sevenperforce

We will! JWST cannot image Earth, Venus, or Mercury because it needs to keep its mirror pointed away from the sun. But it will be able to image Mars and objects in the asteroid belt and all of the dwarf planets and all of the giant planets. It won't produce the highest-resolution photos of all time, mind you. Despite its sensitivity, its photos of Saturn won't be as good as the ones taken by Cassini and its photos of Jupiter won't be as good as the ones taken by Juno. But it will be able to probe into infrared which will tell us a lot more new things. This is the resolution with which Hubble sees Saturn: JWST can gather six times as much light.

So you smear Apollo-era TPS all over it, add "landing gear", and...what? Watch it burn to slag as it plummets uncontrollably, tail-first into the atmosphere?

Same concept for Carina.

I made this to show just how much detail we are seeing for the first time:

Welllllll never mind about that "no visible shockwave" bit. So it does look like there was definitely a detonation wave. That being said, the massive gout of fire that followed suggests only a very minimal amount of fuel actually was involved in the detwave so hopefully that's a good sign.

If there was a fuel-air detonation, it was a very small one. There was no visible shockwave, which is what you would expect to see from a proper stoichometric fuel-air detonation. My guess is a small fuel-air detonation near the vehicle followed by conflagration of fuel-rich preburner exhaust. If there was damage to the vehicle it would have been from the initial small detonation; the conflagration should be less of an issue. Delta IV Heavy lights itself on fire at launch, after all; I can't imagine a little gout of fire is any more dangerous of a regime to the booster than the expected re-entry conditions. The fire probably damaged GSE, though. My guess is that they'll need to replace a half-dozen engines and a few dozen GSE parts. I don't know why they would be running the fuel preburners without an overpressure notice. That seems dumb.

It's the zoom that gets me.

Looks like it has been pushed to 5:30.

May I just ask, what kind of glide ratio does that monster have???

How fast can you get a car moving on the runway? Here's the twist: you can't use powered wheels or reaction engines. You must build your drive wheels from structural parts and drive them with rotors. DLC will obviously be required. How fast can your vehicle go?

Garbage in, garbage out. The "10% of dry mass estimate" is a garbage number so you get meaningless results. Absolutely meaningless. No, there isn't enough space on the back end to fit bigger engines. 33 is crowding it quite a bit already. Silverbird isn't going to factor in additional Isp losses from a poorly-optimized sea level nozzle.

Mainly because of professional drivers I think. It might be because the graphic is showing fatalities per billion passenger-miles, not fatalities per billion miles. If a crowded bus has between 30 and 50 people on board then its passenger-miles number is multiplied dramatically in comparison to a passenger car that may only carry one or two people. Add to this the fact that most buses operate at relatively low speeds. Accidents may be every bit as common but actual fatalities are going to be extremely rare because you're just not traveling fast enough to have serious injuries. That's probably why the number is higher for trains; train accidents are more likely to kill you. Of course, so are plane accidents. But planes go much faster much faster than trains so the passenger-mile number will be skewed in their favor.

The full image dump releases on my birthday.

Yeah, once the SRBs light up there is nothing you can do to stop them However, SLS does have a solid-fueled launch abort system which can pull the crew to safety if the launch fails. The Shuttle did not have this, and so any abort prior to SRB separation was LOCV.

But not towards the nearby planet. Directly towards the nearby planet. The whole battle is taking place directly above the curve of a planet and all the ships have their "down" oriented planetward.

I once used this approach to drop cluster bombs that floated down on chutes and launched fireworks at touchdown. That was cool. With the ability of the KAL-1000 to toggle same vehicle interaction on parts, I wonder if there is a way to use same vehicle interaction nondestructively, perhaps with a docking port on a hinge or something, to turn outside stimuli into KAL input. Can a docking port with same vehicle interaction enabled dock with a port on the same craft?

One thing you can do with a KAL-1000 currently, which is pretty cool, is to use it to mimic the landing probes used by the LMs in the Apollo program. Put one KAL-1000 on the LM, loop it, and program it to set the landing engine thrust limiter to zero. Attach a piece with very low impact resistance, offset it so that it hits the ground before the landing legs, and then attach a second KAL to that piece. The second KAL is also looped but has higher priority and sets the landing engine thrust limiter to 100%. Have them both activate at staging. At touchdown, that piece will break, severing the connection with the second KAL and allowing the first KAL to take over and shut down the engine.

The logic gates and the meta game are AMAZING. It's a shame the KAL can't accept inputs other than from the user, though. That would really make things exciting.

A while back I used pistons, fireworks, and rotation servos with a KAL-1000 to make a fully automatic multi-burst-mode recoil-compensating rotating GAU-8 Avenger which I then mounted on an A-10 Warthog. Ammo is low unless you turn on infinite fuel. And while I was using KAL abuse to increase the projectile speed of the firework launcher for visual effect (and to actually be able to destroy buildings), that's not necessary to the design. I could have made the rear part of the fuselage shorter and put the Wheezleys inside of 1.875-m fairings to make it look more realistic. EDIT: Just like on the real A-10, the rotation ensures that the barrel which activates is always exactly centerline of the aircraft, which prevents the recoil from producing any yaw on the vehicle. It has 7 barrels just like the real GAU-8.

UPDATE: I tried using RAPIERs but apparently they have a wildly offset center of mass and as a result it is impossible to put them in anything remotely resembling a stable flight configuration for a horizontal takeoff unless it's substantially longer. As ugly as it might be, there's actually no clipping, other than the clipping into the wing. All of the pieces are node-attached. The longest span is the air intakes and the small sized nosecones. This "plane" with the RAPIERs can of course be launched vertically to terrific effect but then it becomes more of a rocket, even with the RAPIERs in airbreathing mode. I've experimented with a few different launch profiles and the best speed I've gotten is 1562 m/s which at 2 meters in length gives a score of 781 body-lengths per second. Better than the Junos but not by as much as I expected. The trick with the RAPIERs is getting high enough to find reduced drag and not burn up but not so high that you run out of air before you've gotten to your top possible speed. I used infinite fuel for this run because I wanted to get a feel for what was possible. I could of course replicate readily enough without infinite fuel by using drop tanks.

I think this should approach the maximum efficiency without a bunch of clipping. The Wonky Wing has remarkably good handling thanks to an abundance of reaction wheels. With a TWR well over 1, takeoff is easy. Rapidly supersonic. The highest speed I've hit in approximately-level flight was 789.6 m/s, which at a body length of 1.3 meters gives me a score of 607.38 which seems pretty decent. I've taken it up to 10 km and then done a number of dives at various descent angles to try to get the highest impact speed...it's hard to get the perfect combination of thrust and drag based on the Juno's thrust curve and altitude and airspeed all at once. The highest I've gotten it in a dive was 792.7 m/s which is a score of 609.77 body lengths per second. This is probably close to the limit of velocity on Juno engines with anything resembling a controllable setup. If you start a bunch of ridiculous clipping and offsetting and aero exploits you might be able to get the body length under 1.3 meters but the smallest retractable landing gear are about that long anyway so you'd either have to go with jettisonable landing gear or use the fixed ones, and drag will be an issue with the fixed ones. The Juno should get better all-around performance than the Wheesley. Once you move up to the Panther, your engine length alone is already 1.5 meters so if you add the shortest intake (0.5 meters) you've already set your score back by 54% right out of the gate. With afterburner the Panther can get you up to around 1,034 m/s at sea level but that still would yield a lower score than the Junos. The shortest intake + the RAPIER can get you down to 1.8 m/s so theoretically that should be able to beat the Juno approach.

An expendable stripped-down Starship with three engines is 40 tonnes dry. Dump the engines and you lose about 6 tonnes so that's 34 tonnes. Bulk density of methalox at Raptor mixture is 989.2 kg/m3 and it has a prop load of 1200 tonnes so that means it has an internal volume of roughly 1213 cubic meters. We know the pressure and temperature relative to elevation on Venus, and we know that CO2 has a density of 1.87 kg/m3 at 15°C and 1 atm, so by the ideal gas law we can easily calculate the density of the Venusian atmosphere at any altitude: You can therefore see that Starship would need to be below 15 km before it would be able to displace even its own dry mass in atmosphere. But of course Starship will need to be pressurized in order to keep the atmosphere from crushing it. If you press it with residual methane, which has a density of 0.671 kg/m3 at 15°C and 1 atm, then you can plot buoyancy vs altitude: A little interpolation gives us neutral buoyancy for Starship at ~5.8 km. Deorbiting Starship from interplanetary velocities, however, will be left as an exercise for the reader.

Could be purely for aesthetics, I suppose. Or maybe that's ablative paint to compensate for any plasma spillover from the tiles. Finally, blackbodies radiate better than anything else, so maybe they painted the regions closest to the heat shield black to allow them to re-radiate heat away more efficiently. That last one might be a stretch but you never know. Is it just me or do those grid fins look like they have shorter chord length than earlier iterations for Superheavy?

There's been a great deal of discussion of this concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_airship You can get to the required compressive strengths needed to have a spherical vacuum balloon using aluminum alloys, but you'd need internal reinforcement to prevent buckling. Or perhaps you could have some sort of rotating (un)pressure vessel? The rotation could be set up to provide auxiliary lift AND supply centrifugal force to prevent buckling, at least in the plane normal to the axis of rotation.