RealKerbal3x

fails to contain excitement That is one mean looking engine. Is it 3.75m diameter like the original Mammoth?

As I said on the first page, this is the sort of thinking that makes sense if your large number of launches have to be made with a big expendable booster, ie SLS or Saturn V. Every architecture designed with those launch vehicles in mind has been all about minimising the total number of launches, because cadence is low and you have a large amount of hardware thrown away every flight. It all falls apart when you consider a large, reusable rocket such as Starship. Even if we assume that Starship only manages to get launches as cheap as $70m (the same as a Falcon 9 launch), then 16 launches is still only a little over half of the cost of a single SLS launch at $2b. Put rapid reuse into the equation - as SpaceX is required to do for the HLS contract - and you have something that definitely approaches a routine. You should probably read through all the posts on the rest of this thread explaining why kitbashing SLS and Ariane is probably unworkable.

Had to order myself one of these. Looking forward to it!

I mean, the engines are all there and seem to be in the same positions they were pre-testing. Worst case in this scenario would have been an engine literally exploded, and I would have expected to see more collateral damage in that case. Of course, the engines may have suffered internal damage, but if they're lucky, the flexible boots around the engines prevented that from seriously damaging other engines. I'm not saying this is good, only that it looks like it could have been a lot worse.

There's a lot of scorching (which I suppose should be expected), and I see a few broken/bent pipes, but the engines themselves look fine from this viewpoint. Still waiting for more info from Elon, but this is encouraging. Hopefully either this wasn't as violent of an event as it looked, or the booster and GSE are well-hardened to this sort of thing.

My understanding was that any test involving CH4 loading needs an overpressure notice, but something may have changed (either it's not needed anymore, or residents were discouraged from posting them online)

Didn't look that nominal, but I guess it was:

Static fire? Looked like it.

Thanks to the walls of High Bay 2 being decidedly opaque, we missed this completely on the live cameras:

The coverage seemed a little subdued today.

Live

The oval at the bottom is an access hatch, I'm not sure where the Starlink antenna(e) are on S24. I do know that B7 has a couple on the small HPU aerocovers near the base.

24 gets the Shuttle paint treatment:

@Gotmachine So, I hate to be the bearer of more bad news, but I found a bit of an issue with the new autostrut patch: If you add an autostrut action group to a craft in the VAB and then launch it, the action group assignment will vanish when the flight scene loads. The action group will work fine if you add it via the inflight action group editor, but it disappears when moving from the editor to flight. I don't know if this is related to the issue dok_377 reported above, but I thought I would let you know. I was able to reproduce the issue in a clean 1.12.3 install with only KSPCF, MM and Harmony installed, but if you need a KSP.log I can provide one.

QoL feature request: would it be possible to allow autostrut to be toggled via action groups/KAL controllers? If this isn't doable, ignore me, but I've been fiddling around with robotics recently and thought this would be useful.

Probably one of the coolest screenshots I've taken in a while.

Yes, they want it to leave the pad with ~1.5 TWR.

We already know it has all 33:

Not sure this would work, for stability during descent the main tanks are almost empty, leaving only propellant in the header tanks for landing. Once the ship is landed, it's stuck there until a refuel is possible.

I think the takeaway from this should be "if you fire a bullet at a rocket, you and/or the rocket will probably have a bad time".

Falcon 9 enters the atmosphere more or less vertically. It is able to use body lift and the grid fins to descend with an angle of attack, but left to its own devices it would descend like an arrow.

Liftoff! This is like an NROL mission, no cams or telemetry from stage 2. Touchdown! Those legs deploy scarily late.

Live

Touchdown!

Well, maybe, but he's also previously talked about how TWR is everything for a reusable launcher - especially a huge one like Starship. It seems to make sense why - if your TWR is lower, you're using more propellant to do the same amount of work accelerating up until stage separation, which cuts into landing reserves, so you have to carry more. And of course, the longer period of slower acceleration means that stage sep happens later, meaning you're further downrange and need even more propellant to boostback for landing. I haven't done the maths to figure out how much of an effect it would actually have, but I imagine they're working pretty hard to optimise the booster's mass. If they can figure out how to get more thrust from a single engine, that's (almost) 'free' from a mass perspective - as opposed to just adding more engines, which probably adds up pretty fast (the booster is pretty tail-heavy when empty, because the engines are some of the most massive single components). 'Slapping a few more engines on' might end up being more difficult than it sounds as well, because they've almost run out of space on the bottom of the booster as it is already. So to get the equivalent thrust of 33x 250t-thrust Raptors by adding more 230t-thrust engines, you'd probably end up having to rearrange the engine configuration, or possibly even flare the base of the booster a little. That opens the door to all kinds of extra structural and aerodynamic considerations which might be more trouble than they're worth. So for now at least, just increasing per-engine thrust is probably the way to go. It's worth noting that Merlin is one of the highest-performing modern rocket engines, while also being one of the most reliable. There are lessons there that can be (and probably already are) applied to Raptor development. Reliability improvements will go hand in hand with performance improvements as they continue to develop and test the engine.