monophonic

Chibi! Maybe if Thompberry stays nice Chibi can build him a nice robotic body. Piper's gonna blow a fuse... box on the thought of having a Mechberry stomping around KASA though.

I hope as many as possible. An N-1/LK moon mission would undoubtedly be a fun mission (without realistic failures of course). Personally I will be slightly disappointed if Voskhod doesn't make it in. After all it was used for the first ever EVA mission, and the craft itself is basically a Vostok (already shown) with different internals and a backup retrorocket pack. IMO this feels like a sound candidate for using the part upgrades mechanism. You could skip Voskhod-1 though since the mission wasn't as big a deal in my mind and Soyuz + Apollo(/Mk1-2) will have the 3 man capsule niche covered very well.

If my headache is correct, very little for Boca Chica or Brownsville.

Edit: ninja'd by @CatastrophicFailure Thinking about this is giving me a headache, but doesn't a stage launched from Cape into an hour long orbit overfly places about 15 degrees west of Cape an hour later? Places like, umm, Boca Chica?

Don't fret about it, you can just buy it directly from the VAB/SPH when/if you find a need for it.

Oh man. Now @CatastrophicFailure has to rewrite everything again to incorporate some new idea into the plot. We gotta stop posting here or we're never gonna see another chapter!

Rules can be changed. After all, airliners are allowed to overfly cities and they come down wrong occasionally too. But those particular rules won't change easily, or soon. I'll guess we have to be into daily launches with perfect record before any overflight permits will start to get issued. And those will be special cases for single launches at first too. Depend entirely on the refurbishment costs. STS failed there but SpaceX seems to be doing better.

There's this one thing I have been wondering about. Sometimes the boosters seem to settle in a near perfect cross and stay that way. Other times they take on that wild spinning like they were sugared up toddlers set free on a playground. What causes that difference?

I first read that as "tardisgrade..." which is usually synonymous with late anyway. But then antinormal should be "delete" instead.

7/10, why would anyone want to draw our attention into seeing the circular logic in their attempt to confuse us? Zero divided by anything is zero. Anything divided by zero is infinity. How much is zero divided by zero?

Han was frozen to test the makeshift facility at Cloud City to make sure it would not harm Luke. Vader planned to take him to Palpatine in carbonite so they could together turn Luke to the dark side.

We are beyond the time when material costs dominated, very far so in the western economies. The difference between 100kg of aluminium and 500kg of composite won't pay a single engineer for a month. Yet it is not the per launch costs that is the issue, it's the once over development costs. They must be paid in full before you can begin to recoup them in launch fees. If you run out of money before you have a working launcher, you are not going to space, you are going bankrupt. So there is a limit how much a company can spend in product development. For ARCA cash in the bank is probably most of it. They don't have much of a selling product right now do they? And with history like that how much capital do you think they can raise?

That is true. But cows aren't spherical and you can't build a rocket out of just math. If a marginal system costs less than you can afford and a superior system costs more than you can afford, you pick the marginal system. That's just math. You can't pick just one side of the problem and decide what's best from that angle is best overall. You have to consider all the other sides too. For another company two stage design could certainly be best. For ARCA it evidently wasn't or they have a very incompetent CEO. Going SSTO is saving them design costs on a second engine design and staging system. That may be the difference between them getting into launcher business or not. It could also be an attempt to cut on development time to get the income flow started sooner. It might even be just a risk control measure, less money lost if the business doesn't fly. That is their business secret though so we are unlikely to know. I know this is a science subforum, but we are discussing a commercial venture. I find it unfit to focus solely on the physical inefficiency of their design without giving any consideration to any other aspects of it.

That is an insane difference - I doubt anything like that would be possible. Remember in addition to square-cube-losses in two stage design you have the interstage, which is basically launch clamps for the second stage. Also it has to carry the full weight of the second stage against the maximum acceleration from the first stage. The clamps on the pad only need to hold the entire assembly against a measly 1g. That is a non-negligible mass we haven't yet accounted for. Oh, and not only the interstage, but the first stage as a whole has to carry that weight - fuel, another engine, the interstage itself - while the SSTO tank/stage only has the payload + shroud + adapters burdening it. So it needs to be beefier than the lower half of the SSTO has to be. That said ARCA's numbers do seem awfully tight to me too. I'm not trying to convince you that their plan is in any way inherently better than a two stage approach - just that the opposite isn't necessarily true either.

I emphasised the imperative word for you. Fixed costs like range safety, mission control or facilities maintenance don't depend on the number of stages. Or if they do they go up with the stage count. For a relatively rare use like SLV launches those costs really do add up. Not to mention needing to pump up the profit margin to cover for the additional development costs or the associated risk with that develoment. You are probably right that a two stager could be more efficient, but for a smaller player with limited funding taking the safe route can be a good move. Safe here being defined as "not developing any technology that can be done without." Such as staging. Problems with getting that to work could bring them to bankruptcy before they reach orbit at all.

My profession is showing, but I immediately thought those were GIT reporting the differences in the design. Three things removed, six other things added, and that's how you go from a Walkabout 1 to a Walkabout 2. Would've been typical too, sleep-deprived engineer blaming the version control for bugs...

So the story didn't end when Vlad ate the Kraken? Phew... What do you call a black widow spider with no legs? - A blackcurrant.

Fuel leak. There may well be enough time to evacuate before it finds an ignition source. Even if not - well, they still deserved the chance, don't you think?

Where was this shot taken? It does not seem to be from the time of most heating as the view angle is so far off the booster. So the fins would have had time to cool off significantly. You are also correct about the computer monitors. We do not have an unbroken chain of color profiles from the camera to our monitors, so we cannot say with any certainty what was the wavelength of the light hitting the camera sensor. Things like automatic white balancing can do wicked things to colors, as you may have seen if you have taken photos in areas mostly lit by those nasty orange sodium lights.

Well, the commercial system carries thousands of tourists 1200ft high across the Royal Gorge every year. That is just the one installation mentioned in the original article. I would expect the system to stand up to par on safety-of-life grounds. Perhaps even too well, if I may say so. In a tourist setting you can sit stuck halfway across for a few hours while the emergency services find a crane with enough reach to bring you to firm ground. With a rocket about to explode in vicinity I reckon most people would rather get to the end even if they broke a couple of bones in the process.

How do you think people get fast to the bunker from the top of the ~150ft tower? Yup, zipline. Although Boeing plans to use armoured vehicles instead of a bunker.

I guess Mrs. Frizzle would approve.

Also, dust-free storage isn't cheap. It requires extremely high quality filters, overpressure pumps, space built from special materials. Then you need to account for the operating costs of those e.g. electricity, periodically changing those filters, workforce etc.

As @Nothalogh noted, that is exactly what the MBDA Meteor does. It can even control thrust by varying the size of the exhaust from the solid fuel chamber thus controlling pressure therein. The pressure changes the burn rate and thus amount of (fuel-rich) gas entering the ramjet stage. Although I think the boost stage is a separate solid fuel rocket housed inside the ramjet and ejected once it has burnt out.

Meh... AI, autonomous vehicles, giant space ships, vessel names with a significant gravitas shortfall... He is trying to make The Culture happen!