Nothalogh
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Posts posted by Nothalogh
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On 3/25/2023 at 6:30 AM, tomf said:
Many missions with nuclear engines are going to involve long coast phases so you probably want a design where you can produce electricity without thrust.
That means you just aren't producing enough thrust to go with all that ISP.
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On 4/12/2022 at 4:36 AM, SunlitZelkova said:
so I am assuming it is ok to revive it again this year
Anyone who says otherwise is self evidently a heretic
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2 hours ago, FleshJeb said:
I have some issues with the narrative that this was a wild success. Smells like marketing. Shifting the goalposts from aspirationally "crashing Starship in the Pacific" to "clearing the pad" is a pretty clear sign to me.
"Flying concrete is bad for rocket engines" is not novel or valuable data. "Well they figured out how NOT to build a pad!" Yeah, NASA figured that out over 50 years ago, and they have the papers and math freely available to study. This is still not a lesson that needed to be learned. It's a big rocket, but the parameters are not out of spec for what we already know how to do.
I sat down with my dad this afternoon, who has been a civil engineer for 45 years, and described the setup and end result to him. The first words out of his mouth were, "That is some amateur BS."
He asked me why they launched if they had a flame diverter almost ready to go, and I was only able to answer with "scheduling issues." His response was, "Of course schedule is always an integral factor, but if your 'profit margin' is [volume and quality of] test data, and you lose half to 3/4 of your opportunity to generate data [Starship not getting any meaningful testing in this event], then you've just cost yourself time and money for no good reason."
In terms of opportunity cost, I can only see this as a massive failure.
I will grant that erosion is a big problem in engineering, because it's a cascading failure--Any flaw in design or construction will be exploited. So the answer is always robust design and safety factors. At the very least, you should understand the failure modes and plan for where the blowout is going to occur. If anyone followed the Oroville Dam spillway failure, you might recognize that it was located well away from the main body of the dam, and that's why the undercutting wasn't completely catastrophic. It was still a massive design and maintenance screwup, but nobody died.
Sevenperforce did a really great analysis upthread showing that being only 18% above nominal in a bunch a factors leads to a 600% worse outcome. In isolation, that seems like a big number, but it also means that a very tiny 1.2 factor of safety on all their inputs would have solved the problem.
I've worked for engineering firms that specialize in doing challenging and innovative things. Unfortunately, that didn't include having robust standards, workflows, and competency in the basics. Because we're cool and innovative and that's just boring stuff. What that results in is failures, blown budgets, late nights, apologetic calls to clients, and construction change orders. The cool and innovative thing was rarely the primary challenge on the project.
So when I see an organization making very basic engineering errors and trying to handwave them by pointing at the cool and innovative part, I'm not too impressed. I just see a cultural and systemic problem in the organization.
Come on, now, you're a KSP player.
Anything downrange of the pad is some kind of success, when unmanned.
And any landing you walk away from is a good landing, when manned.
And all this wailing and gnashing of teeth is childish at best, the alternative is to do this the post-Apollo NASA way, which would add twenty years and ten times the budget for a quarter of the initially intended features.
Sorry, not sorry, I don't want another Space Shuttle, and neither should you.
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11 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:
scifi can change that though.
By exterminating humans?
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6 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:
Politics is a human construct physical laws could care less about.... even though it is a wall that must be climbed over nonetheless.
Aye, but we're kind of stuck with the humans and their constructs.
So that may as well be a law on par with that of physics. -
53 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:
That is the glory of physical laws... they do not care about breaking any manmade status quo. Only that you meet whatever requirements that physical laws require.
If so it won't matter who you are... so long you you have what it takes physics will work for you rather than against you... just like time.
Not entirely true, there is also the political dimension of any project, but that can be dealt with by bringing to bear a sufficient amount of shame and bullying.
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On 2/11/2022 at 7:17 AM, RCgothic said:
if Blue Origin were to build a 10 diameter (approx outer diameter of Superheavy outer engine ring) vehicle, they could fit perhaps 12 fixed and 3 or 4 gimbaling engines
Blue Origin would first have to build engines
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3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:
Interesting, how many chutes will the Starship require five years later.
Starship isn't beholden to NASA's design tomfoolery
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On 1/31/2022 at 6:02 PM, cubinator said:
eyeballing his reentry burn
This is the one that always sticks with me
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10 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:
Who's got a seismograph to get a reading on this?
If it doesn't register on the Richter scale, it's not a rocket.
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On 12/28/2021 at 9:43 PM, SunlitZelkova said:
But how long will it take to nail reentry? And then aerobraking? And then the task of landing on Mars, which they only have so many transfer windows to utilize?
Send multiple vehicles per transfer window, each trying a slightly different EDL pattern.
We don't have time for your tomfoolery.
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17 hours ago, kerbiloid said:
A ship to deliver people to the Moon is much smaller than a city.
You dream too small
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2 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
The vaults for those who has no more time to departure in ships, as the comet is to close.
Ship is inherently vault.
Build city on top of ship.
Evacuate to ship.
Launch city/ship.
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2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:
For quick evacuation into the giant vaults, they should be cores of the megalopolises.
For quick evacuation from the Earth giant ships should be built
Why not combine the two?
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9 hours ago, Spacescifi said:
https://www.calumhervieu.com/post/are-inflatable-spacecraft-the-future-of-exploration
Looking at this realistically using both modern and theoretical technology, would it not be more cost effective to just put an orbital ship building station in high orbit, enough that it won't need to be reboosted at all, since it has solar sails that LEO laser sats zap to course correct as needed?
From there, instead of literally hauling a lot of heavy metal around, why not haul up a bunch of inflatable craft, attach them, strap an engine to the back, and call it good?
I dunno, I think Earth built spaceships in orbit can be mass produced easily as inflatables with engines and tanks strapped to them.
You really only want metal heavy craft for reentry anyway. If it is a pure space/moon lander do you even need a metal hull?
Now once the lunar industry is a thing you can can construct stuff on the surface, although I am not sure if you can make inflatables using lunar material alone.
My point is that inflatables just may be the future of manned space only flight.
Reentry kind of needs metals.
As I said here:
Mars is where you want to build you fleet, for the aforementioned reasons.
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On 12/25/2021 at 2:36 PM, tater said:
Yeah, we have two camps, one that wants to terraform Mars, another concerned about not allowing a handful of bacteria to survive
I, for one, am an avowed proponent of stripmining Mars.
It is the goldilocks zone factory planet.
- It has a thin atmo for easy ascent, but enough for aerobraking.
- It has low gravity for easy escape, but enough for conventional ore separation and smelting processes.
- It's in a relatively low energy cost orbital location, not too far in, not too far out.
Muh microbes, muh terraforming...
No, wh40k is my instruction manual, and anyone who complains is getting turned into a servitor.
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10 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:
I am going to assume the latter.
You would be incorrect
10 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:by planetary protection standards
And here we get to saying the quiet part out loud.
The point of all this is to filibuster with demands of compliance to unattainable standards.
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2 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:
While human interplanetary capability is something to strive for, there is no reason "other issues" can not be addressed as well.
No, that's literally what actually matters, the rest is the position of the deck chairs on the Titanic.
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1 minute ago, Jacke said:
commercial
You think my position is about commercial vs governmental?
No, not even close.
I support any and all who are actually striving for meaningful progress towards the goal of the development and implementation of large scale human interplanetary capability.
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12 minutes ago, NFUN said:
No
Cool story, but we've been doing it your way for almost sixty years now, and it's not working.
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5 minutes ago, tater said:
Clearly we should never leave Earth.
Indeed.
I think long term, earth should be turned into a prison for those who were against human expansion.
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18 minutes ago, FleshJeb said:
No.
It's the only way, all other options lead to inaction, stagnation, and decay.
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On 12/22/2021 at 8:39 AM, SunlitZelkova said:
This is literally the same logic used by climate change deniers and corporations who wish to get environmentalists off their back.
All other concerns must cede priority to the development and implementation of large scale human interplanetary capability.
And those who would attempt to filibuster that goal with myriad technicalities are more morally detestable than those who would openly, directly, and physically vandalize such a project.
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1 hour ago, RCgothic said:
A single sample return mission as a prerequisite for a crewed mission is a joke.
If the sample *does* find life, it's clearly so abundant that there's no particular need to take precautions because samples will be everywhere. Makes sense to send crew to study it.
If it doesn't find evidence, that just means there wasn't any evidence in the one place it looked. Makes sense to send crew who can be more thorough in the search.
And if we're sending crew either way, just send crew.
It's basically concern trolling, at an institutional level.
And a way for individuals and organizations to make themselves relevant to an endeavor that they have no business being near.
SpaceX Discussion Thread
in Science & Spaceflight
Posted
It would be a false dichotomy if it weren't the de-facto standard operating procedure of all the parties heretofore involved, for the last fifty years.
They blew up five, if I remember correctly, Atlas SM-65s before they got one to fly.
THAT is the standard I want to see a return to.