.50calBMG

You keep saying that these designs are for scifi, so that's where the designs will stay. These drives don't exist anywhere but the movies, and the odds of you figuring them out on a game forum are less than miniscule. I don't mean to come across as condescending, but there are much smarter people than us working on these problems, and they admit that we won't have them any time soon.

Would it be possible to implement something that mimics plume-plume interaction with intersecting meshes, kind of like how a few mods do lightning, ie when two meshes overlap that have different origins, they would glow a bit brighter in that intersecting area?

Do we have any up close images of raptor 2 yet?

There is no loophole you could find that any number of substantially smarter people than us haven't. I do not mean to be rude here, but this is not a case of doing something nobody has done yet, it is a case of not understanding physics. What you are describing cannot physically exist, because physics itself does not allow it.

As a Kansas native... I see no flaws Other than the fact that something interesting would start happening here...

So, neutron grew up a bit. 7m core, 7 methalox engines on the first stage, 8 tons of payload, propulsive landing, petal fairing.

Almost makes you think they might be working on something other than lawsuits.

Didn't see this posted yet, C-bass does it again. Even though I am an admittedly harsh critic of SLS, I must admit it is a bit awesome finally seeing it put together.

Spacescifi threads... Always the same titles

Don't know why you needed that extra word at the end, could have stopped at the ellipsis. Blue made some good power points back when I was in high school 7 years ago, but so did virgin, and virgin doesn't parade around acting like they are the best and sueing people if they say otherwise... Or was that the Russians?

You can't call something safer and more reliable if the thing you are comparing it to has never been tried before. And before it gets said that starship has crashed more times than it landed successfully, so did falcon 9 until it didn't, so did airplanes before they didn't. As for leaving the Earth's SOI, that's literally what it is being built to do. Just because it hasn't done it yet doesn't mean it never will. Any plane that gets built sits a bit before it flies for the first time, but it always ends up doing exactly that.

As for something realistic (or at least as realistic as this thread can be), and now that JWST is basically ready, I'd love another cassini style mission around Saturn, but with a longer stay for the lander, or multiple landers on Titan. Otherwise, the Apollo applications program had some pretty cool ideas.

Well, Gamma is certainly one of the prettier SSTOs I've seen. Guess I know what I'm doing when I get off work today.

Flip and burn from the falcon heavy side boosters when they have an RTLS landing. All that complex choreography between them and the core, plus the exhaust plume interaction afterward.