AngrybobH

This would be terrible but, they built the aircraft after the spec had changed. Regardless of the reason it is entirely on Boeing to comply with the law because they were not given permission to use the old spec before they built the plane. They should have to fix it even if it is an edge case and they should be responsible for the quality of that repair. I have a hard time believing they can't make these repairs without damaging something but, if that is the case, perhaps the need to manufacture all new wiring. Sure, that is costly but they should have paid more attention to the safety regulations before they built the MAX. The auto industry has to put up with the NHTSA changing rules then eating the cost of fixing hundreds of thousands of cars. Boeing should have to eat this cost too. And all that leads to the question of how the FAA missed this to begin with but, regardless of how much blame you want to put on the FAA it is still Boeing's problem to remedy.

Thats very cool but, while I am in the same state, Houston is kind of far away (7+ hours). I like that you will be able to inspect the whole thing because of a horizontal installation but I feel that standing up on its legs is the best thing about an F9.

There is so many problems with this in the US. There is a large number of jobs that do not pay for sick days or they pay so extremely poorly that it equates to no pay. I can go to work for less than 2 hours and make 2 whole days worth of sick pay. Plus I require a doctors note to get paid, then you add in high deductible insurance. Needless to say, I go to work sick. I my opinion, the US is not capable of containing any form of pandemic. I don't think COVID-19 is worth panicking over but , if it was, the US would have major problems.

What I know (which is not a whole lot) about additive manufacturing is it is essentially all seams.

ok. i get all that with respect to leaving an orbit. Are you saying the same point is also the best for slowing down enough to achieve orbit? It makes sense that at pe (or near it) is the best place to affect your ap directly. I just always wondered if there was a better place in a flyby to do a capture burn with respect to dV spent.

Because of Oberth, burning at pe is more efficient but what about capture burns like you would need to do around an airless body?

I got the impression from those documents that, while it concerned mainly one person, everyone knew what the game plan was and what was really going on. They also make me seriously question Boeing policies because pilot training, which was a significant part of the Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes, wasn't the only fault that Boeing is responsible for.

Exactly. Boeing is A part of the system that failed. It is also true they place a higher priority on profit than safety(see recently released documents). And, until they can demonstrate some form of trustworthiness, they should not be let off the hook on any of their products that could result in the loss lives. Dishonesty as a policy should not be rewarded.

but those tragedies speak to the companies priority of money well over safety. The 737 mess is a very good point to bring up in regard to whether or not the the starliner should re-qualify. I feel that everything they do for quite some time should be absolutely demonstrated in the real world before anyone trusted the product they deliver, based on their recent history.

This is something to think about, considering I'm not too far from there(in Texas terms). I wonder what they pay.

You don't paint rust. You remove rust then paint it to keep it from corroding, which is the point of paint to begin with. Turns out you can also make paint in just about any color you want so your protective coating becomes a fun way personalize your whatever it is you are painting. Paint is a fairly broad term and anything you apply via brushing, spraying, dipping, and possibly electroplating you could call paint. This would cover plasti-dip, rhino lining, galvanizing, anodizing, and on and on. There are only a couple of paint alternatives I can think of, keep your device/machine/spacecraft away from things that will damage it, or make it out of a material that doesn't become damaged in its' operating and/or storage environment. Depends on the material it is made of and its' environment, see above.

The reactionless drive idea makes me ask the question, does the teleported object retain its' momentum? If it does, then teleporting fuel to ships from earth(or anywhere) could have some nasty consequences. If your fuel is now moving in any direction with a high velocity relative to the ship, you could have real problems. I'd prefer scifi as a genre to forget about teleportation.

This happens to me all the time on all bodies including kerbin with or without mods. And, the ground is jittery on kerbin like there is a magnitude 7 or higher earthquake(kerbinquake?) at all times. The problem showed up in 1.8.0. I stopped playing until 1.8.1 released. That did not fix it. I haven't played since. I was hoping for a 1.8.2 but that seems unlikely. Maybe 1.9.0 will address it.

There is a checkbox for deploy fairings, uncheck it (same for solar panels and antennae if you don't want them all to deploy). You also need to move the fairing staging to somewhere MJ won't stage through it to get to the next needed engine. I usually put the fairings I want to do manually with the parachutes.

Those videos are amazing. Why was nightingale chosen over Osprey? From the looks of the video osprey looks easier to land in/on.

United Airlines flight 232 managed a quite amazing landing (mostly crash) with a failure mode that was considered unflyable(all 3 hydraulic systems failed). I really doubt that starship would have a capability to pull something out like that with a similar level of failure. Of course, I would still get on a starship if it were man rated.

KSPI-E has some forms of xenon capture/production. It is a huge mod though. I personally like it but it can be a bit much for some people. Xenon is produced in reactors or can be harvested from atmospheres that have it. Bonus is you can power the ions with the reactor that produces xenon, though you will need another source too.

The timing of a winter storm that is supposed to bring ice to Texas is in perfect alignment with this transit. Ice....in Texas...sigh...Hopefully someone takes a picture.

It is but I think it isn't fully optimized yet. They want the thing out there and 'proven' reliable (by de-tuning it slightly). Car companies can suffer greatly when public opinion sours on a product. Look at the pinto you mentioned. If it wasn't for the penny pinchers it would have had a bladder fuel tank, air bags, and most of a roll cage. With those left out and the vehicle not redesigned made it known as one of the worst cars ever. The Pontiac Fiero was another example(and appropriately named). First year of those caught on fire. They fixed it by the half year but, its' reputation never recovered. 3 years later they cancelled it. Funny thing is, if you take the skinny wheels off a prius and put them on a same year corolla, you get the same mileage on the highway and very close in the city. Same is true for the civic and civic hybrid. turns out the batteries and inverter are VERY heavy and skinny tires, while bad for handling, reduce rolling resistance really well. Absolutely electric cars can do insane things but you cut into range very quickly if you use it. The same is true for ICE motors too. For example I have a Mercury Comet resto-mod (modern tech on an old car) that has a 413 bhp v8. It knocks down 24-26 mpg(better than most modern high HP v6s) on the highway cruising at sane speeds. On the track it gets less than 6 mpg. A very fast electric can use an entire charge in less than 10 minutes. But, when I run out of fuel, it takes 2 minutes to fill 16 gallons(~400 mile range) while an electric would require many hours to charge from empty without reducing its capacity(Yes, fast charge hurts your batteries). Hondas' design seems to be compromising on range, mpg, and power. More electric power and/or means heavier equipment so, make the engine help the motor from time to time. Making a single torque peak ICE with a generator that specializes in a single RPM and load does not sound hard. And, if I had the cash to invest, I would take a Nissan Leaf and put a system in it. But, extending the range on the highway with an ICE is just another way of masking the horrendous problems with battery technology. Piezos are cool, for sure but, for a valve, making a stack tall enough to move a sufficient distance is hard. Piezos shine when you need a valve in high pressure/low volume situation like modern diesels with their 29,900 psi fuel systems. The LNG systems are very interesting but in consumer use you tend to see the ring seal and the cylinder walls wear down much faster(LNG dilutes the engine oil). Cooler would seem to be better but really we keep the engine temp that high for emission reasons.

And it had some issues like compression ignition happening before laser ignition. Quite a problem if you are not set up for for it. The regular 2.5L altima already achieves 39mpg without turbo or variable compression. Although, strangely, the 2.0 turbo VC is listed as 38mpg. It does really get out of its own way though. Also, I feel obligated to mention I work for Nissan. I really doubt this. electric motors are okay but generating power and storing it isn't really there mainly because of batteries. Charge efficiency, self discharging, energy and power density, electrodes degrading, and heat issues are all major problems of batteries on top of the fact that they are heavy. Add to that the environmental impact of mining and refining the needed materials, recharge time, and other customer bothering issues like the cost of replacing the batteries every 2-3 years and you have a significant problem to overcome. Most electric and hybrid cars are on the road to attempt to push the technology forward while getting paid by customers that believe they are/will be better. I'm not saying they won't get better but a new way to store energy is really needed. Hybridizing with a small ICE running at a constant RPM (like a train) would probably mask a bit of the issues but still not solve them. I see the energy future being in using better/cleaner infrastructure creating storable chemical fuel (like butanol) that wouldn't drastically change the way we use energy for transportation or transport the fuel. That is until a real solution to batteries multiple problems comes along. I am The problem is with the scale required for larger things like cars. And batteries don't scale real well unless you like fires in your mode of transportation. I imagine it could but methanol is also used as fuel for race engines and I also imagine you get more energy using the heat(burning it) than you would from the fuel cell with current technology. Perhaps fuel cells should be on the list as well as they could use some real work.

He says " It just needs crazy up force! ". I'm sure it does. But, it makes me wonder about how loud this thing is going to be especially after it pushes away from the sound suppression system. Is the sound pressure going to break things? SpaceX surely has thought about this, right? Anyway I can't wait to see the static fire and then the eventual take off of all those raptors on SH.

Look up a rotary valve from Coates, LTD. One of their valves could be easily actuated by an electric motor. Poppets are terrible for many reasons (air flow shrouding, piston interference, etc). The rotary valve has many improvements(less detonation from more quench area making higher compression is just the beginning) for recip piston engines. Combining direct injection, turbo, electric rotary valve variable actuation, and variable compression (like in the '20 Nissan 2.0 turbo) would be a huge jump in efficiency and power. I think the rotary valve is actually the new thing needed but car companies have refused buying the design and favoring in house or out of patent designs.

Batteries. Our current technology is miserable and new science/engineering makes them only marginally better. I'd imagine something new would need developed to move energy storage forward but, I cannot even imagine what that would be. If I could, I'd be a billionaire overnight.

how much of vision has nothing to do with the eyes but with the ability to process and retain visual information? What we see clearly isn't that large but our brains fill the rest of our 'vision' in with 'close enough' approximations from visual memory. And we miss a lot of things. Police even say eye witness testimony is often inconsistent with reality. Exactly

This is something I always wished would work but, sadly, it does not. The forces experienced upon instantaneously hitting the atmosphere would shred anything we could build. Think about it this way, would you rather slow down in a car from 100 to 0 in 200 meters or 200 millimeters? The energy is the same but the time it happens in is vastly different. Another thought for you. Why do rockets worry about max Q? What speed would you be going at the exit? at what altitude/air density? what is the drag coefficient of the ship? Answer those questions and you will see that you would kill all the crew with Gs and tear the ship apart on exit unless it was made from unobtanium with an unrealistic profile. But the crew would be dead and all the cargo squished so, what would be the point? Lowering the exit speed would easily make the whole system irrelevant. And sure, more mass slows down less in atmo but then you have more mass. So more engines and fuel for circularization, more thrusters for attitude control, more fuel needed for a given DV, harder to slow it down when needed...this makes the whole ship worse for everything else. I'm not even sure the math would allow you to get the mass and drag into the correct ratio for this to even happen. Now if you ditched the vacuum chamber and then built a mag rail system higher than anything humans have ever built and it was capable of accelerating something to a typical first stage speed then you could eliminate the first stage. But, that definitely has both feet firmly planted in scifi territory. And it would have a fixed angle so, only one inclination would be possible. Great for orbital construction but not so for every other mission.