Pthigrivi

Id love to hear more on thruster and maneuverability updates as that seemed the the central hurdle on IFT3. Still sticking with gas thrusters or augmenting with a separate system?

I would say the overall scientific project of learning and understanding our universe is at least as old and absolutely as robust as any religion. Astronomers in China, Egypt, and Mesoamerica may not have used the word 'science' but the motivation to understand and predict physical phenomena was there. You don't need 100% institutional stability over hundreds of years, just trust that in the future just as in the past people will be motivated to understand the universe around them. I think thats a safe-enough bet. As to SpaceX going interstellar... I mean we know Elon. He loves big claims. They marketed Dragon as a Mars lander. By the time they actually do start colonizing mars I doubt Starship itself will be the leading proposal. I think it's a great design for mass to orbit and that form factor will be useful for decades if it's successful. It's obviously silly to compare it to anything like a working interstellar vehicle.

Agreed. Again--unconfirmed, but I see 3 likely reasons for booster RUD: A) the engine relight should have worked but was delayed/asymmetric and threw off the suicide burn, or B1) gridfins were miscalibrated / B2) the grid fins were deliberately testing control authority range. Granted this is a MUCH larger vehicle than falcon 9 and fuel mass slosh, descent speed etc. are very different but aerodynamic control is something SX has a lot of experience with. I'll be curious to hear more info on this. Starship is different. I've heard some vehicles deliberately roll in orbit to manage heat... but...? given the sound of crowd reaction in the room, the plan for a fuel transfer and relight test I think this roll was not in-program. You can see the vehicle is basically continuously venting through most of the suborbital journey and if those ports are exactly oppositional to keep tank pressure constant that shouldn't be a problem. If there is a bias at all--even slight--it could induce rotation and tumbling over time. Once they reentred with the atmosphere so thin it didn't look like the fins could reasert roll stability, but worse Starship pitched aft-down. Someone could correct me but I thought I heard the fuel transfer was supposed to move propellant to the header tank at the nose of the vehicle, which would have helped keep the nose down and forward as air pressure built up rather than tilting engines-down.

Im also wondering if without completing the prop transfer if the mass was actually distributed properly for reentry?

Ice or heat tiles? I feel like heat elements around hot gas ports could be mass-cheaper than a full hypergolic RCS system, if thats even the actual issue. After reaching pre-orbital altitude you've got a few minutes to melt or prevent frozen LOX that would impact thruster vectors and retain attitude control above atmosphere. It looked from the video that they were venting almost throughout the coast phase which *should* cancel out if the ports are oppositional. All of the weird roll and tumble action seemed to induce in coast phase.

Nice to have confirmation on the pez door. It wasn't really clear from the video that was working. It says they initiated but didn't complete the fuel transfer which makes sense with lack of control. Tim Dodd speculated the thruster ports might have been affected by ice build up. It'll be interesting to hear more about that.

My wife and I were gchatting during launch and she was like "wait... Pez dispenser? Chopsticks landing? Plasma blanket? Is this a Wes Anderson movie?"

Yeah the flaps seemed to be helping but it never really looked like they had control authority. Most of what we saw before blackout it seemed to be coming in tail first. The roll in orbit was odd too. Still a pretty spectacular launch.

How long do we think before reentry?

Damn thats exciting I havent heard much about the thermal system lately. They managing to keep more tiles attached?

Yeah Im psyched. My wife and I will be taking the afternoon off. We're in VT so it's running straight over us. Fingers crossed on weather!

I mean I've got my over the top art critic voice on. The NFT thing is just icing. Even in the world of contemporary art this kind of stands out as vain and cynical, kind of like Damien Hirst's 'For the Love of God' but without the self-awareness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Love_of_God

Like imagine if art and its commentary on how money corrupts free expression folded back on itself, like a person sticking their head into their own digestive system. This is the art-world version of that. But launched into space so that humans for all eternity could appreciate what self-absorbed, morally vacuous morons we all were in this moment on earth.

Not as an engineer but as a lifelong student of art and art history this particular collaboration with Jeff Koons may well go down as the worst art piece of the 21st century. I can’t think of two people who could have more obviously outstripped their usefulness and exposed their profound lack of self-apprehension in a more illustrative way. Not sure if that’s something they were deliberately going for. Either way truly an embarrassment for the history books. Like image if Salvador Dali glued a urinal to the side of the Spruce Goose. This is basically that. https://www.apollo-magazine.com/jeff-koons-moon-rakewell/?amp=1

Love all this. I have made a number of UI notes but I want to speak to a very specific important function that I think neither KSP1 nor KSP2 has really captured: Snapping maneuver nodes to Ap, Pe, An, and Dn. 90% of the time when traversing space you're really trying to align your burn vector with one of these 4 points and it would be absolutely amazing if we could right-click and have the option to snap a maneuver node precisely on them. This is a little tricky now because of the way KSP2 handles burn start/stop times vs KSP1's centered nodes, but it would be SO valuable to have this capability for accurate and efficient maneuver planning and execution. I think this is one of those little tools that if implemented folks would wonder how they ever got by without it.

I missed what happened but its kinda my fault. It's hard to dance around it sometimes. I probably shouldn't play so close to the edge. Anyway back on topic any word on timing for the 3rd launch?

No I take your point. There's this gray area where economics and financing blur into politics, where for instance SpaceX can leverage the promised revenue stream from government contracts into its private equity rounds, and politicians have influence over those kinds of decisions. We can only really talk about one side of that coin here.

I would just argue "Government Funded" means "Government Funded". The distinction is cost-plus vs fixed bid, not who is paying for it. I 100% agree the US should have revised its bid process like 40 years ago.

True, contract structure is critical but to say SpaceX isn't also spending taxpayer money isn't accurate. I don't think its difficult to argue even the overabundance of private equity streams due to fed and tax policy comes with its own hidden costs to the public, but again thats getting a bit close to the P word.

I mean, SpaceX is also a government contractor. The dragon program, HLS, numerous government funded satellite launches are also 'spending other people's money.' The difference here is economy of scale, iterative design, and vertical integration. I think we can leave the politics out of it. Its also important to not confuse initial manufacturing costs vs per-launch costs when we talk about reusable rockets. To date SpaceX has spent 3 billion dollars on Starship, so one could say the current per-launch cost is 1.5 billion. Of course the idea is that those initial development costs will be amortized over hundreds of launches, but lots of things could interrupt that: RUD on the pad, fundamental conceptual failures that make full reusability infeasible, lack of demand, or an unexpected disruptive competitor.

This is an interesting idea. I mean I still like that experiments also produce science because it gives players an ability to freelance and not just doggedly pursue the missions. It helps round-out the tech tree unlock process. The missions currently are on a crazy learning curve where you orbit the Mun and then are asked to do a precision landing like a minute later rather than teaching players about inclination and letting them practice on Minmus first. But say you fixed that with a bunch of intermediary missions: they're still proscriptive. It's still the game telling you what to do instead of giving you some tools and some goals and letting you figure it out, which is to me what creative gaming is all about. What I like about this idea is emphasizing the value of non-mission, experiment-based science outside the tech tree, that its actually doing the work of uncovering real, actionable information. The value of missions exhausts on a fully linear basis--you do the mission and get the science and its gone. Experiments are a bit different in that you've unlocked this part and it expands a whole range of uses that persist throughout your playthrough, ideally even through interstellar exploration and potentially through completing the tech tree completely. It creates a zone for creative exploitation where you can cleverly string together a series of actions that result in a bigger payout than if you just followed the spelled out instructions. It encourages excursion and free exploration. And if those experiments are also doing SCANsat like things and providing extra information you have even more incentive to deviate from the proscribed path and do things on your own terms. Learn from BG3, folks. Let players play. Just for comparison: Factorio has exactly one mission: launch a rocket. And when you do the game is like great, that doesn't actually matter, it was the spagetti we met along the way. The entire game is just a set of rules that you can creatively exploit to your hearts desire. I really appreciate that KSP's main story has some structure to get players going but especially as we delve into colonies and resources I'd like to see the devs really give themselves over to this process of open-ended play, where you have tools and constraints and resources and you can kind of go to town.

I think the loose answer is you should have and be deliberately introduced to features just before you need them. Many of these will come very, very early hence KSP1 frustration with locked maneuver nodes. You need this the minute you try to go to orbit, potentially your second launch, so there’s no reason to lock this at all. But when do you absolutely need biome maps? When do you need trajectory factoring drag? When do you need resource maps? Soon, but not immediately. These seem ripe for exploration-based reveals.

Haha okay that makes more sense. Line up the escape either directly behind (to inner planets) or in front (to outer planets) of the body you’re leaving (the orbit line) Ive always been more focused on the resulting kerbolar transit orbit to notice. And nobody make fun of me for saying ‘midnight ejection’.

Yo I been manually tweezing this in the dark for years and never knew that. If Im headed outer I generally guess a point between midnight and sunrise and midnight and drag out till the Kerbol Ap intersects the orbit line, then I move the node forward and backward till I find the intercept, then refine, refine, refine reducing the target Pe and dV cost until I get bored. I’ll definitely check out ejection opposite Kerbol as a starting point.

There it is. It definitely should be squared off AND count down and I love the idea of an anititarget for burns as well as encounters. I’ll offer one more: its cool that the countdown dots go from yellow to green but make the green light bigger and turn the yellow lights off on zero/go so its really obvious that it 3-2-1-GO.