darthgently

For near circular orbits it doesn't matter if you get an encounter or not, it may otherwise

.... Nebbermind

Oops, I thought Bob was referring to SH. Mea culpa

If you watch Scott Manley's post mortem vid somewhere in thread above he covers the multiple engine outages and makes a good case for ullage failure It didn't tumble, just engines starving on gas instead of liquid oops. Nevermind

Only the inner three gimbaled engines, if only they are used during pivot, need alignment. Maybe just those three could share a pair of pumps with parallel axes that could be pivoted around. They'd be the oddballs then, which would be annoying to most anyone technically oriented and would definitely annoy the raptor team I'd imagine

I fully understand that. But it would be capable of real time control, just as a car is. Why else would you want a neuralink? Lol

If think that far more research had been done on rocket engines pushing the rocket they were attached to than engines pushing craft in the plume. The hot stage ring ass'y would catch a lot of force

Yeah, that is why I specified signal delay and also that humans orbiting Mars could have near real time control of a bot (assuming a good enough Marslink constellation were in place). For the leasing for a hike, the person on earth would plan a path then the robot would execute it autonomously I think it's is primarily for being a useful product on Earth, but yes. The software will not care if the robot is humanoid, or a bulldozer, frontloader, whatever, either. Optimus runs a version of FSD. Yes, I noted the big market would be on Earth. A humanoid robot can control a normal frontloader that could later be controlled by a human. That would make the frontloader simpler and the FSD brains hardware more useful in other tasks also. If a frontloader is parked for a month the bot can be used elsewhere. But sure, if cheap enough, have brains in the frontloader also. The best part is no part maybe however

Interesting thread

The beams lose coherence and focus with distance iirc. Which would seem to make it harder and harder to bounce all of the beam back to the other mirror at extreme growing distance, as well as the acceleration issue you bring up. Still, as Acksed notes, it is an upgrade to the normal laser sail concept

Imagine being able to watch live stream (with obvious signal delay) video from visual system of a Tesla robot engaged in building infrastructure on another world. Imagine being able to lease a robot to go on an autonomous hike in the hills of Mars? How much would Bezos pay from his anonymous account for that? What NASA and other contracts could these robots fulfill if they had a modified Cybertruck handy? Imagine watching through a robot's eyes as the first tunnel boring machine is landed and unloaded. Again, I favor orbitals for humans for the foreseeable future, but as tater has pointed out there is no reason to limit use of robots on the surface in prep for the long term. Maybe even terraforming time scales. From Mars orbit, humans could have near real time control of a robot

Cloud formation and cover is a vastly chaotic process that is mathematically impossible to accurately model to any real accuracy beyond a few days into the future without perfect knowledge of all inputs and a perfect computer that can simulate faster than reality with no error. Weather prediction is a lucrative industry that attracts a lot of R&D. If you want to see current state of the art cloud formation and cloud cover prediction simply observe the accuracy of cloud predictions hours, days, weeks into the future on weatherunderground.com or an app like Windy (my fave). IPCC models looking decades into the future don't stand a chance of being remotely accurate. Clouds are not the only inherently chaotic process that affects climate

1) Venus isn't covered with plant and algal life voraciously consuming and capturing CO2 2) Venus is much closer to the Sun Apples and oranges to a very large degree, though worth studying, of course

Yes. Given it is still traveling down range, the center of mass is in the tail, and the grid fins are at the "nose" I think it would eventually weathervane/weathercock to retrograde. But would likely take too long to be satisfactory and perhaps not necessarily do so stably enough. But perhaps this could be built upon and augmented with hot gas-gas thrusters that I think @sevenpercentforce mentioned. Only 1/3 serious: what if the slotted hot stage ring were in six sections that could open outward like flower petals creating more windage at that end? I already know it is too complicated, but would look dang cool popping open at stage sep

Just to add to this for those interested, you want your initial PE to ideally be at a relative ascending or descending node (AN/DN) of the eventual target rendezvous orbit. This will put your elliptical AP near the opposite node. This can be tricky to set up when not yet in the SOI

The frustrating aspect is that professional scientists, meteorologists, geologists, oceanographers, etc, have been raising the point for more than a decade (2 decades?) that climate, and later IPCC models, even current ones, vastly simplify cloud cover modeling if dealt with at all and that water vapor, solar input combined with albedo *must* be hugely critical for climate implications given what has been known for many decades about these things apart from global computer modeling

It is interesting that the Tesla robot has been spec'd with the explicit design constraint that is should have human proportion and pattern and be able to function in an environment designed for humans. This would give it a larger market on Earth, but would also make huge sense if used to build off world habitat for later arriving humans Also, it occurs to me that while 100 humans would not do well packed like sardines in a SS, 100 humanoid robots in a SS would be simply good cargo loading methodology

Seems.

But in none of that does he say with no research. I still think it is PR talking though. He wants to stir the pot. And clearly it is working.

There is a great write up, I think in the ksp-kos reddit, that shows that any relative inclination change greater that 45 deg or so and it will be more efficient to first jack the AP to just under the SOI radius, do the inclination change at the furthest AN/DN (relative, equatorial depending, near AP ideally), then circularize at PE. Works a charm in KSP for highly elliptical capture followed by matching a rendezvous orbit for example.

I'm going to need to see some citations for this. Not saying he hasn't said this, but I've not come across it in a few books about him and many interviews. But maybe we interpreted something differently

I agree. It really leaps off the pad and that is awesome to see Breeze I'd imagine

How aggressive the pitch over is can be a big factor also. IFT-2 seemed to pitch fairly conservatively early on and achieved a high AP fairly quickly, but did seem close to horizontal at stage sep (within 10 or 15 degrees of zero pitch? Just guessing obviously)