RCgothic

Heads up for big news:

Presumably even in the case where the propellants in Superheavy were well-mixed, the propellants in Starship would not be.

Blast Danger area is specifically delineated in Figure 2-4 of the draft Programatic Environmental Assessment. It roughly corresponds with the outer circle in Tater's second pic. The FAA is aware.

Interesting. Definitely interested in what they bid for these contracts.

Hubble/Polaris hint.

So I downgraded my ambitions from a crewed Moho mission to a crewed Duna mission and spent a lot of today trying and failing. It's just been an exercise in annoying bugs. Bendy unstable joints, poor control authority, extra kerbals sneaking onto landers, systems refusing to work, and cargos refusing to separate from payload bays. Feeling a little dispirited.

I *think* there's probably an arm on the opposite side.

In KSP1 the furthest I ever got was Duna. So today I spent a lot of time trying to arrange a Moho mission. It didn't work. The rocket required for a single launch mission was enormous and exploded on the pad. I either need to do some earth orbit rendezvous or try a much cut-back mission profile.

So I managed to land on the Mün! Generally gameplay so far has been good on my below-minimum spec laptop. Specs are i7-6820HK, GTX980M, 32GB ram, and installed on non-system HDD, getting about 6FPS on the surface of Kerbin, which is enough. Couple of bugs encountered so far: - An engine placed in a payload bay works as an oversize engine skirt, and it flies correctly, but the DV calculations don't work. - This text shouldn't be allowed to fill the whole screen, it's excessive. There's a critical altitude where this is persistent and it just completely obscures the craft. Happens with game paused/unpaused as well. - Patched conics disappeared from the map screen after loading a save. I had to eyeball the trans-kerbin injection burn to return from the Mün. Edit: Also discovered a bug I'd initially assumed was my fault: when reloading a save it displaced my lander's engine off-centre within the payload bay. This made the return flight a bit unstable. I thought I'd just placed it badly, but checking the craft in the VAB it was placed correctly, it's the game that moved it some time after the VAB.

I think any references to "manned" should say "crewed". That's the inclusive language NASA prefers. Noticed it in an early tutorial text.

Despite being partially below minimum spec, I downloaded and installed. KSC screen seems fine, tutorial animations are gorgeous, first rocket flight lesson worked fine, as did a couple of VAB tutorials. I think I'm about 4 or 5 tutorials in in total. Had the settings at minimum and haven't really built a big rocket yet, but I feel that the base behaviour is stable enough to cautiously crank it up a bit. Spec is: GF GTX 980M (below minimum) i7-6820HK (older than minimum but higher spec) 32GB ram. Installed on D: drive HDD (windows is on C: SSD).

I don't see the problem with having thousands of planets if there are thousands of gravitationally rounded objects. But even if a distinction must be drawn, draw it with a criteria that wouldn't exclude the things that are called planets if their orbits were slightly different. Degree of roundedness. Stratification of core. Something intrinsic to the body and not its arbitrary position in space. Pluto would be a planet swapped with Mercury. Earth wouldn't be if transplanted to Pluto's orbit. It's the criterion I object to more than the categorisation.

I don't really care whether Pluto is it isn't a planet, but I think the logic by which Pluto has been declared *not a planet* is unsound. Earth transposed to Pluto's orbit wouldn't have "cleared its neighborhood" because it would still be in the neighborhood of Neptune. A definition that depends on location is a bad definition.

And also Progress MS-21. Two vehicles attached to the ISS have sustained critical "hits". Only prudent to check the other vehicles as well.

At the supposed point of impact on Progress, there's also a lump visible on Soyuz.

As expected, launch license is probably contingent on completion of testing and will be issued shortly thereafter.

I suspect S26 has multiple internal tanks. SpaceX has a tech award from NASA for demonstrating the transfer of cryogenic propellant between tanks on a starship vehicle in orbit. https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/10/16/nasa-selects-companies-to-demonstrate-in-space-refueling-and-propellant-depot-tech/#:~:text=An award to SpaceX worth,cargo to low Earth orbit. S26 would be a logical tech demonstrator. I believe it may also be an HLS milestone to do so. In any case, SpaceX get a cheque from NASA if they send S26 to LEO and move some propellant around.

This feels like one of those XKCD what-ifs where the inevitable hypersonic impact obliterates everything within 100km of the equator.

On consideration, I would have thought 700t-750t wet would have enough DV to fly superheavy back to the launch site from the offshore landing platform with zero payload, so an offshore Mechzilla wouldn't need to hold the full 5000t.

Of course one option is to catch offshore, refill, and then *fly* back to the launch site.

The Troll A platform weighs over a million tonnes with ballast and was mobile prior to installation, so stability with a mere 5000 is not necessarily an insurmountable issue (admittedly that's for a sea floor supported structure). I use it as an example as I was part of its expat community when I was younger.

Both Superheavy and Starship individually could theoretically SSTO, we think, with the right tank and engine configurations. So could F9 stage 1. But the exact payload depends very heavily on the dry mass which isn't precisely known outside SpaceX at this point in development. If superheavy masses 160t, then it's payload SSTO with all sea level engines could be somewhere 5-40t range. No rocket can SSTO and be recovered though, which is what makes it kind of pointless. It will almost always be cheaper to recover the 1st stage and expend a smaller 2nd stage, even for the same payload. Then consider that by expending a 2nd stage you can either massively reduce the size of the first stage needed for the same payload, or loft much more mass at once, and the economics of SSTO are very poor indeed.

I'd have expected 100% throttle. Less just invites gravity losses.

So do they need to do another test? 31 engines is not a full 33.

FIRE! It's still standing