JoeSchmuckatelli

On a completely different topic: If anyone is looking for a really good read, that believe it or not has a tie-in to spaceflight, allow me to recommend: Entangled Life Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake (goodreads.com) An exceptionally well written (and easy to read) dive into all things fungi.

Makes sense

Which should help it decelerate... and presuming they are not ripped off during descent, wouldn't that be a good thing?

@magnemoe answered effectively, but I will add a couple of things. There are lots of ways to guestimate range, Special marks on the reticle can be referenced against a known profile (height, width, length) of a target or more technological aids - like radar, lasers, etc. Parallax is only one solution, with the obvious limitations you assumed correctly. I use 'guestimate' because there are also a myriad of ways for the range estimation to be off - it's really just to increase your chance of a hit on the first shot. Modern fire control systems are pretty effective; the firing agency (thing with the gun) rarely has to be able to see its own target anymore.

You still need at least 3 people per mission; one to go with you and one to stay inside to help you out. If your friend outside gets injured (and you're the only two) -- how are you getting back into the craft? ... actually - now that I think about it; unless automated or remoted for a single person to be able to get in/out without assistance it's a bad design... and someone will engineer a solution.

Begs a different question - how many batteries does it take to open the wormhole? That should provide the answer.

A doctor's note... Could get you a script for ANYTHING! ("No, no - see it clearly says 'two bottles of aspirin and a new car'... That's the only cure.")

Thanks, Mr. Pratchett!

'Easy to damage, hard to maintain' And ... Are the perfect answers. Thanks fellers! Edit - back to the question of hexes vs scales for reentry plasma - is there anything to add besides 'they just need to be good enough' and 'unnecessarily complicated /expensive for the comparable benefits'?

Wearing the airlock on your back is both stylish and comfortable. Especially while ice climbing on Europa

Sounds like a good time to engage @mikegarrison-whether standard plane skin / shape must be modified for supersonic / hypersonic flight. Of particular interest is the Harvard researchers' discovery that not only do the shapes improve drag, they increase lift. I know overall craft shape has been modified to enable supersonic flight - but has anyone looked at whether a modified skin is beneficial for super/hyper-sonic flight?

I'm interested in this as well - but I would think that a correct shape of scale would be less turbulent (c.f. Fish & Sharks). Speedo invented (a now banned) swimwear line for competitive swimmers which dramatically reduced drag, including features that mimicked the dermal denticles (scale like structures) found on sharks. While hexes are simple and break up the flow of plasma effectively - scale structures could improve or reduce drag and provide similar plasma protection https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/02/in-aerodynamic-performance-sharkskin-model-offers-more-lift-less-drag/

Easier than Asteroid Mining!

There's plenty on the bottom of the ocean.

Quibbler!

Well... They're kind of both; they don't need a runway to get up to or bleed off speed - so yeah, launch and landing are initially VTVL... But they also (apparently) have atmospheric flight capability (as neophytes would describe 'flight '). They're clearly not 'rockets' in the sense of streamlined 'go up and over as fast as you can' or 'fall with style until you flip and power to a stop' like SS is intended. But they do have the luxurious capability of being 'plane-like' once landed. I think that's what the OP wants (heck what we all want) - something with the convenience of a plane and the ability to drive it to the moon whenever we want to. Runways are not required - in fact the ability to park it in the back yard is a plus!

You referred to the criticism of remote control of tactical decision making - but you are forgetting who the real 'bad guy' of the series is... Hint: it's not the Xenomorph (corporations, maaan... They're EVIL)

Kublai does not approve of the export of silk worms Penalties are stiff

Yeah - if what we are talking about is just fiber and not sheathing - that's quite a bit more. (however, still not significant) So presuming the quality is sufficient to make it desirable - we are still talking about short runs - single center uses, or possibly adjacent center links - but not city to city.

Go to any 'book club' in suburban America and find out. Hint: it's all anyone but Nancy reads (and everyone is pretty much over her, anyway)

This kind of falls into the 'cool but impractical' category. Bulk fiber optic cable, 1,000 foot spool weighs 35 pounds and costs ~ $835. https://www.cablewholesale.com/products/fiber-optic/bulk-fiber/product-11f3-312nh.php The 3 modules (Command, manufacturer and reentry) combined weigh just 120 kg (~265 lbs). Let's graciously say that the reentry module can descend approximately 1/2 the total weight as finished product - you are looking at only 4 thousand - foot spools per descent. Total launch costs would have to be less than $2,000 per mission to have any chance of selling the product at any profit. So we are, again, looking at an experiment or proof of concept rather than any possible, profitable production technology.

That's the same photo (pretty sure) that I linked in the above post - judging by the shadows, it's literally one combined ship length away. https://nextbigfuture.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2021/07/booster4starship20photoshop-scaled.jpeg You can also judge by pickup truck lengths... it's not that far away.

Sorry - we are cross-posting: The top photo (the one that did not load) makes it look like the tank farm is only one BFR+SS length away from the launch table.

If the BFR pulls an "Astra" and flies off in the 'wrong' sideways orientation... a whole lot of stuff can go buh-bye in a hurry. The top photo (the one that did not load) makes it look like the tank farm is only one BFR+SS length away from the launch table.

Why is the launch pad and tower so close to everything? booster4starship20photoshop-scaled.jpeg (2560×1586) (nextbigfuture.s3.amazonaws.com) The way Kennedy is laid out - if something bad happens out at the pad, there's not much else going to go boom. but with SX... everything is at risk.