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1 hour ago, Raven Industries said:

Setting aside the frustrations and/or conduct of a certain government administrator, I'm wondering if making Starship modular would be a good idea, and if Elon has considered it at all. If you make the cargo versions bay door open wide enough, you could maybe just slot crew modules and whatever else you want into the space. You could maybe have the plumbing for the extra engines crew version would require as part of the cargo version, and just slot in however many Raptors you need. I don't know if that would be efficient or safe or worthwhile at this scale, or any scale, but I was thinking it might help if there is ever a time when being able to change the balance of cargo vs crew versions quickly might be useful.  I don't know, what do you all think?

Add an lots of issues, like docking ports and hard to get the crew out. 
Still if you build an shuttle like starship with an smaller crew module and an larger cargo bay this might be an option. Also nice if you want to run some experiments who require bulky equipment.  

As you use steel its not to hard to replace the crew top with an cargo or tanker version for an aging ship either. 

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12 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

Steel is not magic. Despite Elon having fallen in love with it.

No changing the top will be an major undertaking and something you would only do once simply to squeeze some more use out of an starship starting to get a bit long in the tooth. 

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23 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

No changing the top will be an major undertaking and something you would only do once simply to squeeze some more use out of an starship starting to get a bit long in the tooth. 

That is something done with airplanes -- converting old passenger planes to freighters. But they are never as good as new-built freighters. They are, however, a lot cheaper to buy.

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Look how the Starhopper broke through the concrete pad floor on landing.

4K3qHuzysv4.jpg

 Either the pad was expendable, or the landing was harder than expected. So if Starhopper can break concrete, won’t the Starship’s tiny new legs just stick into the ground on Moon and Mars like knives into butter?

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Just now, Nefrums said:

Was just thinking if a 18m next gen starship could have artificial gravity?

According to this chart is could be possible:

vSv7z.png

 

The biggest problem with artificial gravity on the 18m starship is making sure the Intermediate Axis Therum is satisfied.

 

Otherwise...

 

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1 hour ago, Nefrums said:

Was just thinking if a 18m next gen starship could have artificial gravity?

According to this chart is could be possible:

vSv7z.png

 

SS's radius is 4.5m, which is off the bottom of the chart.  Tethering two starships nose-to-nose could certainly work, however.

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3 hours ago, sh1pman said:

Look how the Starhopper broke through the concrete pad floor on landing.

4K3qHuzysv4.jpg

 Either the pad was expendable, or the landing was harder than expected. So if Starhopper can break concrete, won’t the Starship’s tiny new legs just stick into the ground on Moon and Mars like knives into butter?

First attempt. Prototype. Not for production use. Test bed. Learning experience.

Do we need to spell it out? ;)

 

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3 hours ago, sh1pman said:

 Either the pad was expendable, or the landing was harder than expected. So if Starhopper can break concrete, won’t the Starship’s tiny new legs just stick into the ground on Moon and Mars like knives into butter?

The tiny, narrow feet are pretty concerning for any landing on an unprepared surface, frankly.

I don't think that will be a thing for a while, but SpaceX is supposedly working on that sort of thing with Phil Metzger (who does engine plume regolith interactions), so maybe they'll have to evolve the design for any such landings.

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34 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:

To be fair, for a variety of reasons, the lunar module's footpads were extremely oversized, as were the shock absorbers. I remember a video on that somewhere, but I'm busy rn so I can't find it.

I'm less worried about penetration of the surface than I am about Raptors digging a hole.

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11 hours ago, Raven Industries said:

I suppose we could go the classic sci-fi route and just have screens that look like windows, but that's a good point. 

I think Bigelow is actually doing this with their B330 for the moment. I don't it's a good idea- if I wanted a 2d, limited albeit high resolution image of space, I could just pull one up at home. I don't think that would be considered acceptable, it wouldn't look convincing enough. It would certainly kill off most possibilities of space tourism.

Also it causes problems with my plan to send as many flat earthers into space as possible, they could still say it's CGI

1 hour ago, Ultimate Steve said:

To be fair, for a variety of reasons, the lunar module's footpads were extremely oversized, as were the shock absorbers. I remember a video on that somewhere, but I'm busy rn so I can't find it.

Jeff Bezos mentioned that once, oddly enough that's where I heard it first

40 minutes ago, tater said:

I'm less worried about penetration of the surface than I am about Raptors digging a hole.

Isn't that penetrating the surface, though?

Edited by ThatGuyWithALongUsername
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5 hours ago, sh1pman said:

Look how the Starhopper broke through the concrete pad floor on landing.

4K3qHuzysv4.jpg

 Either the pad was expendable, or the landing was harder than expected. So if Starhopper can break concrete, won’t the Starship’s tiny new legs just stick into the ground on Moon and Mars like knives into butter?

Did I not hear that the Raptor shut down a tad early, so it dropped the last meter or more, jarring a COPV loose? No surprise that it broke the concrete...

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1 hour ago, ThatGuyWithALongUsername said:

Also it causes problems with my plan to send as many flat earthers into space as possible, they could still say it's CGI

Trust me, they will say the windows themselves are distorted and can't be trusted. You have to actually let them free out the airlock.

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3 minutes ago, cubinator said:

You have to actually let them free out the airlock 

They'll say that space suit visor is actually a VR screen that shows deceiving images of spherical planet. 

Unless they remove the helmets first...

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People ask why SpaceX is pushing hard on Starship. Mars? Yeah, whatever...

Next gen LVs take some amount of time to develop, so SpaceX is getting in front of the problem. F9 has room to compete with NG I think (and F9 actually exists, which is nice ;) ), but Bezos is decent at this business stuff, and they;re basically telling everyone what they are up to. So odd that ULA hitched themselves to a company that will help undo them.

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1 minute ago, tater said:

So odd that ULA hitched themselves to a company that will help undo them.

BO may take some commercial payloads (that weren’t taken by Starship for whatever reason), but ULA has political power. It’ll get by just making SLS core stages for years and launching Air Force payloads.

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