A Fuzzy Velociraptor

The Sovereign Military Order of Malta is a recognized state whIch does not comtain any territory (though they did at one point). I cant imagine them ever recieving any sort of international recognition though.

I finally have power about thirty hours after literally almost everyone else in mainland daytona got power so yay. We did get quite fortunate the storm weakened and turned east.

The SpaceX reusibility and recovery thread a little further down already pretty much serves that purpose.

It's not free but it is nearly so. Generally with space launch vehicles the cost of the propellant would be negligible compared to the cost of all the other excrements that needs to go into the vehicle to make it work. In this case the additional energy to produce the propellant would be the only cost which while they would have to produce more propellant the cost would be so low compared to everything else that it would be essentially "free"

I agree but it is a very pretty video which I think is the point. I imagine the center ones would have to gimbal especially given what they show in their animation. For launch though the system is wide enough that they probably could just throttle steer which is tricky but not undoable or they might just have a couple of the engines on single direction gimbals that would angle them out to the side a bit to generate the needed torques. That is just an image for the sake of being pretty and to make it clear that you're far away from Earth and going further. There is nearly zero reason to gravity assist off the moon since you and the moon are both in the same gravity well (earth) trying to go to something outside the gravity well (mars).

Generally if you are going to deal with lower tolerances you want to have a larger engine so the relative tolerances are closer and use splash plate injector styles. It is fine to build at very small scales but you need to use certain manufacturing techniques.

Honestly your tolerances are so extremely loose that I'm not actually even certain you will be able to get high enthalpy supersonic flow. Now the effects of changing the size of your injector holes will depend on a number of things. The mass-flow rate could increase which would throw off your ratios, or the velocity could decrease which would decrease mixing and burn performance and would likely cause large combustion instabilities and coupling of the combustion with the feed system which is not desirable. If you wanted to maintain your mass flow rate you could want to create some way to regulate/choke the flow up stream though that will cause a severe velocity decrease which may prevent you from actually igniting. You could either try with trial and error or re-evaluate your construction techniques.

Atmospheric drag makes up a significant but still small portion of the losses normally between 200-400 m/s compared to gravity drag which is normally in the range of 1.5-2 km/s.

I'm not disagreeing with you there. I think I assumed you were just oversimplifying things.

They were also forced to use an engine Korolev didn't want to use for political reasons and Korolev was noted as saying it likely wouldn't be until the 10th launch that it would actually work. The flight testing was to debug the system. It does increase the chances of something going wrong, though it also reduces the impact of a failure. The engines themselves were unreliable and had acoustic problems which caused the pogoing that would cause some of the N1 failures. Other vehicles such as Soyuz which starts with 20 nozzles (not including Vernier engines) did not have those issues. However proton, especially in its early life is well noted for suffering from extreme unreliability. As for Black Arrow, the engines were noted to be the most reliable at the time, if not particularly powerful or efficient. Should you design a rocket with as many engines as the N1, no probably not, you're going to make the plumbing and control systems hell and you're probably not going to save any money but having that many engines is not a guarantee for failure.

I think what he means was that the system was not intended to be designed that it would have a high rate of failure like Aquarius.

Many textbooks on the subject will bring up optimization of rocket stages. For optimization it is generally desired for the non-propellant mass ratios to be the same for both craft. In the case that the effective velocity of both stages is the same the required delta V will be the same. This is generally not the case outside of textbooks or craft which operate entirely within one regime. Also there are many situations when designing to maintain similar mass ratios between the two stages may not be possible due to the non-linear weight-volume scaling relationships. However except in extreme circumstances (i.e. hydrolox or electric upper stage or solid lower stages) splitting the delta-V between the stages is normally a good first order approximation.

A full length spike... Clearly such a long thin thing won't have any sort of structural issues or logistical issues, and certainly having so much exposed area in our exhaust stream won't make cooling the thing a problem at all, especially when you consider all the benefits that a full length spike will give over a 23% "isentropic" aerospike like 1-2% higher performance (less if you dump a bit of exhaust into the center of the aerospike stream).

It did throw me off for a moment at the start though I had initially assumed it was hydrolox which turned out to be incorrect.

With the projector inside it wouldnt be hard to tell the projector to project a different image and you could keep it up longer.