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6 minutes ago, Ricktoberfest said:

What about putting some Super Draco’s higher up on the fuselage?  Can act as a landing engine high above the surface and also an escape system if the craft could be split away from its fuel tanks somehow

SuperDracos are one use only now.

Edited by Wjolcz
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17 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Au conter counter contry :P I disagree. While Dave Scott certainly did thump it down, the nozzle didn’t actually contact the surface, it buckled due to (relevant subject!) firing so close to the lunar surface, as mentioned here (about 10:00 in):

Hence why the whole subject needs further study. Either way, still wouldn’t wanna take off with it. :wacko:

You got over-pressure at the nozzle end because of blowback from ground. And nozzle was flimsy like vacuum nozzles tend to be. 
For an single use nozzle this was not an serious issue outside of fail of nozzle and offset trust during touchdown but then they would just kill engine and land 1 m/s harder than planned. 
 

16 hours ago, Listy said:

If a lunar base is ever established, it also sounds like NASA & SpaceX would both be keen to get a better handle on how best to stop everything nearby (habitats, rovers, equipment, astronauts etc) from being turned into a sieve every time a rocket lands or takes off nearby and starts flinging dirt around at 3km/s in an environment where there's no air to slow the debris down.

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/2014/0419-forensic-ballistics.html

" The exhaust of the Shuttle’s solid rocket boosters pulled several thousand bricks from the wall of the launch pad’s flame trench, slammed them into each other, creating many thousands of fragments, and blew them as far as a kilometer from the pad."  :o

 

Landing near an base on the moon will give some challenges because of hypersonic dust who would do bad things to space suits and solar panels. 
Two options land in an crater or land on an pad, probably both down the line 

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The first lander doesn't need to worry about damaging projectiles, so just send the equipment to make to make the berm first. Also, the moon isn't a flat, featureless sphere, you can land on one side of a hill, and have the base on the other side. 

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53 minutes ago, zolotiyeruki said:

how do you get a bulldozer to run on the moon?

We already have two, one just happens to be on Mars and the other is leaving for there shortly. Just scavenge a spare chassis, which almost certainly exists, strap a blade to the front, and send it off. The first Starship to the Moon could carry dozens, even. Might not be very fast but they can run nearly constantly and it’s a proven, in-situ tested design. -_-

52 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

You use a Tesla bulldozer that runs on the power of the sun.

Or this. :/ Just be sure someone double-taps the stalk first to turn on Autopilot. 

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30 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Or this. :/ Just be sure someone double-taps the stalk first to turn on Autopilot. 

Tesla + Solar Roof + Steel blade made scrap metal at Boca Chica = MoonDozer.

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Dig an underground flame trench that ends in a gun barrel shaped shaft, and you can probably blast small payloads back towards lunar orbit with the exhaust.  Like a small scale version of Pascal-B's test shaft in Operation Plumbbob:D
 

Quote

Propulsion of steel plate cap

During the Pascal-B nuclear test, a 900-kilogram (2,000 lb) steel plate cap (a piece of armor plate) was blasted off the top of a test shaft at a speed of more than 66 km/s (41 mi/s; 240,000 km/h; 150,000 mph). Before the test, experimental designer Robert Brownlee had estimated that the nuclear explosion, combined with the specific design of the shaft, would accelerate the plate to approximately six times Earth's escape velocity.[8] The plate was never found, but Dr. Brownlee believes[9] that the plate did not leave the atmosphere, as it may even have been vaporized by compression heating of the atmosphere due to its high speed. The calculated velocity was sufficiently interesting that the crew trained a high-speed camera on the plate, which unfortunately only appeared in one frame, but this nevertheless gave a very high lower bound for its speed. After the event, Dr. Brownlee described the best estimate of the cover's speed from the photographic evidence as "going like a bat out of hell!"[8][10]

 

 

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41 minutes ago, SuperFastJellyfish said:

 

Dig an underground flame trench that ends in a gun barrel shaped shaft, and you can probably blast small payloads back towards lunar orbit with the exhaust.  Like a small scale version of Pascal-B's test shaft in Operation Plumbbob:D

 

Sure, sure, start digging big holes in the moon then blowing stuff out of them and pretty soon this happens: 

Spoiler

tumblr_otalyy4pSs1rob81ao9_r1_1280.gif?w

Unintended consequences, people! :huh:

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:o

F9-F9350-E-4-FBE-4817-90-FA-924-A45-B589

You know the sad thing... we could have been building spaceships like this in the 70s... it’s a stainless steel water tank in a field... And yet it’s 2019 and it’s going to disrupt the whole space industry.

Having said that though, maybe the avionics for automated retro-propulsive landings wouldn’t have been there back then. But having said that! I think the Apollo flight computer was capable of some impressive degree of automation for the time, as well as inertial positioning o_o!

I’m not an Apollo guy but I watched a vid about the puter...

 

Edited by Guest
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Spoiler
4 hours ago, Scotius said:

Are those big, giant slabs of styrofoam acting as windbreaks? :lol:

Or the number “8” intended to be viewed from space @_@!

 

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Spoiler
2 hours ago, Dale Christopher said:

Or the number “8” intended to be viewed from space @_@!

They use mods.
images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR9TgpxGfmcAHzWidPEQmG

Spoiler
2 hours ago, Dale Christopher said:

viewed from space

By the player.

 

Edited by kerbiloid
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1 hour ago, tater said:

 

What exactly is this thrust structure we are looking at? The aft section where the engines will be? I'm guessing the holes are for all the engine plumbing.

Also, yep, those are white containers.

Edited by Wjolcz
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