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Just now, Rakaydos said:

...Overbuild for possibly a 200 ton booster to misjudge landing velocity?

Yes you don't need the width, also that load is heavy, heavier than the catch arm making it less agile. 

Nor is it an crawler, they seems pretty happy with the current heavy mover who is an commercial product who is commonly used for moving heavy houses and industrial parts. 
 

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Better look at the cupola itself pre mounting:

jBkSDau_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&

Also confirmed that there will be an external camera for the Cupola, though we don't know if it is a free flying cubesat in the trunk (not very likely but possible) or a fixed one inside the cover


Edit: Unrelated, but the crane in the post above this was said by insiders to be a LR11000, which said simply is an LR11350 (Kong/Frankencrane) with a much larger radius and 1000 tons of capacity instead of 1350

Edited by Beccab
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On 9/1/2021 at 12:21 PM, CatastrophicFailure said:

Also, whatever Final Form the MechzillaTreads end up taking, they’ll need some simple mechanism for actually gripping the booster’s load points, like cups or something, not a flat, slippery surface. 

From the Everyday Astronaut videos, it looks like the load points consist of small rods jutting out from the rocket.  That "flat, slippery surface" likely either is a mesh to make it easy to trap the rods or some sort of support for something strong enough to support the rods.

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Info on Starship engine-out capability from the usual SpaceX reddit insider:
"Starship won't suffer the same issues [as yesterday's Alpha rocket launch, this was part of a short analysys on the launch failure]. The most possible cause of launch failure lies with the Booster. Up to 8 engines can shut down and you can still get Starship to orbit. If one of the center engines explodes and damages the others around it, most gimballing control will be lost, and you're probably into Flight termination decision. If an engine in any group explodes and punctures the tank, then it is game over. FT initiated.

Needless to say, each engine will be fitted with an armored blast and thermal blanket to mitigate this risk. Not sure if they'll be ready for the first flight though."

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On 9/1/2021 at 11:18 PM, Beccab said:

Also confirmed that there will be an external camera for the Cupola, though we don't know if it is a free flying cubesat in the trunk (not very likely but possible) or a fixed one inside the cover

That could get… awkward… :wacko:

Likewise if the aliens decide to drop in at the wrong moment… 

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8 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

That could get… awkward… :wacko:

Likewise if the aliens decide to drop in at the wrong moment… 

I'm actually not 100% sure how close to the cupola that is, it was recently confirmed that the sealed hatch of the docking port is still there. it doesn't have the docking hardware anymore, but if something happens to the cupola it can get shut off to keep Dragon pressurized and presumably it is like that during the entirety of the launch

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This was my render from the beginning of August predicting a tank-tread mechanism to translate the booster via its catchpoints:

2051835.jpg

This was back when we thought the arms were actually the sliding tower frames, but no matter. You can see how the tank tread mechanism operates: a sloped section to drop the catchpoints between one of the teeth, and then teeth that rotate around in a loop to move the booster forward or backward.

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11 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

That could get… awkward… :wacko:

Likewise if the aliens decide to drop in at the wrong moment… 

The camera or cameras is probably on the cover. This has the benefit of letting you change the view angle by moving the cover and you can use the cover as an sun shadow. 
Cameras will obviously only be active then activated. Its not like an suborbital flight there you get a few minutes in freefall but an group who will spends days in space and want privacy.

 

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1 minute ago, grawl said:

Looking closely at the tiles, a lot of misaligned edges can be seen.

Does it affect drag and turbulences in a notable way ?

The ones with a green marking over it are misaligned and need to be adjusted (orange = broken instead, blue ones are a gap issue but they are almost gone by now), the rest should be fine. If you mean the ones where the is basically a line between a row of tiles and the next one, yup that's intentional and shouldn't cause problems

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