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4 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Because I apparently have nothing better to do....

There is huge benefit in a few tile shapes reused, but maybe a few "meta tiles" could be designed such that the remaining areas fill in with fewer gaps? Not going from 2 unique tiles to 2000, but from 2 to... 3, or 4, where the added non-hex tiles are shapes forms of the gap shapes, and could possibly even be curved, or slightly "bent" along a midline so the edges match better.

 

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That should help move crewed Starship development along.

And if they have a lunar capable Starship flying by then, I’m sure Elon will be quite happy with 300 million to put towards the Mars capable version.

Maybe he’ll accept it in Bitcoin. :rolleyes:

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5 minutes ago, KSK said:

That should help move crewed Starship development along.

And if they have a lunar capable Starship flying by then, I’m sure Elon will be quite happy with 300 million to put towards the Mars capable version.

Maybe he’ll accept it in Bitcoin. :rolleyes:

Not all of the $300m is going to SpaceX, that's just how much it costs to NASA in total.

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For my own reference: Shuttle had ~24,300 unique tiles.

 

Regarding the landing legs... for Earth, who knows, but the lunar version could just as well copy the TWA Moonliner at Disneyland:

moonrocket_tall0000cl.jpg

No need for the slots, the rails can be on the surface. The stance could be quite large. they don't have to deploy moments before landing, they deploy slowly. Adjusting the position via the rail (worm gear?) allows self-leveling.

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22 minutes ago, tater said:

For my own reference: Shuttle had ~24,300 unique tiles.

 

Regarding the landing legs... for Earth, who knows, but the lunar version could just as well copy the TWA Moonliner at Disneyland:

moonrocket_tall0000cl.jpg

No need for the slots, the rails can be on the surface. The stance could be quite large. they don't have to deploy moments before landing, they deploy slowly. Adjusting the position via the rail (worm gear?) allows self-leveling.

My guess is that they invert the legs and go for an falcon 9 style system. Yes you would need hydraulic for the pistons for self leveling but that could double as dampeners. 

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28 minutes ago, tater said:

For my own reference: Shuttle had ~24,300 unique tiles.

 

Regarding the landing legs... for Earth, who knows, but the lunar version could just as well copy the TWA Moonliner at Disneyland:

moonrocket_tall0000cl.jpg

No need for the slots, the rails can be on the surface. The stance could be quite large. they don't have to deploy moments before landing, they deploy slowly. Adjusting the position via the rail (worm gear?) allows self-leveling.

How would they achieve something like that without seams in the heat shield? It seems like they're really trying to avoid that.

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13 hours ago, tater said:

There is huge benefit in a few tile shapes reused, but maybe a few "meta tiles" could be designed such that the remaining areas fill in with fewer gaps? Not going from 2 unique tiles to 2000, but from 2 to... 3, or 4, where the added non-hex tiles are shapes forms of the gap shapes, and could possibly even be curved, or slightly "bent" along a midline so the edges match better.

Yeah, I'm thinking 5-6 tiles. Large hex, medium hex, small hex, "keyhole"/"meta", and truncated versions of the large hex for edging. I don't think curvature is necessary for the keyhole tile, though.

3 minutes ago, RealKerbal3x said:

How would they achieve something like that without seams in the heat shield? It seems like they're really trying to avoid that.

@tater was proposing this for the lunar Starship, which won't have a heat shield.

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The benefit of a worm-gear driven setup is that the F9 legs have 1g to help drop them. Deploying the legs well in advance is not a problem for the lunar application, and it seems like leveling would be very straightforward with such a system.

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It'll probably be a dual ASDS landing for the side cores with centre core expended.

15t is comfortably within FH's GTO expendable capability of 26.7t, but enough more than the 8t reusable threshold that being on a sub-GTO trajectory probably won't make enough of a difference.

I wonder if using an extended fairing comes with much of a performance penalty?

Edited by RCgothic
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