CatastrophicFailure
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Posts posted by CatastrophicFailure
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37 minutes ago, razark said:
The Superguppy was in town a month or so ago. That thing is just odd to see in flight.
Aww man, the old prop-driven one? That would be a thing to see. And hear.
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8 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
That's fine, and where is a ground crash test of the Dragon?
They’ve done upwards of 10+ ground landing tests of varying fidelity. I trust they have the data they need to design things to needed specification.
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17 hours ago, Nuke said:
was on another medicaid trip to anchorage to escort mom to her orthopedist. it was the kind of appointment they could have phoned in and spared the expense of round trip air travel and hotel for two to the taxpayer, made even more expensive by the fact we got to return in two weeks. upside was today on the way back saw a dreamlifter at anc, i wanted to get a photo but didnt get mom's phone out in time. i was like damn, you could get a house on that thing.
I work right near Paine Field where the Boeing plant is, sometimes when I’m out on lunch one of those monsters will come lumbering in so low it feels like you could just reach out and touch it. It is surreal.
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5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:
And thus total amount of heat to warm the cabin or to leak and self-ignite on a tank damage, say, on a hit by ground or on the upper stage destruction, is by an order of magnitude greater.
Building tanks strong enough to survive a given impact is a known and relatively solvable engineering problem. My intuition is that any impact strong enough to rupture Dragon’s fuel tanks will rupture the crew as well, rendering any post-crash fire irrelevant from their perspective. (See: Vladimir Komorov) It’s a very relevant fact here that even risk-averse NASA has signed off on the safety of Crew Dragon, with LOCV chances far lower than the shuttle ever was. We armchair rocket scientists like to sit here flinging theories back and forth but the fact of the matter is, the people actually making the important decisions have access to much better data than we do and are generally much smarter than the lot of us to boot.
being, y’know, actual rocket surgeons & all...
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1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:
Thus, when you choose to dig a hole in your backyard, you must consult the local authority by calling 811 if you will be digging a hole deeper than 12 inches. Also, you must check and follow the laid down rules. It reduces accidents and safeguards life.
Getting off topic here, buuuuut... having been thru it myself recently, on the offhand chance this oft-unknown piece of information helps someone, 811 ONLY locates utilities from the street to the meter. If the meter is not on your house, or you have outbuildings, you need to call a private utility locator. And pay them. Pay them well. Because... reasons.
1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:Even in a sandbox?
Well it's California, so...
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47 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:
It's not. You are reading what you want to read into it, I guess.
I’m reading into it what’s there to be read. There is implicit bias in how it’s phrased.
48 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:Rich people buying things does not make prices come down. They have been buying private jets for decades and huge yachts for even more decades, but those haven't suddenly become affordable to the average bartender or store clerk yet. Space is not going to magically become as cheap as going down the street to the park.
Yachts and private jets aren’t anything new, they’re offshoots off the exclusivity that such travel once was, because there are mass options available today.
16 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:Economies of scale come into play and the price comes down. That further drives demand, and so you have a feedback loop that continues to lower the price.
Exactly.
16 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:Trips to space are not expensive because they are rare. Instead, they are rare because they are expensive.
And so something needs to interrupt that loop, if only a little. Right now, today, the only way you could Maybe go to space is to pay the Russians dozens of millions, at what, two or three trips over the last couple decades? Now come along Blue and Virgin, offering (or at least planning to) dozens of trips a year for a few hundred thousand. Even half a million is way, WAY less than the current market.
Blue and Virgin have presumably done their homework, and figured they can make their systems work for a few hundred thousand per ticket. The respective Grand Poobahs may have their flaws, but they are not idiots. If their adopted business models are indeed successful, then those early high-margin half-million tickets fund the construction of more SpaceShips and New Shepherds, and eventually they can sell lower-margin tickets for “only” a hundred thousand, because they’re flying a hundred times a year now.
They’re smart people, and smart people tend to employ other smart people.
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I’ve been following the progress of the old Excursion I traded in a few weeks ago, since I’m too lazy to cancel the mobile security access.
It went from Tesla to a big auto wholesaler auction house, then to a used truck dealer down in Seattle.
It’s now one of their featured rides and they’re asking over $29,000 for it.
I only paid $20,000 for it... in 2013.
And the listing says “no mechanical defects.”
Spoiler
Something something glitch in the Matrix...
But, in other news, this still works!
and the rooster hates it.
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55 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:
Does it ever seem like maybe their idea of what would be an affordable lark might be a little distorted?
4 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:I didn't assign any value judgment. I just said that it's only for the super-rich (and pointed out that the people bankrolling it are super-rich, which is probably IMO no coincidence).
Sounds a bit judgy to me.
The super-rich are the target of “affordable” because the super rich are the only ones who CAN afford it until the prices comes down because the super rich HAVE afforded it.
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21 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:
Are you seriously trying to argue that space tourism isn't exclusively for the super-rich?
No, I’m saying each company probably has an entire department of CPAs or folks with other various economics degrees saying, “ok, if we charge x-000,000, we can potentially attract y number of customers, at z revenue. Now, if we change x+100,000, our customer base shrinks too far to be profitable, if we charge x-100,000, we have tons of customers but we go bankrupt in the process.” Dig?
I just get really tired of this “it’s only for the super-rich, so it’s bad!!1!” nonsense. Yeah, it’s for the super rich, cuz it’s freaking expensive, cuz it’s brand new. So were cell phones, automobiles, big-screen TVs, etc. SOMEone needs to foot the bill to start the price rolling downhill for the rest of us.
‘Member that line in Back to the Future? “Pfft, NObody has two TVs!”
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7 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:
In fact ... let's think about who is trying to sell space tourism.
- Jeff Bezos, richest guy in the world.
- Elon Musk, also at times richest guy in the world.
- Richard Branson, pretty rich guy also.
Does it ever seem like maybe their idea of what would be an affordable lark might be a little distorted?
Gee, if only their plans didn’t also incorporate hundreds of other people in order to work at all, some of whom may be there specifically to proffer economic reality checks about potential market sizes...
Ok that came out a bit snarky, but seriously, these guys don’t run their operations in a vacuum. They have people to tell them where that merge between “affordable” and “actually funds the operation” is.
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26 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
No info available about the Axiom launch vehicle and how will they dock the modules without Shuttle.
Each Axiom module will be an independent spacecraft, able to maneuver and dock on its own, so can probably launch on anything big enough.
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This is interesting.
Also, wild Thwomp sighting.
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7 hours ago, KSK said:
Well, I say 'I' but it's more like 'we'. Huge thanks to @CatastrophicFailure (again!) for proof-reading, editing and generally applying the polish.
I deny any and all responsibility.
The Story was already there, I just gave it a quick poke to keep it going straight. It’s a good and solid work, and most definitely Worth Seeing. But I shan’t spoil.
SpoilerIt involves... cacti...
....maybe....
On 3/21/2021 at 4:45 PM, jimmymcgoochie said:And second- am I overdoing it with the references to CatastrophicFailure's Krakens trilogy? Reading that was a big part of the reason I started writing my own KSP story, but I don't want to lean too heavily on it; I've also written a short section that copies a poem/song from the second Krakens tale, more or less word for word, which I think would work well in my own story- but not if it's crossing the line between making a reference and blatantly plaigarising/ripping it off.
Bit late to the discussion, I suppose, my own muse remains on a bit of a hiatus after the last year or so.
I do not (yet) profess familiarity with the work, but I certainly can’t be one to complain about references, given how many I myself have blatantly ripped off word for wordum... borrowed. I would say let The Story lead you where it will, every bit of the same you’ve ever consumed will nudge you along this way and that, whether or not you’re aware of it. For my own mush, I’ve just found it helpful not to resist and just hang a lampshade right on ‘em, imitation the sincerest form of flattery and all that, each blatant plagiarismsubtle allusion cast down with love, which I suppose is what makes all the difference....which will probably do nothing to sway the judge and I should have just settled out of court.
I really can’t complain on “dark,” either, life is imitating art a bit much lately. yeesh.
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2 hours ago, Gargamel said:
I got to say "I rerouted the secondary cooling loop to prevent the core from overheating" with a straight face and mean it tonight.
I just fixed the drill's coolant line on the CNC to keep it from melting... but still.... Roddenberry would have been proud.
Pfft, now...
<actual FAMK> spoiler
Spoiler...do it on the surface of the moon wearing only duct tape
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When did this happen, and why wasn’t I notified?
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24 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
Which ones for example? Except the Mir docking, lol
Launching out of Vandy to nick a Soviet spy satellite then using those big silly wings to land back at the same....
...er, waitaminnit...
ooh, new emoji!
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Tried to replace a toilet today. Which of course
went right down the s—did not go as planned.
And all the hardware stores are now closed.
The cat is extremely upset, as he’s now been deprived of his water bowl. He has a stupidly expensive (for what it is) carbon-filtered USB-powered decorative cat fountain, but insists on drinking from the toilet. And then looking abashed when he gets caught doing so.
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1 hour ago, tater said:
Think they need to add more ports...
Then it ends up like this....
Spoiler -
1 minute ago, JcoolTheShipbuilder said:
Why did that multiply four times?
ok, hmmm... when might sn 15 hop
The Derp is strong with this one.
Also, absolutely relevant...
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3 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:
Are they skipping 18 and 19?
I think there were labeled parts spotted for them at some point, but no idea what’s happened since.
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46 minutes ago, cubinator said:
Which will be delivered to Earth first? The sample tubes on Perseverance, or 100 tons of excavated Martian rock on Starship? It seems kind of close.
The sample tubes on Perseverance.
Along with Perseverance itself, and Curiosity, Spirit, Opportunity, Pathfinder, Sojourner, the Vikings, and enough rock and regolith for a proper full-accuracy display exhibit at the Smithsonian. -
5 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:
This is the true mark of SX's success: their launches are so common and routine that even we don't make an event out of it
Someone just HAD to go and use the R word...
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5 hours ago, .50calBMG said:
Wow
It went from Tesla to a big auto wholesaler auction house, then to a used truck dealer down in Seattle.
And all the hardware stores are now closed.
Russian Launch and Mission Thread
in Science & Spaceflight
Posted
And these are all very solvable engineering problems. It’s not that difficult to design tanks that are stronger than the crew. If the impact kills the crew, what happens to the tanks doesn’t really matter. If the crew can survive a hard landing, so can the tanks.
Kerbals have a thing for squirrels...