totm nov 2023 SpaceX Discussion Thread

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Can't speak for Mike... But for me it's just the ladder and it's instability.  I'm fine on the roof and walking beams, etc.  Standing on the precipice of any rock or mountain is easy - as is climbing the cliff.  The trouble is getting from the top of the ladder onto whatever and then getting back onto it later. 

Would almost be easier to shimmy up a standpipe. 

It makes no sense 

[tater]

22 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Can't speak for Mike... But for me it's just the ladder and it's instability.  I'm fine on the roof and walking beams, etc.  Standing on the precipice of any rock or mountain is easy - as is climbing the cliff.  The trouble is getting from the top of the ladder onto whatever and then getting back onto it later. 

Would almost be easier to shimmy up a standpipe. 

It makes no sense 

I'm similar with leaning over edges—even ones I just climbed up. Makes no sense to me... I'm also similarly not fond of ladders above some height (like tall, extension ladders). they feel too wobbly. I remember being on a knife edge ridge, and I was fine (400ft exposure on 1 side, more than that on the other) until the swifts (I think) flew by making a sound a little like ripping paper, then all of a sudden I envisioned a beak in the side of my head and me tipping over and I got creeped out, lol.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

@taterGrin!  I once told a class that even if a bee stings them while rappelling that they never release their brake hand while on rappel. 

Then, while on the line and demonstrating the 'L' shaped position... I got attacked by 3 yellow jackets and slapped them off my right leg. 

Complete 'Wiley Coyote' moment. 

 

 

 

 

 

(I was lead, with no one at the bottom - thankfully I had also set up a prusik and only fell 15 feet - into the nest.  A single 70' rappel later I was in the water and trying to hold my breath with a machine-gun heart rate!) 

Surviving is one of the greatest experiences of life! 

Edited August 8, 2021 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[tater]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Surviving is one of the greatest experiences of life! 

Any landing you walk away from...

 

Spoiler

I was in Nepal, and my buddy and I looked at the typical trekking route and decided that a straight line between the 2 villages was preferable. At some point we hit a cliff. It was less than 1 pitch, and was not technical, so up I went—with my full pack on. That part I had not really thought about (I was like 22), I had never climbed with my 5000+ cubic inch pack on before. I got high enough that falling was not really an option, and decided the better part of valor required dumping my pack. I gain the top, and walked over til I found a better route, then climbed down so my buddy only had to take the pack laterally along the base and not hump my pack up. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. We were a solid week's walk from a road at the time.

 

Edited August 8, 2021 by tater

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

45 minutes ago, tater said:

(I was like 22

We are all immortal at that age. 

 

45 minutes ago, tater said:

We were a solid week's walk from a road at the time.

The best tales are those you live to tell! 

[Beccab]

Well made simulation of an optimized Starship cargo launch

[kerbiloid]

On 8/6/2021 at 4:11 PM, Rakaydos said:

*whine* but it's not 12m diamiter carbon fiber! Elon LIED to us!

No whining, this could happen to everyone.

They failed to rent a 12 m cargo barge, so had to limit it with 9 m ones.

A standard ISO container is 2.438 m wide.

The carg barge payload zones are:
7.5 m  mide (3 rows x 2.438 + 4* 0.05 = 7.514 m), river class
9..10 m  wide (4 rows x 2.438 + 5* 0.05 = 10.002 m), river class
12.5 m  wide (5 rows x 2.438 + 6* 0.05 = 12.49 m), river class
16 (actually 15+1) m wide (6 rows x 2.438 + 7* 0.05 = 14.978 m, but + 2 margins * 0.5 m = 16 m), sea-river class

Plus ~6 ft for a passage along every side = + 3.7 m for the total barge width (breadth, if you prefer).

Even 24 rows (24 rows x 2.438 + 25* 0.05 = 59.8 m), the widest container supership, 59 m wide, with passages beneath the cargo deck, so no need in 2x6 ft margin.

That's exactly why Vulcan and UR-700M were designed to be 12.5 m and 8.8 m wide, and also why N-1 spherical tanks were of 12.8 m, 10.4 m, etc diameter.

Of course one can think that Starship was 12 m, got 9 m wide for some rocket-science reason, but the larger will be his sorrows from disappointment when the truth gets revealed.

[mikegarrison]

11 hours ago, tater said:

Does looking down off an edge give you the creeps, standing? I'm fine roped, going UP, and I'm even OK rappelling, but standing at an edge and leaning over gives me the willies. A buddy of mine just walks to the edge of stuff and leans over that I would literally lay on my stomach to look down from.

I did a lot of unroped scrambling. That was usually fine with me.

But I'm older and out of shape now, and not nearly so confident in my balance as I used to be.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

4 hours ago, Beccab said:

Well made simulation of an optimized Starship cargo launch

I don't know what game you are playing - but your KSP experience is likely very different than mine. 

8D

Bravo Zulu

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, Beccab said:

Well made simulation of an optimized Starship cargo launch

And what is even more important, for the case of Flat Earth.

[Meecrob]

2 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

I did a lot of unroped scrambling. That was usually fine with me.

But I'm older and out of shape now, and not nearly so confident in my balance as I used to be.

Here's hoping you realized that in a comfy chair, not on your back after a benign but embarrassing fall like me. "hold my beer!!..no wait, give me my beer back and get an icepack!"

Edited August 8, 2021 by Meecrob

[CatastrophicFailure]

6 hours ago, Beccab said:

Well made simulation of an optimized Starship cargo launch

Hmm… that makes the staging-flippy-spin maneuver look a lot less daunting… 

[tater]

 

Spoiler

3 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

I did a lot of unroped scrambling. That was usually fine with me.

But I'm older and out of shape now, and not nearly so confident in my balance as I used to be.

Yeah, I did a few lead climbs back in the day, and a decent amount of top-roping (usually up towards Los Alamos where my climbing buddy lived). We ended up deciding that what both of us liked best was interesting scrambles in CO (13ers and 14ers mostly). Non-technical mountaineering, in short, though sometimes we took some gear for stuff like the Crestone Needle - Peak traverse (which was a backwards and sorta dumb way to do it that involved a needless rappel, but again, young and stupid). My buddy was below, looked up, yelled "ROCK!" and I had to grab a rock and barn-door into the breeze to watch a football-sized rock fly past where a second before I had been.

It's a wonder any of us live to middle age.

 

[Beccab]

7 minutes ago, tater said:

 

  Hide contents

 

 

Yeah, I did a few lead climbs back in the day, and a decent amount of top-roping (usually up towards Los Alamos where my climbing buddy lived). We ended up deciding that what both of us liked best was interesting scrambles in CO (13ers and 14ers mostly). Non-technical mountaineering, in short, though sometimes we took some gear for stuff like the Crestone Needle - Peak traverse (which was a backwards and sorta dumb way to do it that involved a needless rappel, but again, young and stupid). My buddy was below, looked up, yelled "ROCK!" and I had to grab a rock and barn-door into the breeze to watch a football-sized rock fly past where a second before I had been.

 

It's a wonder any of us live to middle age.

 

Color code:

"Red is damaged.  Green, loose or proud.  Blue, gap issue."

[sevenperforce]

I've been looking more closely at the catching arm structures, and here's what I'm thinking currently.

The big black pipe structures are carriages which sit on either side of the tower and slide on the outer rails. They are stabilized by the smaller truss structure, which probably provides braking on the central rail as well. The pointy bits protruding out of the black carriage structures come together right under the lift point; that's where the main lift frame is mounted, which can rotate around that lift point axis and provides the main lifting force for the arms. The sides of the arms are coupled to and actuated through the carriages.

[kerbiloid]

General plan.

Spoiler

 

[magnemoe]

23 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

I've been looking more closely at the catching arm structures, and here's what I'm thinking currently.

The big black pipe structures are carriages which sit on either side of the tower and slide on the outer rails. They are stabilized by the smaller truss structure, which probably provides braking on the central rail as well. The pointy bits protruding out of the black carriage structures come together right under the lift point; that's where the main lift frame is mounted, which can rotate around that lift point axis and provides the main lifting force for the arms. The sides of the arms are coupled to and actuated through the carriages.

Nice but I think it uses too much of the tower, you need booms to fuel starship, you need stuff to verify stage lock. Yes an rail between the southern and between he eastern edges would make a lot of sense. 
 

[sevenperforce]

Just now, magnemoe said:

Nice but I think it uses too much of the tower, you need booms to fuel starship, you need stuff to verify stage lock. Yes an rail between the southern and between he eastern edges would make a lot of sense. 
 

If the crane lift point was between two of the rails then I would agree, but it is clearly over a single rail and you need more than one rail slide for proper stabilization, so it will have to connect to three rails.

The GSE and stabilization arm can rotate around from the back.

[sevenperforce]

Here's what it looks like when you add the rest of the structure.

I'm assuming that the components for the arms themselves are not yet on site.

 

1 hour ago, sevenperforce said:

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

Nice but I think it uses too much of the tower, you need booms to fuel starship, you need stuff to verify stage lock. Yes an rail between the southern and between he eastern edges would make a lot of sense. 
 

The GSE and stabilization arm can rotate around from the back.

This is what I was talking about with the stabilization arm:

 

[sevenperforce]

Since we do not yet presumably have any actual catch arms at the site, it is hard to know what they will look like. Here is an alternate configuration.

 

[Minmus Taster]

U-um guys? I don't know if I can post this here but uhh...this is how Starships will refuel apparently.

Spoiler

And here's a comic that sums up my opinion perfectly:

May the O-holy moderators have mercy on my dirty soul

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

@sevenperforce - given that EM has said that he expects the landing to be off to one side to protect the launch table - wouldn't a cage around the tower that can raise /lower and rotate around the tower be more likely? 

[sevenperforce]

15 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

@sevenperforce - given that EM has said that he expects the landing to be off to one side to protect the launch table - wouldn't a cage around the tower that can raise /lower and rotate around the tower be more likely? 

We know Mechazilla will not only be catching Superheavy, but also lifting Superheavy and Starship onto the pad for mating. We know where Mechazilla’s crane lift point is, about 20-30 degrees off from the launch table. For that lift to be efficient, the fulcrum for the lifting/catching mechanism needs to be under the crane lift point, or as close to it as possible. So we can conclude that the lift mechanism will have a fixed-axis fulcrum but have a “skew” capability allowing it to turn within a ~60 degree arc.

If the OLT can handle the fire and fury of 30+ Raptor 2 engines firing simultaneously, it should be fairly impervious to an empty Superheavy exploding on the landing pad twenty or thirty meters away. SpaceX just has to make sure the OLT doesn’t take a direct hit.

In summary, you don’t need a rotation all the way around the tower; you just need the arms to be mounted on a rotating frame with ~60 degrees of arc.

[kerbiloid]

Every time when a SpaceX design flips 180°, it's stated that "SpaceX knows better! That's the best way indeed!"

The obvious fact that the "indeed"'s totally contradict each other and look like anything but an existing plan, doesn't matter.

Where are those two starships docked by ends?

They told me that it is the obviously best way to do.

How long is it till turning the 2nd stage into a shuttle and stopping showing off?

[Lewie]

 Was it necessary to make this? Yes, Yes it was.

 

3 hours ago, Minmus Taster said:

U-um guys? I don't know if I can post this here but uhh...this is how Starships will refuel apparently.

  Reveal hidden contents

And here's a comic that sums up my opinion perfectly:

May the O-holy moderators have mercy on my dirty soul

 

I took the liberty of creating an appropriate meme for the situation