DDE

Choo-choo.

LOS calculations for RemoteTek A ballistic calculator for a Falcon 1st stage+Dragon 2 ODST deployment system

‘Xcuse me. Also, I think the Proton is a record too: apparently they used six locomotives at one point.

They spared something like 60 kg with that set-up compared to an earlier version. Not sure what the third abort motor is.

Lateral engines? That’s the approach from Energiya boosters, and it has serious problems - without accounting for Sea Launch. I’m not the author, but I had that idea. Soviet military missiles tend to have powerful verniers that are entirely independent from main engines. I’ve ran around with the idea of Falconizing the Soyuz-2.1v (which has an RD-0110 wrapped around the main NK-33/RD-193) about half a year back.

Everybody bails out, but pilot of the upper Anson realizes the whole “composite” has thrust (from the lower plane) and control authority (from the upper plane), so he proceeds to make several passes before belly-landing both aircraft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1940_Brocklesby_mid-air_collision

It was supposed to be a meme. Not on this design, they aren’t. That looks like an RD-180, which reacts badly to being throttled down. Something radically different is required for SpaceX-style first-stage reuse they’re promising.

Radically redesigned? Given what that meant the last time there was an “architecture change”, are they NERVAs now?

Oh, it’s worse. There’s a not-so-sweet spot where both deck armour and main belt are at a very inconvenient angle.

January 31. It’s raining in Moscow, and as a consequence

No such thing as a stand-off position with torps from that era, they all required venturing into 20 mm range. Furthermore, torpedo design imposed a pretty hard cap on the maximum speed at release. And the torpedoes were noticeably heavier than practical dive bombs. In addition to that, AA effective range takes shape of a flattened dome, so dive bombers would be less exposed on approach, and reach wing-snapping velocities by the time they ventured into the innermost AAA radius, reducing their exposure time. Finally, a poor man’s AAA was shooting impact-fused artillery to send columns of water up in front of torpedo bombers. All of this translated into dive bombers being more survivable. It’s not. Bombs tended to strike something on the fairly valuable superstructure, while torpedoes end up hitting the thick lard of specialized sacrificial compartments, leading to a slow demise at worst. By WWII anything bigger than a destroyer was fairly well-hardened against torpedoes and associated flooding, and destroyers died from an angry stare anyway.

NASA: Failure is not an option Also NASA: Don’t look over there!

Talk about checking things out... NASA: runs structural tests SpaceX: slaps together a suborbital prototype from a bunch of sheet metal

Izvestiya makes funny noises about Korona. Unknown if it’s an attempt from Makeyev to slide its SSTO card into the deck again. https://iz.ru/838754/mikhail-kotov/nasha-korona-kak-otechestvennye-inzhenery-obognali-vremia

They encountered severe difficulty in finding any locals. Most of the pork ended up in Kazan, despite being haram. Yay secularism? Booster separation is perfect time for RUD. On a separate note, the lack of a movie theater in Tsiolkovsky is not surprising - big screen profit margins in Russia are plummeting.

Today’s young people? Try my father and his dependence on the GPS Annoying Annies... He tends to have two-three of them up at once. Makes for a good comedy routine whenever they disagree.

Except that baseline Apollo did the same, just 90° in the opposite direction. Every spacecraft does, except Mercury and the Shuttle.

Lifting body is NASA’s M-1 configuration. And I think a) it’s a bit too early for the MOL and b) (D)ARPA/USAF wouldn’t fly on a ship built for a rival space agency.

I don’t need the force, my plane is faster than a drunken snail carrying a bottle of nitroglycerin.

Hello, comrade. The nearest (relatively speaking) village is a strong contender. Oh no, I’ve been found out. Being the fancy dandy that I am, I tend to stock up at Kaut-Bulliger in Munich with enough inkwells to last half a decade... I’ve already snapped the Pelikan I bought there in two due to heavy use, so I guess ink really is a long-lasting consumable. Whereas ballpoints would run out in like two weeks, so I had to wear a bloody bandolier of them.

Probably not. It could instead eliminate much of the air resistance.

Not if you’re accurate enough to send it right down the smokestack or land an 225 kg or 450 kg delay-fused AP bomb hit on the magazine, neither of which was egregious. Lots of one-hit-kill scenarios; plenty others capable of causing grievous damage, or at least a fire, which can easily have devastating consequences. It were rocket-armed fighters that did the AAA suppression.

Hold my beer! I only play on the flattest map available.

WWII experience brutally disagreed. Most sources indicate the dive bombers had it easier than the torpedo bombers coming in nice, slow and low.

Also Zog you with a rusty crowbar, Zak. Get a Yandex vallet already. Also, such a design is very similar to what the Augustine Commission recommended Orion were turned into. So, less greedy sources back from 2016 indicate the primary author is Rafail Murtazin, the man behind the accelerated Soyuz trajectories to the ISS. It's an ISS-LOP-G ferry; 11.4 t wet mass, 7 t dry mass, 30 m3 pressurized volume, 55 m2 aeroshield, minimum altitude 85 km at 11 km/s. As you may notice, such a scheme leaves Federatsya in the cold