531–540 of 899 posts
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I've got the black and white arty photo as my lockscreen which gives you an idea https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/E46BxzjjUkpthVBNE6k8mn-192...
oh wow, i always imagined those breaking fins to be about tennis racket size !
Here is Musk describing them as a dinosaur bear trap: https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=1714
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I’ve said for a while that we won’t be ready for the real space age until you can have a rusty pickup in space. What I mean by that is that we have it down well enough that the tech exceeds tolerances and can degrade gracefully. You see this in some sci-fi where there are rust bucket old ships that work.
You have to be careful how much wisdom you glean from fiction. The sheer hostility of space kind of precludes the "she's a good ol' ship" trope. When your door doesn't shut on your pickup, you can bang on it a bit. When your door doesn't shut on your spacecraft, you've got a ship full of corpses that look like a blob fish brought up from the Marianas Trench.
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Japan was already trying to negotiate conditional surrender when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. The US demanded unconditional surrender, and they nuked hundreds of thousands of civilians to force that demand. The bombing of Dresden is arguably a war crime by todays standards. It was unnecessary. Remember that we were allied with the Soviet Union (Joseph Stalin was the "good guy" on our side). After WW2 he was giv…
Japan should have unconditionally surrendered in March, half a year before the nukes, when the US military burned most of Tokyo to the ground in less than two hours. And yes. Stalin was a bad guy and it's a pity the war didn't end with the demise of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes. This is also irrelevant to the matter of strategic bombings perpetrated by America and Britain.
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It's easy to say that now. Have you lived through unrestricted, total warfare, where one side intends to conquer a continent or the world, invades without provocation, and won't stop until brought to submission through extreme force? The Allies did not initiate war and did not want war. How many of your country's people should you sacrifice to end a war of aggression started by the enemy? Should you not use the means…
Japan was already trying to negotiate conditional surrender when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. The US demanded unconditional surrender, and they nuked hundreds of thousands of civilians to force that demand. The bombing of Dresden is arguably a war crime by todays standards. It was unnecessary. Remember that we were allied with the Soviet Union (Joseph Stalin was the "good guy" on our side). After WW2 he was giv…
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I tried what you said in the most realistic simulator we have, Kerbal Space Program, assuming like you that a gentler approach would be better. And I learned that no, that most certainly is not better. What you need to protect is on the inside of the heat shield. Heat conduction is based on temperature difference and time[1] and the conduction of the material[2]. Since the heat shield tiles have a very low thermal co…
What happens if you do a geostationary deorbit? I.e straight down.
Either you do that with atmospheric drag, or a huge amount of fuel. The weight of heat protection is much lower and more efficient than the fuel option.
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Mars launch window is every two years. It is very inefficient to launch at other times. As for moon, I'm surprised with the estimate you have provided. Apollo needed just one launch for each mission. Even if SpaceX will do orbital re-fueling, it's just two-three launches, why would you need more? BTW, the idea of getting heavy Starship to the moon and back is interesting, but at the end flying the vehicle optimized f…
> Even if SpaceX will do orbital re-fueling, it's just two-three launches, why would you need more? Wikipedia says Starship weights 120 ton empty and 1320 ton fueled, plus 100 ton payload (approximate numbers). That means fuel weights 1200 ton. So to carry fuel to LEO to fuel up a Starship you need 1200 / 100 = 12 flights. You can change this number maybe 2 times into both directions, but I doubt you'll fuel Starship…
It’s a bit hard to compare to Apollo since Apollo dropped stages at every step of the process, but it seems they used 70 tons of fuel in the third state of Saturn V for original trans lunar injection of 45 ton Apollo. Apollo itself was 2/3 fuel. So it’s ratio of 15 tons to 90 tons. I.e. 1/6.
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Japan was already trying to negotiate conditional surrender when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. The US demanded unconditional surrender, and they nuked hundreds of thousands of civilians to force that demand. The bombing of Dresden is arguably a war crime by todays standards. It was unnecessary. Remember that we were allied with the Soviet Union (Joseph Stalin was the "good guy" on our side). After WW2 he was giv…
Japan should have unconditionally surrendered in March, half a year before the nukes, when the US military burned most of Tokyo to the ground in less than two hours. And yes. Stalin was a bad guy and it's a pity the war didn't end with the demise of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes. This is also irrelevant to the matter of strategic bombings perpetrated by America and Britain.
"We may have been fighting the wrong enemy (Germany) all along. But while we're here (on the Soviet border), we should go after the bastards now, 'cause we're gonna have to fight 'em eventually."
https://books.google.com/books?redir_esc=y&id=32DxAAAAMAAJ&d...
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Can you please explain how exactly you would heat shield a camera? Like, your suggestion is a box attached to the ship that changes its aerodynamic profile, with an actuator that can be a point of failure/ fly off and hit other critical instruments? They have lots of cameras. Were we watching the same video? The thing got absolutely melted and you’re complaining that you didn’t get a front row seat? 5 short years ago…
No, I didn't complain about the front row seat :) calm down. And yes, SpaceX is the trend setter in the industry right now, there is no question that their approaches are more modern. Having said that, cameras today can be really small. Not a big box. Lenses or their protectors can be rather, well, protective (I'm thinking about moissanite here, but may be better solutions are possible). And I didn't see lots of came…
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Yep, those pumps have to push the propellant into the explosion harder than the explosion pushes back. That takes serious power!
So thinking where the leverage is - is it like hydraulics where the input cross-section is a lot smaller than the output cross-section? That's kinda what the nozzle looks like.
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Japan should have unconditionally surrendered in March, half a year before the nukes, when the US military burned most of Tokyo to the ground in less than two hours. And yes. Stalin was a bad guy and it's a pity the war didn't end with the demise of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes. This is also irrelevant to the matter of strategic bombings perpetrated by America and Britain.
General George S. Patton: "We may have been fighting the wrong enemy (Germany) all along. But while we're here (on the Soviet border), we should go after the bastards now, 'cause we're gonna have to fight 'em eventually." https://books.google.com/books?redir_esc=y&id=32DxAAAAMAAJ&d...