sevenperforce

That's my thought. @RealKerbal3x Interesting that they already freely have circumferential straight seams. Also, I think we have a candidate for those catching arms: Look how absolutely massive those hinges are.

Of note: Just below the tip, the taper is so aggressive that they are only doing three tile layers between each latitudinal straight seam. Probably large-medium-small. There are no studs above that line so the odds of a large single-piece (or perhaps 2-3 piece) glued-on nosecone seem high.

Now THAT is the most Kerbal thing I have ever seen. How many times have I wrapped an ungodly number of Vector engines around the base of a monster rocket.....

Fascinating that they installed the Raptors underneath the mobile mount. I was wondering how they were going to do the transport but that makes sense. Note also that they are now using the catch points for the hoist lift. Just a single I-beam across the top, secured to the catch points. And here's what looks like one of SN20's aft fins being carted past the base of BN4:

Wait, are they installing the engines before they transport the booster?? I thought engine installation was going to keep happening on the pad!

I'm assuming they will just use hexes cut to fit. That's what we see on the flaps.

Looks absolutely amazing. I now think I know how they are tiling the nosecone, too. It's absolutely ingenious and I can't believe I didn't think of it. (well, actually I kind of DID think of it, nearly...it was my first render a few months ago) I went through and pixel-counted the average width of each tile in each row. What I found is that they step up very very gradually. The way the math works out, it appears they are using just two extra tile widths in addition to the regular hexes. They are narrower, but they don't taper. EDIT: Here's an earlier wide-angle shot of the flap being lowered into place.

Yes, it's a really good look. The tiles go past the halfway point in certain areas to protect from plasma streaming around the elonerons. I don't think there is any suggestion of doing a kick-flip with Superheavy. Superheavy's engine cluster is much much bigger and heavier than Starship's and so it will be VERY tail-heavy; there's no way they could get it to fall horizontally. Starship needed the LOX header tank in the nosecone just to get the right balance, after all. I would more-expect to see them replace Superheavy's grid fins with conventional fins/canards like the ones on New Shepard and New Glenn. They could be fixed to vertical during ascent and then rotate to act like airbrakes on descent: The canards/fins could turn in unison for guidance during initial re-entry and then turn opposite to each other to act as airbrakes and really slow down the booster.

Finally some really good detail on the SN20 nosecone heat shield. It looks like we have tiles that become progressively narrower (but do not taper) with each row, moving up, until you hit a seam and start over. It's particularly visible at the top seam, between the very thin/narrow tiles and the much wider tiles above. Also note curious square tiles on the flap fairing with hex tiles between them, custom-cut to fit.

As the dad of the kid on the spectrum, I am inclined to think it has a lot to do with Elon being on the spectrum as well.

The catch/lift point is just barely under the grid fins: It’s the thing that looks like a bathtub faucet. These could be just for a fit check, but how can you be sure these cannot rotate? The rotating actuator could be inside and thus concealed.

It's all coming together....

Communication is hard. How we choose to communicate surrounding issues of public health and public safety has major consequences. How much is too much to share? How much is not enough? Would we rather use strong communication to get highly effective compliance from a small subset of the population or moderate our language and get less effective compliance, but from more people? What are the short-term goals? What are the long-term goals? It is all extremely difficult.

One advantage is that if the arms were to miss the catch/lift points, they would likely still snag on the grid fins. Would probably still cause serious damage but would at least prevent RUD and pad FUBAR.

My intuition is that the drag will be higher in this configuration BUT the weight will be lower and so the overall penalty will be negligible, if anything. They are pretty thick folded, but in the folded config the airflow would end up going around them pretty smoothly. There’s going to be a lot more overall shock drag from the large extension.

It looks absolutely accursed. But, as I once pointed out: if duct taping fresh hot chicken sandwiches to the fairing would improve aerodynamics, rocket engineers would make a Chick Fil A run before every launch.

I blew up that photo and the pattern is very curious. It looks like there are spacers between some of the tiles? But the straight seam solution was clearly the straightforward one. My understanding is that the central ring of engines on the N-1 did not have particularly good gimbal range and so the grid fins were intended for roll control. I don’t think they worked very well, though. In contrast, the four large fixed fins on the Saturn V were only there to provide passive aerodynamic stability in an abort scenario. IIRC the vehicle had more passive stability than expected and so if crewed flights had continued much longer they would have axed the fins. The only reason that the Skylab launch had the fins was because it was the booster intended for Apollo 18. Fit test makes perfect sense. They do a lot of those.

It looks like they are narrower tiles but it’s still not a great angle.

Well, if the capture arms can catch a falling Superheavy booster, then they should also be able to pick up both the booster and the Starship and move them around. The best part is no part. They may elect to try and lift Starship by the forward flaps to avoid having lift points poking through the heat shield. LOL, came here to post that but I guess I'm late to the party. It definitely looks like those downward-facing triangles mark the bottom of the seam, as previously speculated. If you look higher on that particular image, you can see what appear to be diamond-shaped fillers, but these could simply be fractured tiles that need to be replaced: The seams seem (overall) to be much tighter than I would have expected, though. Once we get a cleaner image we might be able to tell whether they are all hexes or if they have some sort of tapered shape. I'm guessing that they will end up gluing custom tiles to the nosecone, perhaps with one large monolithic hemispheric tile at the very tip. They used glue for custom tiles on the flaps, so....

Orion is very inefficient. It wastes most of the energy it carries. If we had photon portals, no one would bother with lasers or induced fusion or anything like that. These portals are tungsten, after all, so they should be able to handle very high temperatures with ease. The equilibrium temperature for metal reaches about 1700 degrees C around a million miles from the sun, so a tungsten photon portal should be able to get significantly closer: up to around 730,000 miles from the sun, where the equilibrium temperature is just below tungsten's melting point. Insolation there will be 16,000 greater than it is at 1 AU, thanks to the inverse-squared law. Insolation at 1 AU is about 1.4 kilowatts per square meter, so the photon flux through the photon portals will be 19.6 square meters times 1.4 kilowatts per square meters times 16,000 for a total of 440 MW.

Oh this would have been one of my first ideas, except that my understanding of the OP was that the portals only allow photons to pass through, not baryonic matter. No, not at all. You can get the equivalent of an F-1 engine power output in an engine the size of the F-1 simply by hooking up the power of a giant hydroelectric dam to one of the portals. It's really quite straightforward. You don't need it to be big at all. No, it becomes more efficient the more energetic it becomes. If we had magic photon portals, building Orion drives would be the absolute last thing anyone would suggest.

Sorry, haha. Let me cut it down to size. The green line up top, e, represents the eccentricity of Earth's orbit. KSP players will be very familiar with eccentricity, but for those who haven't actually played, it represents the circularity (or lack thereof) of a particular orbit. When the eccentricity is close to zero the orbit is very circular, and so the heat from the sun is fairly constant over the course of the year. When the eccentricity is higher (up to 0.05 on this graph), the orbit is less circular, and so there is much higher solar insolation during part of the year. This is the biggest climate forcing function for our planet. Thanks to resonances between Saturn and Jupiter, the eccentricity of Earth's orbit is on a cycle of approximately 100,000 years. The red and green lines at the bottom represent global temperature (red comes from sedimentary isotope analysis and green comes from ice core analysis). Using these different datasets, scientists are able to reconstruct how insolation impacts global temperature. Here's basically what happens. During periods of low eccentricity, the oceans are cooler, and so they are able to directly absorb a higher amount of carbon dioxide (yes, gases can be dissolved into liquids; that's how fish get their oxygen, after all). Once the eccentricity of Earth's orbit starts to increase and solar insolation starts to spike at certain times of the year, the oceans warm rapidly, releasing their absorbed carbon dioxide and causing a surge in global temperature. However, once the oceans run out of carbon dioxide and the eccentricity of Earth's orbit starts to decline again, the ocean temperatures begin to cool, slowly absorbing more and more carbon dioxide. The last of these surges was in the Medieval Warm Period, so we should be in the cooling-down part of the cycle. Unfortunately, we've been releasing millions of tonnes of carbon that was buried deep underground in oil reserves, and so even though the eccentricity of Earth's orbit is decreasing and we SHOULD be cooling down, there is simply too much carbon being released for the oceans to absorb.

Not stupid, but also not a new idea. This is something that climate scientists have been studying very closely for a very long time. The good news is that we have a LOT of data to work with. We can go back in ice cores and fossil layers and coral reef samples and determine the CO2 levels and global temperatures at any time. We can also look at Earth's position relative to the sun over millions of years to see when the Earth was getting more or less solar irradiance. As you might expect, these numbers line up: This is just the data for approximately the last million years. You can see that there are global cycles in temperature; those cycles line up with the solar cycles resulting from changes in Earth's orbit. The more energy the Earth gets from the sun, the hotter the Earth gets. It's a fairly complex set of variables, of course, but we have enough data to resolve it very, very well.

If you go to the source image you can see that the view we're getting is the lee side, not the windward side. This gives us a general idea of how far around the nosecone the heat shield is going to wrap. I'm really curious to see what they do for the very tip, though, because I don't see any tile studs above the insulation at all. I was reflecting on the possibilities concerning the lifting arm assembly for the tower. We know that the tower is going to catch the booster as well as provide all lifting and stacking capabilities, which means the rail-mounted arms are going to need to turn to one side to pick up a booster or Starship (possibly by the forward elonerons?), grab it, then rotate to the other side. That presents a challenging question with respect to degrees of freedom. Ordinarily, you would want to do something like this: However, the catch frame is mounted on three rails directly underneath the lifting pulleys, so it cannot rotate. Another option would be something like this, with extension elements. But that seems challenging as well. My guess is that there will be a larger frame that is fixed to the rails enclosing a smaller frame that rotates within it, and the catch arms will each have a single degree of freedom on that smaller frame.

Good question. What we know from our study of the carbon cycle over the last billion years or so is that plant growth has difficulty catching up with increased CO2 levels. Plant growth levels are more limited by access to light and fresh water than they are to CO2, and with global temperatures rising and droughts becoming more common, access to fresh water is going to be the biggest problem with that approach. Moreover, most CO2-scrubbing activity is done not by plants, but by marine life -- algae, seaweed, and the like. The oceans are already full of carbon-scrubbing organisms, and here the limiting factor is access to sunlight (since the algae, phytoplankton, etc. needs to be close to the surface in order to get light). This is actually one of the biggest concerns for a runaway feedback loop. Marine life that provides CO2 scrubbing is sensitive to temperature. If the ocean temperature rose too high, it might be curtail the life cycle of that marine life, leading to dramatically decreased ocean CO2 scrubbing capacity, leading to higher temperatures and a runaway loop that could cause a major extinction event within mere decades. Granted, that particular outcome doesn't seem terribly likely right now, but it's still worrisome. There is some good news, though. The most promising carbon capture technology uses marine algae kept in tanks, and it works very well. It's just not being done on a broad enough scale to make much of a difference. The answer is that the current warming is entirely anthropogenic. Solar activity went up in the 1780s, down in the early 1800s, back up slightly, down a little around 1900, up between 1940 and 1990, and is now on its way back down to its lowest levels since the 1840s. Our planet's temperature is increasing due to the increase in carbon dioxide, not due to solar activity. I would argue that we do know. Solar activity has been steadily dropping since the 1990s and the temperature has been steadily rising. It ain't the sun; it's us.