sevenperforce

If anyone wants to propose a list of rockets in exchange for a donation, I certainly won't turn it down!

Cold gas thrusters for RCS on an automobile may be an...unconventional...idea, but there's no reason it wouldn't work.

I'm still making posters -- currently working on Orbital ATK. The hardest part for me is curating a list and finding reference images, so if you can do that, I'll make the graphics themselves.

Since the heavy keel was often not enough to keep a wooden sailing ship upright, virtually all wooden ships were forced to carry ballast: something heavy in the lowest hold of the ship to pull your keel down. Modern ships use a water tank for precise ballasting; wooden sailing ships carried quarried stone or lead. Obvious downside: with a hold full of stone, you're no longer relying on the buoyancy of your ship's structure to keep you afloat. If you start taking on water (either due to a hull breach or because wave action causes hull flexion and opens gaps) faster than the bilge pumps can clear it, the water displaces the air in the hold and your ballast drags you down to meet Davy Jones. This is one of the many reasons why there is a practical limit on the size of wooden ships. The bending moment of hull beams scales with the keel length, so waves will cause the beams to flex and open up much much wider in a 200' ship than in a 100' ship. Something the size of the mythic Noah's Ark would have needed a hull 1/3 the thickness of the whole ship just to hold together, with granite ballast completely filling the hold just to keep it right-side-up, and constantly-operating modern bilge pumps to get rid of the water constantly pouring in through gaps.

Perhaps using "flaps" to vary wing AoA during prograde flight would help.

Make me a list and include links to reference images, and I'll see what I can do.

In a subsequent tweet, the implication was that they'd pack a COPV full of compressed nitrogen and refill it periodically with an electric pump. So the car would have cold-gas thrusters, not combustion rockets. Might give you a nasty case of frostbite if you put your hand in front of it, but no worse than putting your hand in front of a gas-auto tailpipe. I mean...yeah, this actually would work. If the cold gas thrusters have enough kick it COULD really help with cornering, takeoff, and so forth.

You need to keep the solar panels in full sunlight, so you'd point the ship either radially toward the sun, or radially away from it. Probably the latter. In that instance, you wouldn't ever have the sun in your eyes.

Why would stars be invisible? The Apollo astronauts saw stars. You wouldn't really want to look directly at the sun.

it is very simple b, just do like this: have a darker/brighter variant of all colors from your pallete while you are drawing -> after the coloring is done you just repaint one side of an object you want to add shading to -> tiforp What is easier, for me, is to use Paint to grab a gradient from an existing reference and then stretch it across the desired space.

Obligatory:

My plan (because jet engines work underwater) would be to put STOL-assist jet engines in the fuselage and simply flip upside-down for submarine activity.

If they are going to rotate and un-rotate, they'd either need to pack a yyyyyyuge reaction wheel, or burn a lot of RCS fuel.

Over 3 RPM is going to be noticeably unpleasant for at least some of the passengers, though it is possible they may be able to acclimatize over time. We don't have long-term studies of the effects of centrifugal gravity.

I'm not entirely sure why the N-1 elected to use grid fins on its S1, but that might speak to overall lacks, too.

Extreme mode: Using an SSTO, take off from KSC, dock with a station in LEO, re-enter, dock with the underwater base, come back to the surface, and fly back to KSC. You should be able to refuel at the KSC and (in theory) repeat. You can refuel at the station and at the base if you like.

Holy crap that was amazing.

Good catch. in a pack 30 at once. Poor rocket design + unfinished engine. The NK-15 couldn't be test-fired at all. Once it had fired once, it was melted inside and useless. You could certainly test it, but once you tested it, you couldn't use it again. In fact, that is how the test system ran. They would pick one engine out of the production run to test-fire and hope the rest of the engines in that production run also worked. Could they have static-fired the N-1? Sure! They would have had to load all 30 engines onto the first stage, fill up the N-1, start up, shut down, and then replace all 30 engines.

The NK-33s were not unreliable engines (although N-1's second failure did originate in one of the LOX turbopumps due to burn-through, probably the result of a manufacturing defect); with that one exception, all 119 other NK-33s launched in the N-1 test program performed perfectly, as far as the individual engines are concerned. The problems all came from firing all thirty engines together. The NK-33s couldn't be test-fired, so they couldn't do a brief test fire (like a Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy) with the whole stack. Issues like pogo and wiring interactions popped up only in a full stack. So while the engines themselves are fairly reliable (given their cutting-edge design), their inability to be test-fired doomed the N-1's first stage from the kind of testing it would have needed to perform properly. Yes, but not a lot. Advantage of a lower-latitude launch is more about needing less dV for inclination matching than about needing less dV for getting orbital.

Sustained 3 rpm acceleration might prove to cause second-order effects over time. 20-50% of Mars gravity would be enough to make mobility easy without losing your sense of up and down, and avoid stuff floating about, but avoid motion sickness. Just make the beds parallel to the axis of rotation.

4.5 meters is not a great radius for that sort of thing. Also the windows would be in the floor.

This is a belief. This is not a scientific view. Science never gives 100%. But see, therein lies the point. I could not say "I'm 100% certain there were never any ancient aliens" in a vacuum. Science cannot prove a negative. But I can say "I know what proof I'd need to conclude there were ancient aliens, and I'm 100% sure nothing has met that standard of proof." This gives us the opportunity to inspect the "what level of proof is necessary" question rather than nitpicking semantics.

The funny thing is...this brings us to a new question. What level of anomaly (accuracy in ancient prophecies, mathematical structures in ancient tombs, oddly-intricate relics) would we, as present investigators, need to see before an "ancient aliens" or "time traveler" hypothesis would make more sense than coincidence? To be clear, I am 100% certain that all "ancient alien" and related theories are utter bunk. But the reason I know they are utter bunk is because I can tell you what sort of proof I'd need to see in order to be convinced.

Challenger and Columbia and SpaceShip One all trace to design problems. If it's designed properly, later human error is accommodated for. The NK-33 uses ORSC (oxy-rich staged combustion) that melts turbopumps like butter. As a result, it's cooled ablatively. You can't fire the engine more than once because it ablates away the structure.