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.50calBMG

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Posts posted by .50calBMG

  1. Just because they said fully fueled doesn't mean 100% full. There's plenty of rockets that will partially fuel the tanks for certain variants or flight profiles. Fully fueled in this case could just mean "fully fueled for this mission profile"

  2. Just because they are hardware rich doesn't mean they can afford to redo testing. All the requirements to do those tests cost time, money, and add associated risks that occur during any flight. You don't see them testing the hot staging by putting it on the SO pad with a full ship on just the hot staging ring to see if it works. They could, but they would get the same if not better data by actually flying.

  3. Again, I will add emphasis to test data that is A YEAR AND A HALF OLD. How many improvements were made since then? How many hundreds of tests have been done since then to verify that they work? I'm sure raptors reliability has followed the same curve that starship has from ift-1 to today's test, if not exceeds it based purely on the fact that they can and have been testing multiple times a day since the first test

  4. But it does relight successfully. The failures on the last flight were due to the fuel system, not the engines. The failures in this test were attitude control and fuel systems, not the engines. Raptor 1 fixed the fuel leak issues 2 years ago with sn-15. The first one to land landed hard and cracked a tank bulkhead, leading to an explosion, so another fuel system problem. No ship other than ift-1 was lost to engine issues, and that engine design has been retired. The issue you keep bringing up has been fixed. 

  5. "something something landing test", those tests were 2-3 years ago, they've had that issue fixed for a minimum of a year and a half. That was two engines ago. I doubt sls will have an engine failure because an rs-25a test failed on the test stand 

  6. 12 minutes ago, Exoscientist said:

     Actually, we do know definitely that the engines did not all relight during the landing burn for the booster. That proves something went wrong at this relight, and the damage could even have occurred during the first relight during boostback except that burn was not long enough to cause loss of vehicle.

     If something goes wrong with the engines during flight, and it is a known problem to have occurred before during testing the first thing to suspect is that same issue is occurring again. 

    Bob Clark

    My best guess is that it's fuel slosh from the booster wobbling and spinning so much. That's solvable with tweaked control algorithms, not a failure of the engines. Seriously, with the number of test firings, I don't understand why you automatically jump to engine failure

  7. I just showed my father the animation for how Starship is supposed to work while sitting in our favorite booth at our favorite pizza place, and he just laughed and shook his head. Seems crazy that almost a decade ago, in the exact same booth, I showed him the animation for Falcon 9, to which he said it would never work... Think they landed their first booster two weeks later... 

  8. We did answer that question, it just seems like you didn't listen to the answer. With all the structural changes you would have to make, a twin vulcain Ariane 6 would no longer be an Ariane 6. It would be especially wasteful since Themis is already in the early stages of production IIRC, and offers better performance than the actual capabilities your idea would have.

  9. The one failure I was thinking of was STS-93, which I was referencing. Looking back through flight history, there was also STS-51f which had the abort to orbit, but that was a faulty sensor, so wasn't the engine's fault anyway.  If we start counting on pad aborts pre launch as actual failures, then every rocket in us history goes from at a minimum decently reliable to abysmal, especially Delta IV.

    I'm only counting failures in this instance as either catastrophic engine failure resulting in at least loss of mission, if not vehicle. I don't really consider being careful about anomalous readings pre launch as failures, but that's just me

  10. How many RS-25s blew up during testing over how many years before becoming operational? IIRC only one RS-25 ever failed after that, and I have very few doubts that raptor will eventually get there as well. What you seem to be forgetting is that we are still very much in the testing phase of both starship and raptor, no one has ever stated that either was at an operational level of completion. Both are very high performance engines that push the envelope in their respective times, and both had to undergo a huge amount of testing. You seem to be the only one that fails to see this as a test campaign. If SpaceX claimed starship and raptor were operational, then I would have to agree, but they don't. How many "experimental landings" did falcon 9 make before they took out the "experimental" part? Most people already thought of the landings as routine by that point, and I'm sure that will be the case with starship to an even greater extent.

    Like I said in the last post, people said every step of the falcon campaign would be impossible right up until SpaceX did it, then shifted the goalposts back a bit. I remember having a conversation with my father about them landing on a barge back in 2015, where he said it would never happen. Now, over multiple launches I've watched with him, he still giggles like a little kid when they do it. I've said it before and I'll say it again, SpaceX has gotten pretty good at doing impossible things.

  11. The difference here is that the raptor is a completely novel engine design that had never been flown before, so failures should be expected. They are also testing and iterating on every engine, with raptor 3s starting to show the fruits of that labor. Raptor 3s are proving that they are substantially more reliable than the 2s, which in turn are more reliable than the 1s. You can't point to a few failed engines early on in a test program and say they are unreliable and always will be.

    Take a look at how long the RS-25s took to get right, and even after all those flights on the shuttle, sls had multiple failures with the same engines, so are those unreliable as well? Same goes for the F-1s

  12. You keep saying that these designs are for scifi, so that's where the designs will stay. These drives don't exist anywhere but the movies, and the odds of you figuring them out on a game forum are less than miniscule. I don't mean to come across as condescending, but there are much smarter people than us working on these problems, and they admit that we won't have them any time soon.

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