will die if we don't have infrastructure in space.

We need spaceports, space shipyards, sky hooks, refueling stations.

We currently have 0 space infrastructure built or planned to be built.
The ISS is just a science station, it has no use for any space business.

>>12028765
>>12029080
It mostly boils down to reusable rockets, no one else has an effective reusable rocket.

>>12029087
The US was fuck all ~300 years ago.
Things can change quick

>>12029080
SpaceX's development process is very different from the rest of the industry. There's alot of details about it, but the core of SpaceX's engineering philosophy is "test as you fly". While riskier depending on the situation, it allows for incredibly fast development times. Compare this to NASA's engineering philosophy of being initially study and research heavy before making a prototype that is close to the final product. NASA's way is much safer and generates more confident looks than SpaceX's way, but is much slower.

There's also general complacency in the private sector of space flight due to it being tied to government contracts, and government programs tend to stagnate economies that they operate in.

>>12029087
You can't have infrastructure in space without a good cheap launch vehicle. Once the vehicle is done, then the rest is easy.

>>12029080
As said; reusability.
Also SpaceX was getting subsidies along their CEO being a madman who didn't care about going bankrupt. It help a lot when you aren't asked to play safe and stick to "proven method".

>>12028890
Pick up Ashby Engineering Materials and read through it it is a standard introduction to materials for engineers.Composites are nowhere near the tensile strength of fibers themselves and whole range of failure modes of them are a pain to figure out compared to metals also your iteration is long because lead time for composites is way longer than a bunch of rolls of SS

>>12029103
The way Musk reacted during the 2008 recession is still the most based thing he's ever done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6kb5YYVges
>here's your lunar lander bro

>>12029115
I hope the final product has everything neatly labeled like a political cartoon too.

>>12029115
That will be 10 billion plus tip

>>12029057
>that scalloped profile
"We made our vehicles mass fraction shitty on purpose, as a joke"

The Senate Launch System continues to impress by now maybe not even being able to launch one of the few missions guarenteed to it.
https://spacenews.com/compatibility-issue-adds-new-wrinkle-to-europa-clipper-launch-vehicle-selection/

What can this thing do besides funnel money into D*pot Mans pockets?

>>12029080
SpaceX's products are what you get if you chase practicality and low cost instead of chasing mass reduction and propulsion performance at any cost.
SpaceX's method of reusability would be unthinkable for any organization so heavily steeped in the mantra of maximizing payload per launch as NASA, because a Falcon 9 in recovery mode can only put up about 60% of the mass that an expendable Falcon 9 can. For SpaceX however the solution is obvious, just size your rocket so that the 40% payload reduction doesn't hurt your ability to provide services, and take over the market with low cost launches.

>>12028197
That landing will shock normies

>>12029131
>"We made our vehicles mass fraction shitty on purpose, as a joke"
I can't wait until we reach that point in space vehicle design. Tired of seeing hyper optimal spheres and trusses.

>>12029149
Radiation shielding and structural integrity will play their parts to some degree anyway. But there will be much more variety among space-born vehicles, indeed.

>>12029087
>We need spaceports, space shipyards, sky hooks, refueling stations.
America didn't have rail, roads, farms, blacksmiths, or anything else until the people across the pond had the ships necessary to get to America.

In the same way, once we have a ~$50 per kg launch option with a fleet of vehicles that can place a million tons into orbit per year, THEN we can worry about the easy shit like "how to weld together steel beams while in Earth orbit", "how to construct Lunar electromagnetic launch systems and space elevators", "how to build very large pressurized habitable space stations", etc. Those are all things that we could EASILY figure out, so long as we have the mass budgets and mass throughput to orbit that Starship and vehicles like it can provide.

>>12029057
imagine the smell.
At least it has onboard methane production.

>>12028656
A crew starship and a cargo starship like we're on track to get. If you decided it was better to combine crew and cargo in the same flight like the shuttle, make an orbital constructor starship with both a life support section and a cargo section, canadarm, etc.

Not sure what kind of abort is possible on starship without adding so much weight you gimp it.

>runways
lol

>>12029107
Elon is pretty based, yeah he's an autistic weirdo but he does what he wants and makes choices that make sense. Love him or hate him, if Elon didn't exist neither would SpaceX, and we'd all still be sitting around with our thumbs up our asses with the biggest upcoming events in spaceflight being the eventual launch of SLS and Ariane 6.

>>12028890
carbon fiber is for ricing automobiles. If you're going to space you use a real material that can handle extreme heat and cold

>>12029163
>we'd all still be sitting around with our thumbs up our asses with the biggest upcoming events in spaceflight being the eventual launch of SLS and Ariane 6.
That would be incredibly depressing. What's worse is that the slow rate of development would seem normal and fine.

>>12029158
>America didn't have rail, roads, farms, blacksmiths, or anything else until the people across the pond had the ships necessary to get to America.
Except the people who got to America could live in a hovel made of sticks and shit for a time if need be.

>>12029163
Truly our reality sucks but it could definitely always be worse

>>12029115
>game changing
what the fuck, stop calling fucking everything a game changer, it's a meaningless fucking buzzword and fucking every space company uses it way too fucking much (except SpaceX actually, I can't think of a single example of Elon or anyone at SpaceX calling any of their stuff a game changer, not even Starship).

>>12029135
Hopefully it can RUD on the pad

>>12029185
Probably because spacex isnt game changing. It's what the game should've been for decades now. God bless em, but screw the rest of the industry for being too afraid to make any progress.

>>12029135
>Such issues, industry sources say, likely involve the environment the spacecraft would experience during launch, such as vibrations.
Imagine designing a spacecraft meant to explore far away worlds to be so fragile that it can't handle a little shake up.

>>12029149
Trusses can be hot too,anon.

>>12029149
We will definitely get there once we're scooting around in the asteroid belt, going from rock to rock. Hell even chemical-only designs could be waaay off of a typical propellant mass fraction, because in the asteroid belt just having 500 m/s of delta V in total could let you visit, land on, sample, and launch off of a dozen different asteroids, and still have enough gas to get back to your home orbital habitat. The asteroid belt has such low dV requirements to get around that literal shitbuckets built by amateurs in their space-garages that are propelled by boiling water using an electric element powered by some scrap solar panels would be viable.
To get the same level of design freedom in interplanetary space, or even really around the systems of moons surrounding the gas giants etc, you probably need a low level direct fusion thruster at least. The better the fusion engines the less you need to care about propellant mass fraction.
Interstellar vehicles will always be hyper optimized for performance unless we figure out some kind of new physics like a way to manipulate and annihilate dark matter with itself to release energy, since that could allow any vehicle that can accelerate to a few thousand km/s to switch on a kind of dark matter bussard ramjet and keep accelerating basically for free.

>>12029187
please not, I wanna see hi-res pictures of europa and see if theres lotsa liquid water under the ice.

ENCELADUS FUCKING WHEN

>>12029107
What did he do? Double down and win?

>>12029219
When we can send encels there.

>>12028265

>>12029163
>Love him or hate him, if Elon didn't exist neither would SpaceX
That's objectively true but the people that hate him ignore all of that; they think he's stealing talent and taking all the credit. (Although in reality nothing could be farther from the truth. Every time SpaceX does something cool he congratulates the team without taking any credit.)
To them, Musk will always be evil because of the bad words he said and the fact that his family was wealthy.
They don't understand that you need a dedicated, driven person to inspire other people to work hard.

/rant

>>12029219
Somewhere in this decade, maybe early twenty thirties.

Is Liquid Nitrogen cheap enough to justify it's use in an Electrodeless Lorenz Force thruster?

>>12029163
Ariane 6 was a response to falcon9. Likely if SpaceX didnt exist, Ariane 5 would be in use for another 10-20 years. Status quo was changed due to SpaceX.

>>12029090
IIRC his original goal was to send a plant to Mars on someone else's rocket to encourage colonization, but the rockets all sucked so badly he was better off building his own.

>>12029291
It's literally cold air so I assume it's pretty cheap.

>>12029292
Baguette 6 is still made obsolete by the Falcons.

>>12029221
Pretty much yeah. He had the decision to drop spacex and save tesla. Instead said fuck it, kept both, and the rest is history.

Here comes some more delays at Boca Chica.

>>12029369
We must undertake and accomplish before the decade is out the great task of defeating weather once and for all.

>>12029369
Thats fine, static/hop is saturday/sunday/monday. Likely they'll be done by then.

>>12029381
Is there any chance we can nuke some ocean currents to prevent these storms from forming or something?

>>12029389
ULA will just build more hurricane factories

A couple of threads ago we were talking about the difference between scaling a plane vs. scaling a rocket. I had one more question:
Assuming Elon had the final version of 9m Starship, and had time to fix all the kinks and make a couple hundred launches, how hard then would it be to scale that up to 18m? I hope it’s easy bc if Musk actually makes it to Mars I don’t see how he could oversee new starship developments all the way from another planet

TSLA just hit $2000.

Why didn't you listen, /sfg/ bros? You could have gotten enough money to go to Mars, now you'll be lucky to get a job on the asteroid belt emptying out the AI sex robot cum tank.

Wow, Elon's wealth may reach $100B today for the first time:
Tesla $372B x 0.21 = $78B
SpaceX $46B x 0.5 = $23B

~$100B

>>12029219
somewhere in the 2030s, after europe clipper and probably next mission after dragonfly

>>12029415
Stocks and space aren't real

>>12029415
that's what happens when your stalk is a bubble

>>12029389
All efforts so far have proved ineffective.
Perhaps carpetbomb-nuking the sea?

>Blue origin talks again after like 4 months
>Its for a shitty expendable lander mockup

>>12028197
This is going to be ridiculously epic if they can pull it off

>>12029181
>Except the people who got to America could live in a hovel made of sticks and shit for a time if need be.
And the people who go to Mars will be able to just live in the vehicles they landed in until they can build the equivalent of log cabins (that is to say, a significant step up from a hovel covered in sticks). It's not an issue, especially if you just say fuck it and use overkill in place of min-maxing.

>>12029436
Honk honk

>>12028765
>no one else is willing to do it.
Was/is there a conspiracy to hold us back? I've read stuff from globohomos seriously arguing that scientific progress must be drastically slowed down until h̶u̶m̶a̶n̶i̶t̶y̶ ̶h̶a̶s̶ ̶l̶e̶a̶r̶n̶t̶ ̶h̶o̶w̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶l̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶h̶a̶r̶m̶o̶n̶y̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶l̶a̶n̶e̶t̶ they've figured out how to take away any and all chances of escape

>>12029436
shitty or not it's a good idea to give nasa a test article to play with. maybe they will provide good feedback for blue origin's final design.

>>12029146
Normies don’t pay enough attention to this type of stuff.

It would need to be a landing with humans onboard returning from a mission to get the normies to care

>>12029217
If SLS blows up, or if they can't figure out a way to damped the vibrations or reinforce Europa Clipper enough to handle them and it can't be launched on SLS anyway, then EC will be launched by something else (Falcon Heavy, Vulcan Heavy perhaps, maybe even an early Starship).

How many Gs will a fusion engine create? Can we survive the Gs inside a fusion spaceship?

>>12028168
Mods continue to breathe new life into this game fucking amazing

>>12029471
It's probably simpler than that; crabs in a bucket. The world is already enormous and terrifyingly complex, but at least it's fixed and finite. The little dictators inside most normies, the kind of people to get government jobs or push their views on social media, are terrified of a future where it's impossible to control everyone. Space is one such future. I'm almost certain it's just a case of stunted development, in the end.

>>12029497
waterfall configs for all of ROEngines WHEN

>>12029243
>They don't understand that you need a dedicated, driven person to inspire other people to work hard.
[rant]
Elon is not very close of that and he does take credit, he isn't too stupid to forget to congratulate the team for PR but as the CEO and thanks to many other factors anything SpaceX become his doing.
Even among his fan he is disliked for blurting stupid things at the wrong times (remember the pedo submarine thing?), plus other shitty decision or things like not caring for covid. He was removed from TESLA as CEO and thanks to that it's finally turning a profit.
You could replace him by anyone taking responsibility for putting money in these engineers work. Because unlike what some shills think he is neither a Tony Stark nor a good manager.

It's annoying how normies have been brainwashed into thinking that being rich mean you are an Ubermensch unless proven otherwise.
[/rant]

Don't get me wrong. Oldspace, redtape, corruption and NASA being nothing more than lobbies handjobs for PR stunt is far worse.
But Elon is a liability that is keeping down what SpaceX could be doing. They would certainly have the Normies more exited if instead of a madman promoting another Marsbase some other PR guy was promoting space project that are just as shiny but actually feasible.

>>12028741
Not if enough of them vote. Democracy was a mistake.

>>12029207
this

>>12029093
>The US was fuck all ~300 years ago.
>Things can change quick
It's shorter than that even - the UK was the most powerful nation on earth almost within living memory

>>12029512
Also if you haven't tried it out yet

http://spaceengine.org/shipeditor/

it's addicting

>>12029087
>The ISS is just a science station, it has no use for any space business.
What if a lemonade stand was installed?

>>12029504

Mars base is feasible and necessary, it wasn't done until now because 80% of the United States are low UQ mongrels.

The fact there is no money in return for colonizing Mars shows that Musk is a righteous dedicated person.

>>12029517
what a shame it never got updated with new parts/modules

>>12029504
>creator was predicted by Von Braun himself

wut

>>12028656
I would build a very large railgun launch ramp.

>>12029528
As foretold

>>12029535
And on the cover, a familiar-looking starship.

>>12029525
>>12029517
wait there is a new version but it doesn't seem to work for me it just shows a static page but I can see new modules and parts on the left

http://spaceengine.org/shipeditor2/

is this working for anyone?

>>12029535
Didn't mean to quote you railgun-anon.

Jupiter and the whole jovian system are the most underrated things in our entire solar system.

The Jovian System will be wat better for colonies and far more populated than Mars.

>>12029495
there are hundreds of different "fusion engine" designs. be more specific.

>>12029542
Oh boy, if Musk cared as little as Trump for rational thinking he would actually claim this to be prescience.

https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/195913-18x-19x-110x-orbital-decay-updated/
oh shit bros, it's not on ckan yet but orbital decay has been updated for the newer versions finally

>>12028197
>>12029461
I want to ride that

>>12029553
jovian system will be persued by spacex after mars is self sustaining and after they have a large base on ceres, so probably 2080s at the earliest

>>12029495
Irrelevant since you don't provide have enough information for a meaningful answer.
You need the thrust of your engine and the mass of your spaceship with and without propellant.

Plus thrust isn't the most important parameter. We will easily prefer a spaceship that accelerate slowly but is so efficient in propellant that it will reach higher velocity on the long run and get there faster using less fuel.

>>12029144
It was also a case of "Space is so expensive that there aren't many launches, so if we made them reusable it wouldn't be any cheaper!" Never mind that cheaper launches means opening up the market to missions that wouldn't be possible at the higher prices.
Then they launch their own comms constellation at a rate where a single launch is almost as many satellites as previous entire constellations, targeting more than two orders of magnitude over said previous constellations.

>>12028197
which building do you think it's gonna slam into on the landing
I'm betting the high bay

>>12029601
Against all odds, a rural chinese village.

hypergolic starship WHEN

how bad is boiloff with kerolox for deep space shit

>>12029219
If they launched something literally today (or whenever the launch window reopens, whatever) we'd still need to wait about 6 or 7 years just for the probe to coast out to Saturn. Cassini did a Jupiter gravity assist I think, which could have got it to Saturn a bit faster, but waiting for Jupiter and Saturn to line up for a J-S gravity assist would probably end up taking as long/longer than just launching directly to Saturn on a slower trajectory.

>>12029291
LN2 is cheap as fuck. In fact most places that sell it in any sort of volume make their money just by charging rent for the dewar flask the nitrogen comes bottled inside.

>>12029292
>Ariane 6 was a response to falcon9
True enough, though really it was a response to Falcon 9 v1.0, with the square engine arrangement and shorter tanks etc. Modern Falcon 9 kicks the shit out of what Ariane 6 could even hope to be.

>>12029548
nevermind online version doesnt work but the offline version posted on here works for anyone who cares

http://forum.spaceengine.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=174&start=45

>>12029616
Chinese will be on it. Imagine a fleet of Starships landing on rural villages. Double score points for Uyghurs'.

>>12029495
Early fusion engines will likely be just more powerful and efficient ion engines,so the problem is surviving the lack of acceleration unless you have a centrifuge or something.

>>12029700
The frogs are most likely working on a answer to modern falcon 9.
The frogs are top dog in ESA, so they need to keep being most relevant&important compared to the other ESA Nations..

>>12029712
Landing on Uyghurs only harms their organ harvesting supply, so they'll avoid that.

>>12029397
Well for one thing they'd have several legs up on where they are now; Plumbing systems would have been proven out, TPS would be a known factor, Raptors would be much more evolved than they are now, flaps and legs would be on fourth or fifth generation of upgrades/refinements, the alloys and welding methods for building the Starship itself would be very well pinned down, etc etc. At that starting point, scaling up to twice the diameter pretty much only involves figuring out the larger thrust structures needed for the bigger number of engines, getting the steel thicknesses right, and maybe some changes to the flaps and other bits since the 18m Starship would have a different fineness ratio and this different aerodynamics during bellyflop reentry.

In summary, once 9m Starship has flown hundreds of times, development of 18m Starship would be relatively fast, low risk, and easy, and would simply need to wait for some justification to exist for the investment in creating it.

>>12029743
Shit, you're absolutely right.

>>12029412
>TSLA just hit $2000.
Jesus christ, didn't people get stinky with Elon just a few months back because he told them TSLA was being overvalued at ~$700?

>>12029517
Nah,running on a potato pc :(

brazillian mars colony when?

>>12029784
Brazilian colony in Venezuela when
c'mon you could take 'em, those guys are pussies

How close are we to a functioning reactionless drive in the near future? Hard mode: don’t source your answer from popsci.

>>12029812
>How close are we to a functioning reactionless drive in the near future?
When we have so much free energy that we can use photon drives with ease.

>>12029812
0%

>>12029784
A brazilian? How much is a brazilian?

>>12029812
>How close are we to
Exactly one universe away.
You just need to go to a different one where physics allows free energy, time travel as well as violations of Newtons laws and thermodynamics.

Static fire when? Hop when?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH IM GONNNAAA HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPPPPPPPPPP

>>12029433
Ocean currents exist because of thermal gradients in the water. Dropping nukes will only increase the energy of those currents and increase storm strength.
If you want to decrease the energy available to feed storms you need to lay reflective sheets on the water to bounce solar energy back into space and prevent the water from warming up. Obviously this has other implications beyond just reducing storms; the water will be colder, and therefore flow differently while also dissolving more oxygen from the atmosphere, which will produce a unique ecological environment that has never existed on Earth before (the closest analog would be arctic waters with seasonal ice coverage, except with much warmer waters and tropical solar intensity where it isn't being shaded out). We'd need to have a large industry set up both to manufacture and deploy new floating shaders as well as collect and recycle old shaders that have been damaged and/or colonized by organisms.

The only truly low-maintenance, extreme-brute-force method I can think of that would reduce tropical storm intensity would be to build large artificial islands with tall enough terrain that they would act as a a physical barrier to storms, causing air currents blowing over them to rise in altitude and dump out most of their moisture before flowing back down the other side with a greatly reduced relative humidity.

>>12029482
It's possible he meant normies that buy Earth-to-Earth tickets, or who are even thinking about going to space some day.

>>12029759
>didn't people get stinky with Elon just a few months back
Yes but rightfully so because he crashed his own stock to 'prove' he doesn't care about money while still remaining a billionaire. It was stupid but I didn't sell because of it. Elon has been better lately at not getting into dumb spats on Twitter, maybe because he has less to prove now with the success his companies have had.

Aerojet Rocketdyne finally going to innovate?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimvinoski/2020/08/20/aerojet-rocketdyne-and-velo3d-are-taking-metal-3-d-printing-to-a-whole-new-level/#609f3a196864

>>12029873
did someone say build another RL10?
pretty sure someone said build another RL10

>>12029812
A few thousand years maybe for a vacuum energy drive.

redpill me on centaur

>>12029495
>How many Gs will a fusion engine create? Can we survive the Gs inside a fusion spaceship?
Fusion is efficient, not powerful. Chemical rockets are powerful by default, unless you make them very tiny.
Fusion rockets can in theory be powerful as well as efficient, but it's an extremely hard problem to crack, and also by "powerful" I really mean "approaches a thrust to weight ratio of 1 in Earth gravity".
Also, while the thrust to weight ratio of your engine is something that you generally want to be as high as possible, the thrust to weight ratio of your entire vehicle is something that you almost never want to be able to go above 5 or so. This is for two basic reasons; first off, it's hard to design something that has a decently light structural mass ratio that can also take high accelerations, and, if your final acceleration at burnout with a highly efficient engine is getting very high, that usually means that you're wasting a lot of energy to accelerate a very small payload.
With highly efficient engines, say of around 50,000 Isp (compared to chemicals which practically top out at around 480 Isp), you can easily design single-stage vehicles that have a delta V budget of about 340,000 m/s with a propellant mass fraction of just 50%. To put that into perspective, the first stage of a Falcon 9 is approximately 90% propellant by mass, and it can do all kinds of flips and shit and land back on a barge in rough seas. Achieving a 50% mass fraction would be trivial, even if fusion engines turned out to be very heavy (they certainly will, at least to start). That dV budget is enough to go from low Earth orbit to a low Lunar orbit and back 86 times in a row, without ever refueling.
Delta V has nothing to do with TWR, though. That fusion rocket with 340 km/s in the tanks may only accelerate at 0.5 m/s^2, and take a long time to execute burns of thousands of meters per second of velocity. That would matter less the further away the destination was.

>>12029504
>But Elon is a liability that is keeping down what SpaceX could be doing.
I could not disagree more. I think if Elon was a goodey-twoshoes who played nice all the time it would hold SpaceX back far more, potential for increased funding be damned. Funding does not correlate with results. Drive correlates with results, and Elon has some fanatical drive to see SpaceX succeed.

>>12029513
>It's shorter than that even - the UK was the most powerful nation on earth almost within living memory
Nobody ever EVER forget how fast and easy it is to backslide into irrelevance, PLEASE.

>>12029553
Maybe, but the Jovian system is out of reach using chemical propulsion, unfortunately. No use doing it the hard way when there's lower hanging fruit, especially when that lower hanging fruit enables you to reach higher in the first place.

Elon is going to dump all his TSLA stock to fund Mars, right?

>>12029967
He doesn't need to when Starlink will be funneling multiple billion a year directly into Spacex

>>12028265

>>12029593
That's broken logic, but I won't disagree that it's what they were spouting. Everyone was sitting in a comfortable position where the status quo never changed and the public perception of things was that the technology they had was already the best of the best and couldn't be significantly improved along those same lines anyway, so it didn't matter that nothing new was being seriously pursued.
Along comes SpaceX who grabs the spotlight and shines it on a rapidly evolving family of rocket vehicles that look pretty much just like a classic expendable rocket, except it's cheaper, it starts flying really often, and they start landing and reusing booster cores. They have cameras on every stage, they live stream their launches, everything they make looks clean and cool, people are enthusiastic, it's great.
Now the comfortable giants are getting their lunches stolen, they're starting to look old, slow, expensive, wasteful. Their launch streams suck ass, using graphics from the 90's and cameras from the 2000's. People sound either bored or phony. Some of those old space programs straight up shift into denial, saying SpaceX can't possibly be making money, it's all a song and dance, they're just being subsidized by the government to try to kill off competition from international launch vehicles, etc.
Now SpaceX is building Starship, using radically new and different technology, and it's looking like the old giants aren't even trying to be relevant anymore.

>>12029495
Probably less than 1 at the start, as the engine will demand enormous amounts of energy just to keep itself running, we're not going to be racing around the solar system so fast you could knock yourself out if you accidentally punch the accelerator or anything like you'd see in a sci-fi show.
You can "afterburn" some fusion torch drives though by dumping water (or some other reaction mass, but water is easy) doped with a ferromagnetic element into the plasma jet of your drive. This will of course mean your ship is hurling out more mass, and will thus accelerate it at a faster rate, however obviously this extra mass of propellant will reduce the overall speed of your drive plume's exhaust, and thus reduce the overall efficiency of your drive.
This isn't really a useful feature for anything but a warship, you can give yourself simulated gravity by using large counter-rotating habitat rings, and even if your TWR is something tiny like .1, you'll end up there faster than a ship accelerating with a TWR of 1 who has to stop ten times earlier than you and spend most of the trip coasting.

This is why it would be so useful to override the brainlet environmentalists and start sending large power producing nuclear reactors to space, because you could start using upscaled magnetoplasma rockets which, while they have absolutely pathetic TWRs, have massive ISPs. It doesn't matter if a chemical rocket can put out as much thrust in a few minutes as an MPD puts out in a week if the MPD can spend weeks on end continuously running to accelerate and more weeks later to decelerate again.

>>12029967
No, Mars won't need that much money for decades and SpaceX will soon be very profitable by itself. He has no reason to sell most of his shares.

He also doesn't have to sell any shares to fund Mars in the event SpaceX cannot pay for it, he can use some of his TSLA shares as collateral on a loan. He already does this for personal expenses because he knows the future value of the shares will be more than the interest.

>>12029995
>Boing! sweety, it's 2020, time for your stock market flattening!
>"Yes Elon."

>>12029616
unironically, there's no real restriction on propellant choice when it comes to building a reusable TSTO. Hypergolics may be shitty to work with if you're a technician, but from the standpoint of the vehicle they aren't anything species, apart from burning very rapidly and cleanly. You can do staged combustion with hypergolics, in fact you can even do FFSC, and you gain the advantage of not having the baggage of cryogenics plus an additional uptick in overall propellant density. Oh, and hypergolics do actually get decent enough efficiency, definitely north of 320 Isp in vacuum. I think there's a meme that hypergolics get really shitty performance because all anyone knows about are the AJ-10 engines from the 60's, which are a pressure-fed design and thus have garbage chamber pressure leading to trash Isp even with big fuck off nozzles.

HYDROLOX STARSHIP WHEN

pressure fed helium rockets when?

>>12030034
Go away.

>>12029232
>>12029994
>>12029996
>>12029997
>>12030000
>>12030005

Awww yeah, thanks sempai

if you think about it, hydrolox rockets are just really big showerheads

>>12030042
Lol.

>>12029728
Weren't they looking at some kind of methalox gas generator engine similar to Merlin meant to power a kind of Falcon 9 clone? I can't remember the names. Apparently though that new engine hasn't even got past single-component testing yet, so they're a ways off no matter what, and Starship is coming fast.

>>12030054
The engine is Prometheus, and the rocket is the RETALT 1.

>>12030061
Can't say I like the interstage/aerofins/aerobrakes/whatever the hell that's supposed to be.

>>12029547
>>12029551
It would be called the VLRR, (pronounced velour). VLRR stands for Very Large Railgun Ramp. It'd have cool red racing stripes along the sides of the launch tube and a 50's aircraft aesthetic.

>>12029812
>How close are we to a functioning reactionless drive in the near future?
Near future? No.

>>12030061
>RETALT 1
Copying SpaceX seems pretty retalted...

>>12029873
>>12029883
>Our newest evolution of the RL-10 sets a new standard in rocket engine design by utilizing highly advanced 3D printing technology to expediate manufacturing time from 36 months to just 30 months and reduce total unit cost by nearly $10,000

>>12029928
Has a very good propellant volume to structural mass ratio and if it used methalox instead of hydrolox with an expander cycle methalox engine (~360 Isp in vacuum) it would probably get as much if not more delta V.

>>12030034
more like, hydrolox starship WHY?

>>12030061
It's so sad to watch them try to stay relevant in such a meaningless way. If they ever did decide to build this powerpoint rocket (which they won't), it'd be like 10 years behind the F9 by the time it flew.

>>12030006
I’m having trouble understanding how a fusion engine could be bad. Hate to ask this, but can you further explain it in terms of someone who just started playing KSP?

>>12030125
At least it's better than staying the course of old expendable rockets.

>>12029851
sun shields, anon
just shade the storm

>>12030006
>This isn't really a useful feature for anything but a warship
Actually it'd be useful for any vehicle that is making trips between already-established settlements in space, because it lets you take greater advantage of the energy of your fusion fuel by using a much cheaper and more abundant reaction mass.
For example, a hauler moving between icy moons around Jupiter could do it purely using fusion fuel at ultra high Isp and (for example) perform 100 back-and-forth flights on 10 tons of deuterium. However, if at every stop it could fill up with 1000 tons of water, then with the same ten tons of fusion fuel it can perform 1000 flights, effectively multiplying its fuel economy by ten. In terms of true Isp the use of water propellant would drastically reduce efficiency, but in terms of Isp based on the fusion fuel supply, it actually goes UP drastically.
This is basically how we treat jet engines when we calculate Isp, by looking at the thrust produced by the engine (as it consumes tons of air and kilograms of fuel) and ignoring the air mass. The effective exhaust velocity of high bypass jet engines can be greater than 1000 km/s, but the true exhaust velocity is only a few hundred meters per second. For a fusion drive using inert, cheap propellant, the mixture ratio you'd choose is simple enough to determine; you just add as much water as it takes to reduce the true exhaust velocity no further than the point at which the vehicle's delta V budget (before the water runs out) is enough to get to the next water refilling station. Ie, if your vehicle needs to expend 5 km/s to get to the next water refill station, you meter the water flow rate so that your water tank will run out just as you're expending your last few m/s of that 5 km/s budget.

>>12030006
I too wish to become the fastest skeleton in the universe

>>12030026
NASA jusrt posted this.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/tdm/green/gpim-nears-completion.html

>>12030061
That unfolding interstage would be a giant pain in the ass to engineer, and would definitely end up being heavier than a dedicated single-piece interstage tube combined with deploy-able grid fins. Hell, they could just go with deployable flaps instead of fins and still save weight.

I'm starting to miss the early days of Falcon landings and the Falcon Heavy launches with all the uncertainty and SpaceXers cheering and USA-ing.

>>12030175
isn't the purpose of the grid fins to prevent roll?

>>12030136
Except they're doing exactly that, while giving lip service to reusability that they'll never actually develop.

>>12030178

>>12030180
They do pitch and yaw control together with the nitrogen cold thrusters.

>>12030197
*cold gas

>>12030197
yes, that's important too and is an easy function to add, but the first role they were designed for and performed was keeping the rocket from spinning itself to pieces

>fuck around with mods a little bit
>now procedural parts isn't loading for fuck knows what reason
aaaaaaaaaaa

>>12030128
>I’m having trouble understanding how a fusion engine could be bad.
Define 'bad', do you mean low thrust?
What fusion gets you is a very high energy exhaust propellant, which translates to high exhaust velocity and therefore high efficiency. Even if the first fusion engines can only produce ion-drive levels of thrust, they'd still be great because they'd be more efficient than ion drives, and they'd be self-powering. That is to say, a fusion engine is powered by its propellant, rather than requiring large amounts of power to be dumped into it like an electric engine. This means that without solar panels or anything more than a small continuous power supply to run electronics, a fusion rocket/probe could zip around the solar system pretty handily.
The reason that fusion rockets will probably get low thrust is because thrust from a rocket is related both to the energy of the exhaust and to the mass flow rate of the exhaust; you get more thrust the harder you throw things, and the more things you throw in the same amount of time. Chemical engines have comparatively low exhaust energy but 'throw' hundreds of kilograms, even thousands of kilograms of mass per second, resulting in very high thrust. Because of how momentum works, doubling the amount of mass you throw at a time doubles the thrust, and doubling the velocity at which you throw a mass LESS than doubles the thrust. This means that even at the exhaust velocity of a fusion engine, a chemical engine is going to have an easier time generating a lot of thrust, just for not as long a time with a given mass of propellant.
Fusion engines will probably only sip a few grams of fusion fuel per second at full burn, producing a little bit of highly efficient thrust. What's more, fusion engines are going to be great big heavy things, simply because it's hard to make a machine that can sustain a fusion reaction at any kind of scale other than "large".

>the virgin shield

>>12030170
I guess all I can really say about the 'green' propellant is that, being a monopropellant, it can't really be used in any engine cycle other than pressure-fed, which mean's it's off the table for anything bigger than spacecraft maneuvering thrusters

>>12030184
God I wish a sperg autist literal gigachad

>THE CHAD SPEAR

>>12030206
>but the first role they were designed for and performed was keeping the rocket from spinning itself to pieces
Nah, the grid fins have had pitch, yaw, and roll authority from the beginning. They weren't designed to control roll any more than they were designed to control any other axis.

>>12030230
>It's much more interstellar-medio-dynamic

>>12030226
excuse me?

>>12030240
the idea is particles/debris whatever would ricochet, because this thing is meant to be moving FAST between systems and a puny virgin shield wouldn't cut it

>>12029563
Certainly

>>12030230
LONGER

>>12030252
>ricochet
no
>sloped armor increasing effective thickness
yes

>>12030178
The goal was always to become boring so that they can move on to bigger and better things. Now Starship is the vehicle for that excitement.

>>12030270
>rule of cool
yes

>>12030224
It was explicitly targeted at replacing crazy toxic hypergolics in current RCS, so mission accomplished. For any spacecraft that doesn't run its main engines and RCS on the same propellants (read: everything but Starship), that's going to make rapid reuse a lot easier and cheaper.

urine RCS when?

>>12030170
>NH3OHNO3
>OHNO

>>12030297
>entirely composed of nitrogen and hydrogen
at least there's no nitrogen/nitrogen bonds
ah, that second group is NO3, not another ammonia group

>>12030252
Doesn't really matter if you have a conical shield or not actually, anything you impact has ten thousand times more kinetic energy per gram than the highest yield chemical explosives have as chemical potential energy. Your best bet would actually be to arrange a swarm of thin sheets of foil in a skinny cloud a million kilometers long in front of your spacecraft, which would convert any incoming bits of debris into a thin and rapidly expanding cloud of plasma by the time it reached your ship.

>>12030305
Yeah, it's a salt in liquid form. [NH3OH][NO3]

>>12030312
what does it decompose into?
N2 and OH?

>>12030216
>Because of how momentum works, doubling the amount of mass you throw at a time doubles the thrust, and doubling the velocity at which you throw a mass LESS than doubles the thrust.
Does this mean it’s more efficient to make a larger (chemical) engine that throws out more mass at a given time, as opposed to trying to make the original engine throw out the same stuff at a faster rate?

>>12030318
less efficient, more effective

>>12030315
That is seemingly quite complicated from what old papers I can find.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02701522

>>12030336
But it seems end result is N2O + H2O.

Penal astronauts sent to dangerous missions to the Jovian system , yes or no?

>>12030339
Mind you, this is for burning. Not for passing through a catalyst. They're currently seeking scholarly papers for publication in April 2021 regard HAN decomposition passing through a catalyst.

>>12030284
SpaceX's Falcon 9 uses nitrogen gas as its monopropellant, the ASCENT propellant isn't going to make reuse of any launch vehicle stages any easier or faster, it MAY help to make some capsule spacecrafts easier to use and it will simplify propellant handling and loading operations for future single-use spacecraft.
I guess I should clarify that I was originally talking about hypergolics-propelled Starship-style vehicles and their feasibility, which is real. They wouldn't be better than methalox style, especially not in terms of cost, but they'd work. Hell, even something like a gas-generator powered kerolox propelled Starship style vehicle would work, it just wouldn't work as well as FFSC powered methalox Starship.
Hydrolox Starship would be kinda shitty because it'd need to be very very voluminous in order to get the same propellant mass, giving it a much higher structural mass, and it's a lot more difficult to get high thrust out of a hydrolox engine because of the volumetric flow rates needed to get high mass flow rates.

>>12030355
I was more thinking of the Shuttle and X-37 which need major hazmat protocols to clear RCS propellant on the runway.

>>12030358
don't they use bipropellant RCS?

>>12030361
Yes, hypergolics.

>>12030364
this green high performance monopropellant doesn't help that in any way

>>12030361
MMH/N2O4
Cancer in two jars.

>>12030318
Throwing out more mass is just increasing thrust output. If you throw out twice as much mass and get twice the thrust, your efficiency is exactly equal. If you throw out twice the mass and get less than twice the thrust, you're losing efficiency.
Oh, and if you make an engine throw out mass faster than before but keep the amount of mass being thrown per second the same, you are increasing efficiency without reducing mass flow rate, which means you're actually increasing efficiency AND thrust. An example of this in real life is when a rocket engine is upgraded to get a higher chamber pressure: higher pressure equals a greater pressure gradient from inside vs outside the engine, which means more mass acceleration as the exhaust expands, which means exhaust velocity goes up, which means efficiency goes up. Furthermore, the way to increase chamber pressure is to increase the mass of propellant being burned per second, which means thrust is increasing while efficiency is increasing, too. This is why Raptor shattering chamber pressure records is such a big deal, and it's also why low pressure rocket combustion cycles tend to have shitty performance (the worst is the pressure fed cycle, where chamber pressures usually don't exceed a few hundred psi, or less than ten bar).

>>12030377
yeah, I don't particularly care which variety of hydrazine or assorted oxides of nitrogen they use for it, when you say "hypergolic bipropellant RCS" everybody knows what you're talking about

>>12030368
I wouldn't call it "green". I'd call it less cancerous.

>>12030342
No, penal astronauts are given supervised busywork so they cannot pose a risk to the group, and if they are deemed slippery or dangerous enough they get recycled for their proteins and other useful nutrients.

>>12029728
>>12030054
Thing is having worked with Frogs in Brussels I can tell you the SpaceX approach is the absolute antithesis of Frog business culture. There's endless levels of out and out bullshit, empty prognostication, horse trading, and mutual backscratching before they'll get anywhere near making a decision - and when they do you can pretty much guarantee there will be no comprehensible logic attached to it whatsoever, other than that that involves brown envelopes and sexual favours. The crusty old French boss of this company I worked for arranged a business trip to Finland with the apparent intent of getting our large breasted young Jewish colleague to take a 'proper' sauna with him, and to hopefully reveal her gigantic milkers in all their magnificence. Almost comical how they live up to the stereotypes

>tfw cant decide if I want to keep playing GPP or start new game on RSS even though current game is still just barely getting to the stage of manned missions outside of low orbit
help bros

>>12030342
Definitely not if they're obliged to do so.

>>12030386
>when you say "hypergolic bipropellant RCS" everybody knows what you're talking about
B2H6/N2O4

>>12030407
Is your GPP at RSS scale? If so, definitely just stick with it. If not, then eeeeh maybe.

>>12030006
couldn't a NSWR drive with 90% enrichment get close to constant 1g acceleration through at least the part of the solar system known to have planets

>>12028402 Lnding speed doesn't win wars now, does it?

>>12030426
yeah it's at real scale, it does have a little bit of jank with RO/RP1 though
fuck it i'm at least gonna try making a RSS install and see how it works

>>12030431
Sure, but then you have a continuous fission detonation inside your ship.

>>12030448
so?

>>12030450
so neutron embrittlement means that's probably going to require frequent repairs

gigaheavy sea launch when?

>>12030420
is boron hydride really hypergolic with oxides of nitrogen
fuck you

>>12030061
Now where have I seen this before?

>>12030453
idc

>>12030476
>Pentaborane(9) and diborane + nitrogen tetroxide – Pentaborane(9), a so-called Zip fuel, was used in combination with nitrogen tetroxide by the Soviet RD-270M rocket engine.
Yes, diborane is hypergolic with nitrogen tetroxide

>>12030492
Too bad for you, physics doesn't care what you think.

>>12030503
>Soviet RD-270M rocket engine
>specific impulse at sea level 340 seconds
>ten seconds higher than Raptor
based soviet madmen

green rocket flames WHEN

>>12030516
I mean you could dump any number of chemicals into a rocket plume to color it for aesthetic purposes, but why would you want to do that?

>>12030542
>the switch from UDMH to pentaborane created immense toxicity problems but increased the Isp of the engine by 42 seconds

>>12030309
or we could scoop

>>12030507
I DONT FUCKING CARE WHAT SOME NAZI PHYSICS SAY!

>>12029695
>>12029291
I just looked it up, it's about 15 cents a litre which is the same as free when factored into the cost of a rocket.

>>12030555

>>12029928
It's what you get when you fuck a horse

>>12030570
but what if the horse does the fucking

>>12030570
I's a real kick, you say.

>>12030061
>When you copy your friend's homework and change one thing so it looks like it's your own

>>12030215
Tweakscale fucks it up.

okay bros, who should I larp as for my new RSS game and where should I stage my development space center until I start doing stuff where inclination matters

>>12030586
Location: KSC
Larp: Nazis won WW2 and took the east coast states

>>12028265
12m starship is the sexiest

>>12030586
also using RSS launch site expansion, so I can put the center basically fucking anywhere on the planet

>>12030595
Yes, but 18 meter Starship will become its own animal, and may return to space whale

>>12028265
I found this one here, 1440p, not strictly spacex, but its bretty cool.

>>12030595
Would makes more sense to hide those engines under a skirt and extend the fuselage down so the legs don't need to be so fuckhueg

>>12030590
Why are incels today so obsessed with Nazis?

>>12030613
Fine, Japs won WW2 and took over the world, happy?

>>12030572
Then the top half is horse and bottom is human.

How da fuck am I supposed to hunt and eat wild game on Mars?

>>12030610
yeah but it actually looks like a spaceship rather than a fucking tintin rocket

>>12030640
Grow your own meat and play a VR hunting game. Hunting games are already getting extremely good, they're probably be more fun than real life hunting soon.

>>12030640
read The Most Dangerous Game

>>12030613
why do stuck up people use "incel" for anybody they don't like?

>>12030668
The other old standbys weren't working anymore.

>>12030599
Due to the way that volume cubes with each linear increase in an external dimension, 18m Starship will need to have legs that are absolutely fuckhuge compared to 9m Starship's.

>>12030550
Supposedly the USAF/NRO TSTO used some sort of ultra-toxic Boron fuel to get into orbit.

I've also heard that the SR-71's successor uses it as well.

>>12030550
>>the switch from UDMH to pentaborane created immense toxicity problems
>the switch FROM UDMH
>created immense toxicity problems
Good lord.

>>12030675
Or, you know, just scale in only two dimensions, diameter, not length.

hey bros where do I buy some triethylborane and triethylaluminum???

>>12030700
Try Ethel's Aluminum, it's on the Jersey Turnpike.

>>12030707
thanks man

>>12030184
>my ancestor

>>12030184
>Those pumps
>Still shorter then the engineers
JUST

All memes aside nice pic

>>12030733
i-it's just the helmets......

>>12030693
Boranated fuels make UDMH look like kerosene by comparison.

>>12028868
>some people literally spend their entire day for years on end arguing for it.
That is part of the definition of a troll, yeah?

>>12030682
It's not fuel, it's an ignition agent to help light up the engines, the fuel they use is too stable to easily ignite with just a spark plug, so they use a pyrophoric chemical charge instead. Raptor used it too I believe, which is why in some of the early test footage you'd see it produce an initial puff of green-tinged flame.

FLUORINE
POWERED
FIRST
STAGES

Can you wank the cock in space?

The fact that we have no planned fusion rockets really show how fucked we are as a species.

>>12029115
What's with everybody wantiong to land on the moon with a tall skinny lander all of sudden? Disregard "Well, looks like it fell over!" You still are making problems for yourself getting crew, samples and equipment up and down all the time.

Wide and low, baby.

>>12030792
>fusion rockets
pointless

>>12030659
Fake shit will never be better than real life.

>>12029146
They'll just say it's CGI. To be fair, it does look like CGI.

>>12030787
In zero gravity?
Yes.
Impregnating?
probably.

>>12030797
Well, for the contractor clique it's because stacks are what they know, they're lazy, and they don't want to innovate when they aren't being paid to. For something more exotic like MoonShip, it's because that's the constraint you have to work in to land a modified Starship upper stage on the Moon, can't really make it much wider. I'm thinking some more widely spaced legs will probably eventually be conceded, as opposed to the admittedly very nice and sleek but very stubby legs on the current concept design.

>>12030761
>The propellant mix that would produce the greatest specific impulse for a rocket motor is sometimes given as oxygen difluoride and pentaborane
>Above 30 °C it can form explosive concentration of vapors with air. Its vapors are heavier than air. It is pyrophoric—can ignite spontaneously in contact with air, when even slightly impure. It can also readily form shock sensitive explosive compounds, and reacts violently with some fire suppressants, notably with halocarbons and water. It is highly toxic and symptoms of lower-level exposure may occur with up to 48 hours delay. Its acute toxicity is comparable to some nerve agents.
>Occupational exposure limits for pentaborane set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health stand at 0.005 ppm (0.01 mg/m3) over an eight-hour time-weighted average, with a short-term exposure limit of 0.015 ppm (0.03 mg/m3).[12] The acute toxicity of pentaborane has caused it to be considered immediately dangerous to life and health, with a limit set at 1 ppm.[13]
>mfw

Paging the "things I won't work with" chemist guy.

>>12030803
>Rockets 100X more powerful than the rockets we currently have are pointless

oh nononono the state of humans

>>12030810
Id like to see those BFR-style landing legs built on to the side. They look like aerodynamic surfaces, but the whole thing opens up at the bottom and the legs deploy

>>12029389
>Giant storm which is basically a huge heat engine is coming
>Guys! Let's add more heat!

>>12030086
Can we name it the "Nimbus?" Please?

>Reaches Mars in 30 days

Really destroy the hopes and dreams of worthless chemical rocket fags

>>12030821
>Oxygen Difluoride
>Pentaborane
ONE, something's got to RUD
TWO, something's got to RUD
THREE, something's got to RUD
FOUR, something's got to...
RUUUD!

>>12030640
Live in the ventilation system and eat humans who aren't meeting their production quotas

>>12030640
Terraform Mariner Valley and release wild game into it. For bonus points, put cameras everywhere, ban the use of firearms, and live stream the fun.

>>12030810
You still have your crew stuck way up in the... well... in the lack-of-air.

>>12030682
TEA-TEB is the chemical mixture they used to ignite the SR-71s engines, because it's storeable at room temperature and it ignites instantly on contact with air. It makes a pretty bad fuel in and of itself though because it's got high molecular weight and not the greatest energy density, plus the production of aluminum and boron oxides causes literal sandblasting of whatever parts the exhaust blows over, which is why only little bits of it are used when igniting anything.

>>12030863
The fusion engine is real. You've seen it down at Michoud. We're building the core stage. We have all the engines done, ready to be put on the test stand at Stennis...

>>12030881
What the fuck are you talking about?

>>12030768
>>12030878

I wasn't talking about the SR-71.

>>12030881
The best pasta, by far

>>12030886
shut the fuck up nerd sperg

>>12030886
>What the fuck are you talking about?
Memeing on Charles Bolden's hilariously-painful-in-hindsight interview where he said that Falcon Heavy might happen one day, but SLS is real and here now.

>>12030797
It's Shelby's fault again.
>can't fit a wide and low design in SLS Block 1 or Vulcan+Centaur
>can't do in-orbit assembly because otherwise you can just Orbital Yeet Train the thing, which threatens the existence of SLS
Moonship is the only remotely justifiable current design because that's just how the rocket is shaped.

>>12030806
Stay on earth then and have fun with your LMAO one deer a year.

>>12030863
>*teleports behind you with constant 6kN thrust at >400km/s Ve*

>>12030896
>t. nigger
>>12030899
But Falcon Heavy is here? I'm pretty sure it launched way before than SLS

>>12030907
Deer will always be around to hunt unless modern society reintroduces wolves.

>>12030910
He said it in 2014. It became an /sfg/ meme because he was so catastrophically wrong in hindsight. Here's the original source.

https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/organizations/nasa/nasa-administrator-bolden-visits-sls-manufacturing-facility-in-new-orleans/

>>12030768
Raptor used to use it, and now uses spark-torch ignition, where basically a big spark plug lights a methalox torch that blasts into the chamber that needs to be ignited.
Merlin 1D still uses TEA-TEB to ignite, so we still get the green flash.

>>12030910
>But Falcon Heavy is here?
The quote was from 2014.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/rocket-scientist-says-that-boeing-squelched-work-on-propellant-depots/
>"Let's be very honest again," Bolden said in a 2014 interview. "We don't have a commercially available heavy lift vehicle. Falcon 9 Heavy may someday come about. It's on the drawing board right now. SLS is real. You've seen it down at Michoud. We're building the core stage. We have all the engines done, ready to be put on the test stand at Stennis... I don't see any hardware for a Falcon 9 Heavy, except that he's going to take three Falcon 9s and put them together and that becomes the Heavy. It's not that easy in rocketry."

>I'm pretty sure it launched way before than SLS
And the SLS has been fairly close to being ready for a while, but slow contractors and poor management from NASA has resulted in a propellant tank taking nearly a decade to make. Plus, Bolden had to save some face.

>>12030792
>planned fusion rockets
If we don't even know how to get a Q>1 fusion reactor running yet, why would we bother planning for fusion rockets? That'd be like pre-industrial people worrying about how they're gonna use internal combustion engines to power airplanes.

>>12030921
>And the SLS has been fairly close to being ready for a while, but slow contractors and poor management from NASA has resulted in a propellant tank taking nearly a decade to make. Plus, Bolden had to save some face.

Don't forget King Nigger. If it wasn't for his active disinterest in spaceflight we could have flown SLS in 2016 and landed on the moon in time for the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.

>>12030513
That doesn't seem right, there's no way a hydrazine/DNTO engine is beating a liquid methane/lox one.

>>12030890
I know. However, TEA-TEB won't ever be used as a main fuel on any vehicle regardless, because of the reasons I described. It works well for igniting engines that use oxygen as their oxidizer and nothing more.

>>12030918
I liked the green puff, but to be fair you couldn't pay me enough money to play around with TEATEB, so a less hazardous system for ignition is nice.

>>12030918
>Raptor is an AMERICAN INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE WITH SPARK PLUGS
>Starship has six Raptors and is therefore a V6
We're literally hotrodding our way to Mars, boys.

>>12030420
>b2h6
throwback to orgo 1 hydroboration

>>12030821
>tfw I just reaized that a pentaborane/fluorine (pentaborofluor?) rocket engine would sidestep the biggest drawback of boranes as propellants, being the fact that boron oxide is a refractory solid, because boron trifluoride is a gas with a boiling point of -100 celsius and hydrogen fluoride is also a gas with a boiling point of -83 celsius
We need ultra toxic pentaborane fueled fluorine oxidized FFSC engines and we need them now

>>12030955
What magic space mythril do you make them out of to avoid slagging themselves?

>>12030960
304L

>>12030825
>fusion
>powerful
Don't make the mistake of confusing efficiency or fuel energy density with power output, you scum.

>>12030863
>my propulsion system works on paper therefore drop everything and build it or you're a poopyface
Why don't you just go ahead and build that fusion engine and use its exhaust to boil a steam kettle to generate power? Governments around the world will be sucking your cock as sensually as they can in order to get access to your blueprints.

>>12030937
It wasn't burning hydrazine, it was burning pentaborane. The switch to pentaborane increased the Isp by 40 seconds compared to the hydrazine fuel.

>>12030948
Each Raptor actually has six spark-torch igniters, two for the fuel rich preburner, two for the oxygen rich preburner, and two for the main combustion chamber. Therefore, Raptor itself is a V6, and Starship is either a V36 or a V6 if you wanna count each main combustion chamber as like a cylinder in an ICE.

>>12030960
ceramics, specifically fluoride ceramics. Fluorine can't burn what's already been burned by fluorine.

Guys im kinda retarded.
Is the ISS leak important at all?

Random question, but I need help. What is the theoretical lower limit of lightning? What is the minimum amount of charge needed for two plates to discharge energy?

>>12031004
It's been leaking for like a year, so no.

A friend claimed that a possible grand solar minimum in the coming decades would lead to levels of cosmic rays that would endanger human spaceflight. Is he full of shit?

>>12030996
Thanks, Elon.

>>12030668
Because /pol/ is full of virgin manchildren NPCs who mindlessly believe whatever drivel is pushed to them by whoever is shilling on that board.

>>12030668
Idpol obsessed freaks are absolutely mentally deranged and all they've been taught by the people who programmed them is how to create slurs. When one starts to get stale they just jump to the next one, creating a stream of insufferable meaningless buzzwords. Give it another year and incel will be replaced by something else equally meaningless.

>>12031059
Yeah he's full of shit. We're in the grand minimum RIGHT NOW and spaceflight still works.

god damn 16k RSS + RSSVE + TUFX looks fucking nice
now imagine if KSP devs actually had the foresight to make it possible to implement axial tilts in the game without the fucking meme hack that RSS uses of just tilting the whole solar system 23 degrees since you can't tilt planets

>>12030792
This is like Grug in 60,000 BC saying we’re doomed because we don’t have an Alderson disk yet

>>12031209
>without the fucking meme hack that RSS uses of just tilting the whole solar system 23 degrees since you can't tilt planets
wtf lol

>>12030874
Actual Yuatja culture when?

>>12030874
Based, if you're just pouring atmosphere into the valley you can actually pump up the oxygen content above normal too. Hyperoxic low gravity game hunting, nothing more complex than a simple straight bow or atlatl.

Shelby has done NOTHING wrong.

ahem
fuck uranus and FUCK VENUS

>>12030933
Lmao no SLS is a rehash of Constellation and that was a failure as well. It's the senators trying to keep shuttle contractors alive

There is something freaky going on in Venus.

The fact that we have yet to explore it properly is baffling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQqShj6leq8

>>12030921
>We have all the engines done
...because we cheated and are going to use the old Shuttle engines, and expend them too!
>>12030955
>hydrogen fluoride
I hope you didn't plan on reusing those engine bells...

Our Solar System is one freaky place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPe5hs3yYqs&t=136s

>>12031261
>The fact that we have yet to explore it properly is baffling
It's so hot and high pressure on the surface that electronics don't work. There's no place harder to explore in space other than the inside of a gas giant or the sun.

>>12031209
aaaahhhhh im gonna coom bros

>>12031269

Venus is not a gas giant and the toxicity of that planet is extremely overrated.

We can land drones quite easily there.

>>12029115
FUCK NO god damn it why do we keep giving money to these fucking people. Oh you think Bezos teaming up with boing would do anything except inflate prices & shit out on innovation

>>12031216
>ywn be a hunter gatherer tribesman unknowingly living on the surface of an Alderson disk in the year 600,000 CE

>>12031241
I guess his hand in the whole keeping-public-and-military-spaceflight-technology-stagnant-for-decades thing was kinda involved in Elon's decision to start up SpaceX, and was a factor in SpaceX needing to run fast and lean in order to survive, which led to the modern day where we sit on the precipice of a radical and complete shift in how space technology is viewed by the public and an utter overhaul of the space economy, so I guess Shelby's influence isn't 100% bad?

>tfw Biden is president and defunds everything NASA has planned, specially moon and Mars missions

>Bigelow Aerospace has gone silent since last year
>They said they would launch their private inflatable station this year

lmao

>>12031301
They don't really exist anymore.

https://spacenews.com/bigelow-aerospace-lays-off-entire-workforce/

>>12031263
>I hope you didn't plan on reusing those engine bells
HF is only corrosive if mixed with water, and even then it's not nearly as difficult to resist as fluorine itself.
It's still a much better option to try to handle for a reusable rocket burning boranes than any oxidizer with oxygen in it. This is because boron trioxide is a hard solid at temperatures below 450 celsius.

>>12031287
That’s a real interesting idea. Primitives living on or even evolving on some artificial megastructure and being unaware or considering it mundane. Wish I was a caveman sometimes.

>>12031034
Do they normally hunker down in the russian module tho? I'm scared ISS is dying

>>12031274
He just said that there's no place harder to explore EXCEPT for the gas giants, ie they are harder. He didn't say Venus was a gas giant.

Toxicity doesn't matter, even the pressure doesn't matter. The temperature however will kill any electronics on board as soon as they warm up, which means you either need some kind of cooling unit that can have a hot side of over a thousand degrees to be able to maintain sub-100 degree celsius temperatures inside a well insulated box, as well as a high temperature power supply that can run your cooling unit, OR you can design a probe that uses a large thermal mass to allow it to do short ~1 hour trips tot he surface before flying back up to the upper atmosphere to cool off, OR invent completely new, high temperature semiconductor circuits using new materials and processes for etching those transistor circuits into existence.

Exploring the surface of Venus is an extremely tough problem.

>>12031313
>I'm scared ISS is dying
It's going to die someday, anon, whether we decide to kill it or not. It's only a machine, and no matter how many billions you throw at it it's getting older every year and eventually it'll just be too cracked and moldy to fix anymore. It won't matter soon anyway because NASA will be able to just buy a customized spacelab-outfitted Starship, launch it in one piece, and have a single module station that has more habitable volume than the entire ISS for not even $100 million in total (launch costs plus internal outfitting costs plus straight up buying the vehicle permanently from SpaceX).

>>12030640
You can cannibalize the commies

>>12031271
What mod makes the parts shiny like that?

>>12031313
They're going into the Russian module so they can try to pinpoint the location of the leak, not because it poses an immediate risk.

>>12031356
I dunno what the orgiinal implementation was, but procedural parts/SSTU/etc has recolor menu on the parts and thats just using default steel texture

>>12031357
Soo shut em all off and start em one by one to figure which ones fucked kinda process?

>>12031287
I was thinking how cool it would be to have a run of the mill medieval fantasy story with dragons and dungeons and feuding families and such but then have the sudden reveal that the fantasy takes place on another planet and the protagonist’s “magic” is millennia old technology that has been left there by the first settlers.

A story set with native Americans or something would be kinda cool if there was an ending reveal that they’re living on a Ringworld, and it’s really set half a million years into the future.

aaaaahhhhhh I still can't fucking decide what launch site I want to use bros

>>12031363
Yea. I'm not sure exactly what their procedure is, but I imagine it involves sealing off sections and watching the pressures to narrow down which module is leaking. From there maybe they could set up cameras and puff water vapor or something into the air to see where it flows.
Once it's pinpointed they have an epoxy that they use to plug the leak. They used it on that leaky Soyuz a while back.

>>12031368
I've always wanted a story like this.

>>12031372
Near or on the equator.

>>12031368
You mean Star Wars, but going past the barrier where you don't have gay elves, other generic fantasy shit and a general medieval monotony and discomfort in general? Or more like that Predators movie, just replacing the cool soldiers and predators with gay elves and dragons and shit?

No offense dude, but I can't stand generic fantasy and hope the whole medieval genre just dies out in favour for industrialpunk sci fi-fantasy.

>>12031415
I think he means like having the dragons and shit be synths, and the protagonists finding shit like robots and drones as the film progresses.

Give it to me straight SFG. Is it possible to make a space opera with FTL and Aliens while obeying the laws of physics, or are even Wormholes impossible?

If so, is Space Opera still possible without FTL?

>>12031425
no

yes

>>12031425
I mean I guess wormholes are theoretically possible

>>12031423
I always figured it would be neat if near the end the Protagonists run into the still-functioning AI of one of the first colony ships, who explains that thousands of years ago shit happened and humanity colonized this world, but the civilization eventually collapsed and fragmented, reverting to pre-industrial technology

>>12031431
The star trek twilight zone

>optimal space center locations are all in humid tropical shitholes instead of anywhere nice
bros this is not FAIR

>>12031436
>tfw no antarctic launch complex

>>12031309
Read Ringworld.

>>12031436
Somalia would be an ideal launch site and it's a desert tropical shithole.

>>12031425
If those guys in Nebraska claiming to have an Alcubierre drive are right, then wormholes are possible.

>>12031423
I didn't read any of that, I think he means fantasy fantasy dragons elves (...) the 2001 monkey scene.

>>12031464
>If those guys in Nebraska claiming to have an Alcubierre drive are right

Say what? Also [x] Doubt

>>12031464
>if

>>12031464
><> J—————

>>12031478
https://qed-ne.com

They're claiming 15N/kW.

>>12031425
FTL via warp drives is technically possible as far as we know. We're just a long way off from acutally having the tech to do it.