Shpaget

Do they still use GPUs? Haven't all serious miners switched to ASICs long ago?

About 16 MW per portal. Not bad and a billion of them would certainly cover all the world energy needs, but in comparison, the Rocketdyne F1 was about 1500 times more powerful. That being said, the "win conditions" are trivial. Having an occupied outpost on Moon and Mars in 100 years would super easy, barely an inconvenience, even without this tech, and I'd guess that will be a case with or without the promise of alien super present.

Foundation is coming in about two months. Perhaps it's time to start rereading the Robot and Empire series? Hopefully they do Asimov justice.

Yeah, and then you get to work with a component with pin pitch that is not 0,1'' but rather 2,5mm, but in the general dismay that yet again you have to work with imperial nonsense, you don't even notice, and have 100s of your boards made only to realize weeks later that the error compounds so much that you can't use the boards and have to make them again, only now you're near the deadline and need to place a rush order and DHL charges you an arm, both legs and your firstborn to get it to you a couple of days sooner.

Is suppose we all know about and love Enya. She's an amazing artist and has some really cool tunes. You guys also know about Prodigy, right? Well what about them combined? How the hell do these two work so well together?

A similar process is used for black powder production, where water is added during mixing and grinding. Not only it increases safety, since damp gunpowder doesn't catch fire nearly as easily as dry, but it also dissolves potassium nitrate which then can better coat porous surface of charcoal. It also helps in forming uniform grains, which are later dried.

Hmm, that would be an unusual usage of the term "resolution" in context of telescopes. Besides, cranking up the pixel count in a diffraction limited system is pointless. But yeah, a ~9 m mirror has about 10 times the area of a 2,4 m mirror, but "only" 3,75 times the resolution. In any case, even a 9 m mirror space telescope would be amazing and produce some pretty pictures. I'd be happy with that too.

Melting the mix allows for better mixing due to smaller particles of fuel and oxidizer being in contact and thus increasing surface contact area. This leads to faster and more uniform burn.

Can we talk about this, because I think it's awesome, and rather obvious use of a Starship. So, this: As we all know, resolution of a telescope is directly proportional to the size of its primary mirror. In case of Hubble, that is 2,4 m. So to achieve 10x resolution, a telescope would need to have a mirror of 24 m in diameter. Starship has a diameter of 9 m, so a mirror that fits inside would need to be foldable. James Webb Telescope has done it (or at least will have done it, hopefully), point is, it has precedent. If we use hexagons with diameter of 8,5 m each, it gives us 25 cm of clearance in the fairing on each corner and 57 cm on the sides. Is that enough? I dunno, but let's go with it for a moment. Perhaps this is not the optimal configuration, but 7 such hexagons, with a 5 cm gap between mirrors, give us the total diameter of 22,59 m (22,18 between flats). So we are close to 10x resolution, but not only that, light gathering power is insane. Area of Hubble mirror is 4,5 m^2, while SBST (Starship Based Space Telescope) would have total area of a whopping 328,5 m^2 (not considering a hole for sensors in the middle of the central mirror). That's 73 times larger than Hubble, or 13 times that of JWST. Each mirror segment in this configuration is significantly larger than total, unfolded JWST mirror, so manufacturing it is a problem in its own right. A wikipedia article says that currently largest single mirror telescopes are 8,2 m in diameter, and that is without all the considerations for spaceflight and folding mechanism. Would manufacturing the mirror for space based telescope be easier or more complicated than for ground based one? Ground based ones need to account for distortions and flexing due to gravity and the mass of the mirror itself, but the space mirror needs to be lightweight and must not spring back out of shape once in microgravity. Comparison HST, JWST and SBST

Not quite true, according to this: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/richard-branson-elon-musk-the-sunday-times-spacex-jeff-bezos-b945176.html

Still smaller than the Roadster windshield, right?

The quote you posted says 10 MW, so let's go with that number?

Is that cost to build or to launch?

Can we gang up on the delivery guy and steal his truck? Even if this was his last package of the day (or whatever time system Spaceazon works with), so no additional packages, just taking a look under the hood of the truck itself would be insane.

In case of F9, you can't fit 9 vacuum optimized Merlins at the bottom of F9. The nozzles are way to large.

Not much, since governments do business with private companies all the time. This is almost almost always done via public tenders, a system designed to provide an opportunity for everybody to offer their bid. This is not something new and specific to Spacex. I could start giving examples, but I'd wear down my keyboard before scratching the surface. Suffice to say that Apollo 11 would not reach Moon without cooperation and contracts between government and private companies. There would be no Hubble Space Telescope without it, or virtually any other major project, space related or otherwise. Gov contracts are not subsidies. It's not a case of just shoveling money into private pockets for no return whatsoever. It's always about a service or a product and public tender system is in place to ensure a fair playing field for all parties and transparency for the public.

Neither does Spacex hyperfocus on SSTO (none of their orbital lauch vehicles, existing or anounced, are SSTO), nor did the 60's space race hyperfocus on reusable vehicles (which proved themselves to work quite well, if I might say so). Also, a quick google search for Spacex subsides comes up with only the ones related to Starlink, or more precisely, the act of bringing broadband internet service to rural areas, something that was available to all internet service providers, yet there wasn't much interest in providing it. Spacex saw a market that wasn't being serviced and jumped in. Nothing to complain about here. You are running out of reasons to complain.

And as soon as that tech advancement is made, TSTO designs implement it, continue to outperform and stay out of reach of SSTO. There is no competition. TSTO is more capable configuration. Always.

So why not keep the discussion in that thread? Also, in that thread it has been said multiple times that, given the same tech for SSTO and TSTO, the two stage configuration will always be more capable. If you want to to talk fiction, then just give you ship the capability to launch into orbit and land back down multiple times without the need for refueling and be done with it. In case such tech is available, it may be worthwhile considering SSTO as a better configuration than TSTO, but until such time TSTO is the way to go. In any case, what's this talk about vertical dropping into atmosphere? Putting back breaking braking aside, even the most optimistic hypothetical SSTO designs can just barely reach orbit. You now want to double the dv requirements? No.

The problem you seem to have is that you think SSTO is some paragon of technological achievement, with the whole rocket science community struggling to make it work because it will revolutionize space travel. The truth is that nobody* really cares about it. All the problems and complexities that come from TSTO configuration are already solved, not to mention they pale in comparison to performance gains that come from shedding mass. *talking about launch providers, not dreamy eyed, scifi loving spectators. Also, clients are just interested in the final orbit.

Regarding sailing directly up the wind, Kevin Costner settled that 25 years ago. Unrelated, but a few years before Kevin trimaraned, when I was but a wee lad if about 5, I distincrly remember playing with yoyo placed on the floor and tugging the string. Yoyo would catch up with my hand.

Like the g in garage.

Got my 2nd Covid vax shot more than 20 minutes ago; still haven't met Bill. What's taking him so long?

But why? Using the same tech for TSTO that you use for STSO will always lead to TSTO having an advantage, so it always makes sense to use TSTO.

Do not try and find the spoon—that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth.There is no spoon.