sevenperforce

Balloons have been inflated in orbit before; you just have to get the pressure right. A balloon pressurized to 3 atm at sea level is under the same stress as a balloon pressurized to 2 atm in a vacuum.

If it’s light enough, large enough, and stiff enough, it will deorbit with just fine with minimal heat shielding required.

The video shows an edge view of something that is not PICA-X. The earlier ITS configuration was 33% wider and made of carbon composite instead of stainless steel. You're once again comparing apples to oranges. Or, like, apples to broomsticks.

It has already been proposed. http://www.jpaerospace.com/ATO/ATO.html It has been discussed on this forum. It will not work. The problem is that a craft which relies upon buoyancy must, by definition, displace a volume of air greater than its own mass. In order to occupy that volume, you must have surface area. If you have surface area, you have drag, lots of it. Drag is quadratic to velocity, so if you are moving twice as fast through the air, you need four times as much thrust just to maintain velocity. Forget about acceleration. And you must stay in the air because that's the thing keeping you up. Doesn't work at all.

No sensor inputs, but you can definitely do some fun stuff with chaining KALs. I once built a bunch of cluster bombs which launched fireworks on impact with the ground by using two KALs: one to command the fireworks to fire and the other to stop the first KAL. The cluster bombs deployed parachutes which lowered the impact speed to just above the impact resistance of the part the second KAL was mounted on. I wonder if it would be possible to use old-fashioned stock hinges to couple disconnected vehicles so one vehicle would force the rover to maintain level movement, etc.

The six hexagonal tiles under the SpaceX logo are Starlink comm antennae, right?

Indeed. This whole claim that an SSTO can be made reusable with a payload penalty equal to just 10% of the stage dry mass is ludicrous. If that was the case, we would have reusable upper stages by now, because reusing an upper stage is necessarily easier than reusing an SSTO. The dry mass of the Falcon 9 upper stage is only 4.5 tonnes; there have been PLENTY of missions where a 450-kg payload penalty would have been acceptable. Centaur is even lighter, at 2.25 tonnes; there have been many, many Atlas V missions where the launch vehicle had enough performance reserve to make up for a 225 kg payload penalty. And we are finally on the cusp of having such a reusable upper stage now, Starship. At 85 tonnes dry, the reusable Starship has 89% mass growth over its notional expendable dry mass of 45 tons; adding in landing propellant reserves brings it to 115 tonnes or 156% mass growth. If it was possible to magically make an SSTO recoverable for only 10% of the vehicle dry mass, then SpaceX would simply apply those magical numbers to the notional 45-tonne expendable Starship and so the fully-reusable SH+SS would deliver 215 tonnes to LEO instead of only 150 tonnes. There is no mechanism, architecture, or configuration which can safely return a rocket stage from orbit to the launch site, for rapid reuse, for a payload penalty less than 10% of its dry mass. It does not exist.

What Elon actually said is that an optimized expendable Starship would put 250 tonnes into LEO while a reusable will put 150 tonnes into LEO. But that’s talking about Starship only; Superheavy is recovered in either case. Using realistic numbers with Silverbird gives you an orbital payload of 308 tonnes, expending both Superheavy and Starship. So the payload penalty for boostback recovery of Superheavy is (308-250)/308 or ~19%.

But it absolutely does not. If you put garbage numbers in, you get garbage numbers out. Superheavy has a dry mass of 200-220 tonnes, not the 136 tonnes you plugged into Silverbird. If you use realistic dry mass numbers and a tiny disposable fairing, expendable Superheavy puts 85-90 tonnes into LEO. We’ve explained repeatedly why this 10% value is nonsense. But even if it was realistic, do the math with the non-garbage numbers. 10% of the mass of Superheavy is 20-22 tonnes, so subtract that from the 85-90 tonnes of actual SSTO payload and you get 65-68 tonnes. That’s because the quoted payload values for SH+SS are based on realistic, real-world engineering numbers, not made-up numbers that don’t represent reality. If we plug your numbers (136 tonne SH, 45 tonne SS) for SH+SS into Silverbird, you get a payload capacity of 319 tonnes to LEO. If it in fact takes only 10% of dry mass to make an orbital stage fully reusable, as you claim, then making this SS reusable only reduces payload to 304 tonnes. And if your claim that boostback reuse reduces payload by 40-50% was correct (it’s not; that’s not what Elon was talking about), then making this SH reusable would reduce payload to 152-182 tonnes, which is still above the 145 tonnes you claim a reusable SSTO SH could get. In reality, none of these numbers actually mean anything because they are all bogus to begin with. Yet that is not what Elon or anybody else ever said.

They have expended everything so far. Okay, I mean, technically they did relaunch SN10 once. Yes, that's something to keep in mind. Let's take the first stage of Atlas V, for example. It can absolutely SSTO without any boosters or upper stage. It can even put a small payload into LEO while doing so. Can it come back to Earth? No.

You've acknowledged this, but you don't seem to accept it. Sam and Tom are the same size. Sam is an SSTO. He can take 10 apples to orbit. Tom is a TSTO. He can take 30 apples to orbit. Let's suppose that if we reuse Sam, Sam will lose 10% of his payload capacity. Sam can now only take 9 apples to orbit. Let's further suppose that if we reuse Tom, Tom will lose 50% of his payload capacity. Tom can now only take 15 apples to orbit. Tom still carries more apples than Sam. See?? Even if TSTO reuse was a 50% payload penalty and SSTO reuse was a 10% payload penalty (which is CATEGORICALLY wrong), you still have to account for the fact that the TSTO is carrying 3X more payload to begin with. It does not, it will not, and it cannot, and I have painstakingly shown you the math to prove it. If my math is wrong, show me. Small note, but this is not "doubly disadvantage". Dead weight on ascent and reduction in propellant capacity are two ways of saying the same thing. And keep in mind that thanks to the magic of staging, reduced performance on the first stage has only a small impact on the second stage payload. So even by Elon's statement, the number is a range of 40-50%, not the flat 50% you keep claiming. And this is for a specific architecture using a specific approach to reuse. You can't just handwave and pretend that the numbers for one vehicle are going to apply to all other vehicles and architectures. No. It does not lose "less than 10% of the dry mass on adding reusability systems." That number is wrong. Realistically, making an orbital vehicle reusable is going to require you to approximately double its dry mass. And even if the reuse penalty was only 10% of dry mass, that means MORE than a 10% payload loss, because an SSTO dry mass is inevitably going to exceed its payload mass. And even if the reuse penalty to payload was only 10%, that STILL wouldn't make it exceed the performance of a reusable TSTO, because a TSTO has so much more payload to begin with. Well you would have to scale based on total vehicle mass. Starship+Superheavy is about 40% heavier than Superheavy alone, so it's not a fair comparison. But you're right, the basic math still doesn't work out. If you scaled up Superheavy by 40% to have the same launch mass as the entire stack, then expendable payload capacity would only increase to 70 tonnes, which is still less than half the payload capacity of a fully reusable Superheavy/Starship TSTO. The booster does require less recovery mass, but for a boostback architecture it requires a lot of reserve propellant, which is treated as "dry mass" for ascent purposes. However, what @Exoscientist seems to think is that this boostback propellant cuts significantly into the payload of the upper stage, when in reality it does not. He is conflating recovery mass (which he insists is only 10% even though it's more) with payload penalties, when those are measurements of two completely different things. He's also ignoring the foundational advantage of the TSTO carrying more payload to begin with.

Ah, I must have missed those bits. Yeah, it was the fall of the Invisible Hand which made me think about this, originally. If it was in orbit, it would have stayed in orbit; losing engines makes it derelict but it doesn't make it deorbit. Of course the landing itself was questionable; no amount of body lift would have allowed for a transition to level flight, so perhaps some of the auxiliary engines were still functioning enough to counteract some gravity? This really fits the subsequent scenes in Rogue One and The Last Jedi, particularly that goshawful bombing run in TLJ. Every disabled ship begins to plummet straight down toward the surface the moment that it loses power. And when the bombs themselves finally drop, they do so under the obvious and apparent force of gravity. At the battle of Scarif in Rogue One, the ships drop as soon as they lose power, and the hammerhead cruiser that is used to push one star destroyer into another causes both to fall into the shield generator. The reason I don't think the in-universe answer is "their engines are so powerful they can actually just hover" is that we never see any downward-facing engines. In addition, ground vehicles are shown hovering even when the engines are idled. All of the bikes, groundspeeders, transports -- everything is able to zip along parallel to the ground without any continual use of energy. It's as if vehicles have some sort of invisible forcefield that allows them to repel the ground "at rest" without needing to burn any propellant or expend any energy to resist gravity. And like I said above, that's not physically impossible. A magnet doesn't expend any energy to stick to a refrigerator. In a sense, even the table where my laptop is currently sitting is providing separation between my laptop and the ground without expending energy. There's no physical reason why you can't have an engine or mechanism which can push or pull an object at a distance. It violates neither conservation of energy nor conservation of momentum. You need energy to make changes to the magnitude of the push or pull force, but you don't need to consume energy to maintain it.

A lot of the scenes in Star Wars make more sense if you assume the ships are not actually ever in orbit but have the same "float against gravity" tech that all the ground vehicles have. So getting to space is simply a matter of flying up there, since gravity itself is canceled out without a need for even using energy. There's no artificial gravity in the spaceships; they're just standing under normal gravity. That's not even physics-breaking.

A reusable first stage which uses a boostback and landing burn will have a lower total payload than one which is expended, yes. Reusing the first stage cuts into the payload of an existing TSTO architecture. And since an optimized TSTO architecture will have VASTLY higher payload than an SSTO of equivalent launch mass, losing 50% of your payload still beats out even an expendable SSTO. It cannot. And that's not even what your own numbers said. You said that the payload penalty would be 10% of the total vehicle dry mass, not 10% of the payload. If you have an SSTO that masses 70 tonnes dry and delivers 30 tonnes to LEO, and you want to claim that you can make that 70-tonne SSTO reusable by adding 10% of its dry mass, then you need 7 tonnes, which cuts your payload by 23%. Much more than 10%. No, because even if your numbers were right (which they aren't), you're comparing apples and oranges. Even if it was true that an SSTO can be reused with only a 10% payload penalty and a TSTO requires a 50% payload penalty, which it isn't, that STILL doesn't mean the SSTO beats the TSTO, because the payload of the TSTO was already 3-4X greater than what the SSTO could manage. If your TSTO already delivers 3-4X more payload than an SSTO of equivalent size, then losing half of your payload mass STILL beats out the SSTO even before you apply the SSTO reuse penalty. The mass for the expendable version is 40 tonnes. The mass for the tanker/cargo version is 85 tonnes. The mass for the Mars transport passenger version is ~100 tonnes.

If you did it perfectly you could use an alloy that is stored in solid form and then melts and flows into the chamber to react as a liquid at the operating temperature of the engine. No tank required.

Just massive.

As @KSK already pointed out (and as I and others have now pointed out several times), hybrid rockets are chemical rockets. There have been some proposals to refine aluminum powder out of lunar regolith and use it with oxygen (presumably obtained from silicon oxides in the regolith) in hybrid rockets built on the moon, but that wouldn't be "wilderness refueling" at all; that would be a large industrialized effort building expendable rockets. If your goal is a reusable rocket that can be refueled by ISRU, I can't think of a worse way to do it than hybrids. Compressors? What on earth are you talking about? Hybrid rockets still require large tanks to hold the liquid propellant; you're not really improving anything. Some solid fuel types are denser than some liquid fuel types but that's true of anything.

You're correct, the plan was nukes. Supersized explosive charges won't work; if you're going to use explosive chemicals then you put them into an engine in small amounts, after all. The reason to use nukes was that nukes have a spectacularly high energy density. One element of good news here: nukes are notoriously tricky things that do not want to go off. Shock or nearby explosions or whatever won't trigger them; they have to be commanded to explode or they won't.

The size of the ship doesn't really matter unless the crew cabin is far from the center of mass. Turning feels the same to the crew whether you're in a small ship or a big ship. But why would you turn off the engines in order to pitch, yaw, or roll? That doesn't make sense. Just use the engines to provide whatever attitude change you want. A container-ship-sized spaceship wouldn't have any more trouble with g-forces resulting from turns than an actual container ship has with g-forces resulting from turns. This seems like a problem in search of a problem. I would say a solution in search of a problem but it's not clear that there's a solution involved.

As I said, in actuality the reusable SSTO gets at or above the payload of the reusable TSTO because of the severe payload loss from the reusable TSTO having to keep a large amount of propellant on reserve in the first stage to cancel out the forward motion then boost back to the landing site. You've said this several times before. It is false. Absolutely, categorically, wholly wrong. This is not how the math works. Consider a putative vehicle with a launch mass of 2000 tonnes. For the sake of simplicity, let's say it is launching methalox propellant as payload to an orbital prop depot so we don't have to worry about fairings or payload mass. Let's make all the assumptions in favor of SSTO over TSTO: equal structural mass ratio on both stages, same engines, same specific impulse, same recovery mass penalty, same T/W ratio. Let's set the structural mass ratio at ~30:1 and use enough sea level Raptor 2 engines to give a T/W ratio of 1.5 (or as close to it as we can come). Let's set the recovery mass penalty at 10% of total dry mass even though that's wildly unrealistic (it will be much lower for a first stage and much higher for a second stage or SSTO). Finally, because we'll be using vacuum thrust and isp, let's set the required dV for LEO at 9.6 km/s. Then we can just figure out how much propellant we have remaining when we reach 9.6 km/s of dV, which gives us our total payload. Raptor 2 masses 1.6 tonnes and produces 230 tonnes thrust at sea level. Using your 358 seconds of vacuum specific impulse and 330 seconds of specific impulse at sea level, that's 358/330 or 8.5% greater vacuum thrust, for a total of 2448 kN of vacuum thrust. However, for liftoff thrust considerations, we need to use sea-level thrust. Since the launch mass of 2000 tonnes is going to be the same whether it is an SSTO or a TSTO, the liftoff thrust needs to be 3000 tonnes, which will require thirteen Raptor 2 engines off the pad. First we do the math for the SSTO case. Thirteen Raptor 2 engines mass 21 tonnes, leaving 1,979 tonnes to play with. Using our structural mass ratio of 30:1, that gives us 64 tonnes of structural mass which means 75 tonnes of dry mass. But as you'll recall we have a 10% payload penalty for recovery which we will pretend is enough for deorbit props, TPS, landing gear, and landing props, so that adds 8 tonnes, bringing dry mass to 83 tonnes with 1917 tonnes of propellant. By the rocket equation, mf = m0 / eΔV/ve, and ve is 9.81 m/s2 * 358 s or 3512 m/s. e9600/3512 = 15.39 and m0 is 2000 tonnes so mf = 130. 130 tonnes minus 83 tonnes of dry mass means this SSTO reaches LEO with 47 tonnes of propellant as payload for the propellant depot. Now let's try doing the same math, but for a TSTO. We assume that the first stage provides impulse up to a total ΔV of v1, where it stages at a velocity of vs. Note that vs is significantly less than v1 because v1 includes gravity drag, aerodynamic drag, and pressure drag. To return to the launch site, the first stage executes a boostback burn vb which is equal to the horizontal component of vs plus whatever additional impulse is needed to get a ballistic trajectory back to the pad. In order to make this as generous as possible to the SSTO case and as punishing as possible to the TSTO case, we will set vb = (vs + v1)/2 even though it would never be that high in reality. Gravity drag is negligible for the second stage, so the second stage needs only provide ΔV equal to 7.8 km/s - vs. This means all of the drag is concentrated in the first stage, making v1 = vs + (9.6 km/s - 7.8 km/s). The question then becomes, where do we put vs? Well, we can balance the first and second stage however we want. General wisdom says to make the total calculable ΔV on both stages approximately equal, but since reuse changes the calculation, we don't necessarily have to follow that advice. We know the total mass of the vehicle is 2000 tonnes so let's look at what happens when we vary the total wet mass of the second stage. As you can see, as long as the second stage wet mass is greater than ~10% of the total launch mass, TSTO is going to beat out SSTO every time. This is precisely what we would expect. The efficiency of staging is vast; losses due to boostback propellant reserves are not going to cut into that unless your upper stage is comically small. Changing the math won't help you because any changes to one stage will be translated to the other stage. And this was with ALL the most generous assumptions. A TSTO first stage will NOT need as much recovery mass and an SSTO will need significantly more. A second stage can use a vacuum engine and a better structural mass ratio. Anything an SSTO can do, a TSTO can do better. There are certain advantages to SSTO architectures, but the math does not support your notion that the TSTO boostback penalty is significant enough to overcome the efficiencies of staging. There is no forward skirt that extends beyond the tank. The top dome of the tank is 3.7 meters so that's the most you can subtract off the top. No, you can't subtract off the height of the bottom tank dome, because the thrust structure transfers the engine thrust directly to the tank walls, so you need the walls to extend down to the bottom. Sure. You also need the shielding around the engines but that can be thinner steel so we'll set it aside for now. So the actual first stage tank wall height is 70 - 3.7 - 3.1 = 63.2 meters. A fraction, yes; negligible, no. You can't just ignore the mass of parts of the vehicle. Plus, there are actually three domes since Superheavy uses a common bulkhead. So the total area of the steel required is going to be 63.2 meters * pi * 9 meters + 1.5 * 4 * pi * 4.5^2 or 2,169 square meters. With 4mm walls that's a volume of 8.676 cubic meters; with 3mm walls that's a volume of 6.507 cubic meters. The density of low-carbon 304L stainless is 8 tonnes per cubic meter. So the actual structural mass of Superheavy tanks alone is going to be 52-69 tonnes depending on whether 4mm or 3mm steel is used. By the way, you don't have to worry about mass flow rate in calculating the vacuum thrust. Just multiply sea level thrust by the ratio of vacuum isp to sea level isp. Sea level isp for the raptor is 330 seconds. I think you're underestimating thrust a little. Anyway, Elon's BOE estimate at 40 tonnes was with no fairing. If you want to get a payload to orbit you need some kind of fairing. And if you want to add "reusability systems" then the fairing can't be jettisoned. So you think that you can make a stripped-down expendable Starship fully reusable by adding only 5 tonnes of dry mass? That doesn't make sense. There IS a fully-reusable Starship, and it has a mass of 85 tonnes. That's just the fairing and the flaps and the flap drive motors and the heat shield, no crew quarters. And if you added three more engines to it then it would be 90 tonnes. And it needs to reserve 30 tonnes of propellant for re-entry and landing. So "dry mass" in this scenario is 120 tonnes and the actual useable propellant is 1,170 tonnes. Plugging that into Silverbird: Doesn't close. The Dragon 2 crew capsule dry mass without the trunk includes aeroshell, heat shield, and parachutes. The square-cube law is going to help if you're scaling up, since there are a lot of things that don't scale linearly when you increase passenger capacity. So no, you cannot simply multiply out and subtract 60 tonnes. The 40-tonne mass Elon quoted, again, is without flaps or heat shield or recovery propellant or anything else. I don't see how you're claiming you can make a stripped-down 50-tonne Starship recoverable using only 5 tonnes of recovery mass. You talk about PICA-X being lightweight and everything, which is great, but let's do the math. The Apollo CM heat shield was 1400 kg and covered a surface area of 11.95 square meters. The tank section and skirt of Starship, with no fairing at all, is 28 meters high, so covering one-half of it with TPS would mean 28 meters * pi * 4.5 meters = 396 square meters. Let's suppose PICA-X is half the weight of Apollo-era ablative TPS. 0.5 * 1400 kg * 396 m2 / 11.95 m2 = 23.2 tonnes. Let's be generous and say you can cut that in half again, both because Starship is fluffier than a crew capsule and because you only need to deal with LEO re-entry and not cislunar re-entry; that's still 11.6 tonnes, which is more than twice your estimate for total recovery mass. But let's go with that. You've launched your stripped-down 9-engine Starship to LEO, and your 48.6-tonne payload capacity has been cut back to 37 tonnes due to TPS weight. How are you going to get it back down to Earth? You'll need deorbit propellant, about 100 m/s worth. That's about 3 tonnes. With 9 engines in the back and nothing in the front, Starship is a tail-first lawn dart, so you're going to need wings or flaps of some sort to keep the heat shield oriented properly. But let's pretend you don't need wings at all for attitude control (perhaps you have four mini-Raptor thrusters mounted dorsally?), and you're going to just land the whole thing with parachutes in order to avoid needing any more reserve propellant. You'll need a lot of parachutes. Total dry mass is now nearly as much as the Shuttle SRBs, which each required 3.5 tonnes worth of drogue and main parachutes in order to reduce splashdown speed to 23 m/s. Let's imagine those mini-Raptor thrusters you used for attitude control (using no propellant to do so) are going to provide your soft landing. If they're mounted dorsally, then you're looking at cosine losses of at least 30%. To get the 2+ gees required for an efficient landing, they'll need to produce a total of 123 tonnes of thrust plus another 43% to make up for cosine losses, so that's a total of 176 tonnes of thrust; if you can scale down the Raptors perfectly then you're looking at a total of 1.2 tonnes of engines. Even though a smaller engine won't be as efficient as Raptor, let's pretend it will. Your isp of 330 s is cut back to 231 seconds due to cosine losses. Factoring in gravity drag and the need to cancel out residual horizontal velocity from the chutes, you'll need about three tonnes of propellant. You're also going to need some sort of landing gear, which is going to be around 2-3% of landed mass. Let's be friendly and call it 2%, so that's 1.3 tonnes. So your actual payload to orbit has been reduced from 48.6 tonnes to 25 tonnes. That's still something, right? Yes...but you have no fairing, no RCS, no propellant reserves for controlling re-entry attitude...nothing. And that's making all the assumptions in favor of the SSTO.

Well, look at actual dogfighting in history. It had its heyday over the skies of Europe during World War I, with nearly equal amounts of excitement during World War II, and a fair degree of action during the Korean and Vietnam era. By the time the Top Gun era rolled around and the Teen Series fighters debuted, the age of true dogfighting was nearly at an end. Today, the Su-57 and F-22 can achieve truly astounding feats of maneuverability, and yet stealth and weapons integration make these abilities superfluous. A fifth-generation fighter can shoot virtually anything else out of the sky before it’s even spotted on radar. So what created the age of dogfighting, and what ended it? What did aerial combat in the world wars have that air encounters today lack? The dogfights over Europe, particularly during World War II, evolved in connection with aerial bombing campaigns. The campaigns did not focus on particularly strategic targets; instead, the goal of the bombing was to destroy industry and slowly extinguish the enemy’s will and capacity to fight. Bombers were slow and heavy, so even when they bristled with defense weaponry they were easy targets for nimble interceptors. And the bombers in turn were targeting ground targets because neither side had developed sufficiently accurate cruise missiles or ballistic missiles. Dogfights arose not because of point defense but because fighters escorting bombers clashed with the fighters attempting to stop the bombers. Dogfights were characterized by relatively low closing speeds, saturated skies, localized targets, and (of course) no guided missiles. Finally, air combat was generally symmetric. In contrast, air combat today is characterized by extremely high closing speeds and the absolute dominance of guided missiles. Thanks to carrier groups and in-air refueling, heavy low-flying bombers are wholly obsolete; ground attack is carried out either by high-altitude stealth bombers or by small fighter-bombers. Targets are wholly strategic. And it is rare or nonexistent that air combat sees anything remotely approaching air symmetry; it is almost always one side carrying out precision strikes with asymmetric resistance. In order to get dogfights in space, we’d need to come up with a situation that looks more like the first situation than the second situation. Rather than trying to replicate this in Earth orbit, which is a losing battle, let’s try something more interesting: the Jovian moons. Instead of warring countries on adjacent continents, you have warring countries on adjacent moons. So how do we get fighters and bombers? One option is to follow the same tack as WWII and ignore strategic targets. The Jovian moons have no atmospheres, so let’s say that the surfaces of each moon have tremendous laser-based defensive capabilities which obviate any direct attacks on the surface. Thus, like WWII, the goal is not to cut the head off the enemy but cripple their capacity to fight. We already know how to do that in a space context: Kessler Syndrome. If you can enter LEO, dump a bunch of nails and chaff and other junk, and then leave, you can cut off your enemy’s ability to launch. Cut off the shipping lanes and your enemy is dead in the water. So your target is low orbit over enemy moons. Your “bombers” need large payload and large dV reserves in order to insert into orbit and drop their Kessler bombs and get back home. Your fighters defend (or intercept) the bombers. Seems like it could work.

You can always go the BG/Dune approach and just ban thinking machines

Yeah, if your goal is to get space dogfights then you either have to cut corners with the physics or you need to come up with some plot reasons.

This depends on the setting. Take a Star Wars, or even Star Trek (or Expanse) type of setting. A small ship (Millennium Falcon, or smaller) that can accelerate at 1g for a few weeks might not be a "missile" that could be carried by another small ship, but a "torpedo" carried by the Death Star could easily be the size of the Falcon (or a fighter). Oh, sure. I’m talking about an in-universe constraint in which no ships can carry other ships with these magical drives. So you can certainly build a missile with a magical acceleration but it has to be independently flown from the shipyard to its target.

Plugging in realistic numbers for the mass of Superheavy and adding a payload fairing no longer than the one on Falcon 9, Silverbird gives me an 88.6 tonne payload with 33 engines and an 84.4 tonne payload with 27 engines. And this is all extremely silly because why would you expend an entire booster for an 80-90 tonne payload when you could recover the booster and expend only an upper stage to get 3x as much payload into LEO?? Anything an SSTO can do, a TSTO can do better.