RyanRising

I wonder if it's cause they're all of a sudden shy about cameras or if it's cause they want to use that telemetry elsewhere. Also, it's scrub city around these parts.

I wonder if they'll be able to make a medium launch vehicle with the appropriate amount of quirky Rocket Lab charm. You lose some of it from not having electric pumps on your engines or being able to strap the rocket to the top of your car for a camping trip, so they'll have to make it up in other areas. I'm sure they'd command interest even in an oversaturated smallsat market on account of their successes, but I can't blame them for wanting to diversify, seeing the wave of optimistic smallsat launchers trying to swim. Everyone and their mother seems to want a piece of that market, likely because a small rocket is easier to pitch than a large one. Kinda feels like this:

I think some of the Raptor people heard complaints from the outside about not being able to see the engines’ serial numbers. Image by bocachicagal, posted to the NSF forum.

And we did get a launch, though it was foggy enough that past the launch there wasn’t much of the flight to see. However, they did show a view of the launch pad and I thought it was funny to see that some four minutes after the launch there were already people mulling about the pad. I haven’t seen enough Soyuz launches to get used to that. The animation was fancy, but so fancy I doubt it was a data-driven visualisation. I suppose that impacted me a little more cause I can’t speak Russian.

Yeah, aviation generally calls out times in UTC (although called something else) anyway, right? Zulu time, was it?

Interesting that their "famiy picture" or whatever it is on the bottom left doesn't include the silhouette of SS3. Also, I see that there are three 1s replacing "i"s in "V1rg1nGalact1c," which I guess makes some sense for this announcement but still looks more like a gamertag than anything actually relevant.

Static fire happened, looks like about 2-2.5 seconds. I don't think that's full duration, is it?

The WaterfallRestock gas-generator exhausts keep the Restock particles, and they do this as well. It's not ideal, but there doesn't seem to be a better way. I'd take this over just flames from the GGs.

Complex and possibly very annoying? Yes it is, but you don’t have to speculate: It’s been done before. Almost certainly out of scope for this mod, though - I don’t think the developer wants to get into environmental sound effects beyond the muffling as you move out of the atmosphere even when they do have time.

I saw that somewhere else. Apparently you can see Mars in that sky?

I got a good laugh out of that. Yeah, SpaceX has other things to demonstrate when it comes to Starship, but that sure does make the MDF or whatever the other two are made out of look sophisticated. Whatever happened to that white-painted nosecone, anyway? Also, calling that thing a Space Elevator would be consistent with the naming of Starship in that it really, really isn't what the name actually means.

Raptors are still finicky, I see. I wonder if we’ll ever get to hear the stories of the development challenges with Raptor, much like the early days of the SSME or the F1? I hope we do, and it’s from the same angle of “we had to throw this many engines in the meat grinder to get something that consistently worked, but once it did, it really worked.” Even then, the SSMEs had to be taken apart between flights. ...I thought the people who were suggesting this were joking. Had no idea it was an actual option.

This paper investigates a hydrogen engine using a mixture ratio that’s variable but still pretty near the common 6:1 oxidiser/fuel mix for hydrogen, which isn’t stoichometric. But a FFSC engine is still investigated, compared to a fuel-rich SC engine, where it shows no benefits in specific impulse, but instead says the benefits are in avoiding needing really high-performance helium seals and taking some of the load off of the higher-power fuel turbopump and transferring it to the lower-power oxidiser turbopump, and (I think as a result) the maximum pressure in any turbopump is lower. I was under the impression the reason SpaceX went with FFSC for the Raptor because they wanted those lower pressures, more reliable and reusable seals, and, because gas-gas mixes better than gas-liquid, you can have a shorter combustion chamber for the same combustion efficiency. But perhaps most importantly to this discussion, Raptor runs fuel-rich, not stoichiometric, anyway. Its O/F mixture ratio (by mass) is about 3.5, and the stoichiometric ratio by mass is 4:1.

Would Blackrack's Singularity shader be a good fit here?

I don't see why a full-flow staged combustion cycle necessitates a stoichometric mix - all it means is you have both an oxidiser-rich and fuel-rich preburner that both supply the main combustion chamber, right? So your fuel-rich preburner could be more fuel-rich than your oxygen-rich preburner is oxygen-rich, resulting in a mixture ratio that's still fuel-rich. I'd also like to say that, perhaps in contrast to Zorg, I really like do like having the cyan colour in there as a contrast to the purple near sea level, and (in the case of a RAPIER's closed cycle) to the orange-yellow plasma surrounding an SSTO on ascent.

That fuel doesn't return to the economy, but the money spent on it does in exactly the same way the money spent on SLS does. Almost all ways you can possibly spend money have the same effect.

OK, but that money could have easily come from somewhere else. Our work making money is how the company funds us doing the work and drinking coffee. NASA gets money from the government instead, but it doesn’t really matter - money is interchangeable, so it shouldn’t matter where that money comes from when you spend it. Just cause we made revenue doesn’t make our expenses less real. And just cause NASA money flows to other things, and, in part, itself (through the US government) doesn’t make SLS cost less.

I’m a little confused now. I’m buying John Doe? We’re spending the same amount of money on more coffee?

Cost is an upfront measure, how the money gets distributed after it’s spent doesn’t lower it. It’s like, if I go to Starbucks and buy a coffee, that $5 will get distributed amongst the workers, corporate, and maybe even wherever they get the materials for it. Those people will use that money again to do other stuff. But the coffee still costs me $5.

Or flipping upside down. What’s the deal with that, anyway? I could have sworn they didn’t do this a while back.

Wow. Thanks for doing the math! I was expecting a ridiculous result, and boy howdy I guess I got one. I think this could be used as a good preface to introducing modern moon missions: it explains why doing things like Apollo did doesn't scale up well at all, and why we need to take a different approach this time around. Tyranny of the rocket equation indeed.

Looks to me like they are tapered, though very slightly, on the case walls. This is less pronounced in 5.56x45 than, say, 7.62x39, but I think it's still present. That being said, I'm only reading the documentation here, not actually poring over handful of ammo. I understand, though, that you'd want some amount of taper to help with extraction? If they were perfectly straight-walled, seems to me the cases would really like to stick in the chamber no matter how hard you pull on the end.

I think Starship will probably be expensive enough that expending it won't be cheaper than a F9 launch. There's a lot of hardware and work hours that will go into a full-up orbital Starship, and it's a significantly more complex beast than a F9 second stage. That being said, I absolutely think that they'll put Starlink sats on the first couple orbital launches and reentry tests. You're going to orbit anyway, why not put something up there?

I think it depends on the casing - if your round is tapered and you try to line them up wall-to-wall, you'll get a curve. If your magazine is long enough and the round is tapered enough, matching the magazine to the curve the rounds naturally make will improve feeding. For an extreme example of this, see the Chauchat magazine. Straight magazines, on the other hand, are easier to pack, so if the magazine is short enough relative to the taper of your cartridge that you can get away without curving it it's usually easier to handle. Additionally, some cartridges aren't tapered at all, so a curve won't help those. Lastly, the reason the Vector has a magazine that's swept backwards is because it uses Glock mags. Glock magazines are made to fit in the grip of a handgun, and we've generally found that giving those an angle greater than 90 degrees to the barrel is more comfortable to hold. That limitation doesn't apply to the Vector and other guns using pistol magazines outside of the grip, but they keep the sweep to maintain compatibility.

I know this absolutely, positively will not and cannot happen, for many, many reasons. But what sort of rocket would it take to send Orion, an appropriately upgraded service module, and a four-person lander on a lunar landing mission single-launch? Expense, debris, and politics aside.