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Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

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Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Western Poland and bits of other nations, sure You say that as if it is meaningless. How about just not invading your neighbors?

“The entire world” down to “half of Poland” may be the theoretically largest goalpost move possible (on Earth, anyway).

That’s only if things actually stop at half of Poland, which is hard to imagine with a facist state. You kinda need (plausible) external enemies to keep your power.

It also just sets a bad precedent to let the bullies have their way. Though I’ll admit that it’s questionable whether it was worth it in hindsight, we have only one possible branch of history to compare.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#732
post #127

Watching pieces of the ship melt off, but then seeing it make a relatively controlled landing, is perversely confidence building. If it can survive that kind of damage on a control surface maybe it's a quite robust craft.

Agree, a successful mission needn't be a perfect mission

Any mission you land and can walk from is a successful mission.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#733
post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conditional surrender would have been completely unacceptable given that they were the aggressor and had a million troops in China, and wanted to hold on to their conquests after the war. Even after the first nuke they didn't surrender. It took the emperor speaking up - for the first time ever - after the second nuke, and even then the military junta tried to stop it. Your points about the Communists stand, but keep…

> Even after the first nuke they didn't surrender. It took the emperor speaking up - for the first time ever - after the second nuke, and even then the military junta tried to stop it. All this is true, but it's also true that the nukes weren't the only factor involved. A good case can be made that it was actually the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, which started at midnight local time on the same morning that Nagasaki…

Hmm, the books I’ve read in Japan make it seem more like the emperor was just tired of an unwinnable war. The nuclear bombs and soviet invasion were simply a catalyst. They just got a surrender note from the US at the proper time for that to be the topic under consideration (aside from, you know, surrendering to the people that tricked you being a generally bad idea).

I like how they ultimately accepted the unconditional surrender, but still tacked on a condition that the emperor was not to be blamed.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#734
post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conditional surrender would have been completely unacceptable given that they were the aggressor and had a million troops in China, and wanted to hold on to their conquests after the war. Even after the first nuke they didn't surrender. It took the emperor speaking up - for the first time ever - after the second nuke, and even then the military junta tried to stop it. Your points about the Communists stand, but keep…

Literally the only condition was that the emperor was preserved.

I think that was the condition they tacked onto the unconditional surrender xD

I imagine there were more before that.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#735
post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Conditional surrender would have been completely unacceptable And some would argue that nuking entire cities is completely unacceptable.

Allied options were: 1. Invade. Expected Allied casualties of 300k all the way to much more than a million. Expected Japanese casualties: tens of millions, perhaps up to literally all of them. Previous Japanese strongholds fought to the last man, earlier in the war the Allies invaded an island with 11000 Japanese soldiers, and I think 47 of those eventually surrendered. The rest died. The civilian populations on thes…

> This option turns out to have had the lowest bodycount in the end

Given that you don’t know the body count of the other options, given they didn’t happen, that’s a bold statement to make.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth noting part of the craft flew (intentionally) without heat tiles, and another part with thinner tiles. They're gathering a ton of data to make it robust! Many of these engineers built Falcon 9, and I have a pretty high degree of confidence they'll shake out the issues. SpaceX operates very differently from traditional aerospace, so we'll likely see many more issues come up before Starship is human rat…

I love that they are deliberately tempting failures with the no and thin tiles. In a lot of ways they will learn far more from the heat shield burn through around the flap(s) than they would have if they had been "lucky" and it had all gone perfectly. You during testing you want things to fail, that is the point of testing. If it's all successful you only learn that under those conditions your design works, but if it…

That's an often underappreciated aspect of engineering.

When parts last longer than expected, it is considered something that needs "fixing". It is a signal that the part can be made cheaper, lighter, etc... If SpaceX had gone with heavy, thick tiles, and they did their job because they were overspecced, it is that much less payload capacity.

Even value engineering, which is often criticized when it comes to consumer products is a good thing. Yes, your new dishwasher is not as robust as the one made in the 50s, but it is also 10x cheaper (inflation-adjusted), and it can still wash dishes for maybe 10-15 years without repairs, at which point you may want a new one as technology has improved. Note that I am talking proper engineering, having a single point of failure that prompts a replacement is planned obsolescence and terrible engineering, there should be no single point of failure with good engineering.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#737
post #498
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was seriously some of the most dramatic television I've ever watched. Video of Starship being melted/torn apart by supersonic plasma, the broadcast stream dying multiple times maybe due to ship destruction, then finally back online, peeking through the cracked camera to see the nearly destroyed grid fin STILL ACTUATING. The announcers laughing about the ship being "maybe held together by some nuts and bolts" and…

A friendly fyi just in case it wasn't a slip of the tongue: grid fins are only on the booster.

Grid fins are only intentionally on the booster.

This one just became one accidentally.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#738
post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If those things the Japanese did were "outrages", so were the things the US, Britain, and other European countries did to build their empires. The Japanese viewed their actions as simply taking their rightful place as an imperial power alongside those other countries. Yes, by today's standards, or at least today's Western standards, such things are Not Done, but if we are going to judge WW II Japan by those standards…

Point me to the rapes of Nanking the allies did. Or maybe just stop spreading Soviet propaganda.

Uh, 2000 years of European history not enough? Just because it happened a few hundred years earlier doesn’t make it better.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#739
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't much to be gained from mangled, corroded remains of what used to be ITAR hardware at some point, so nobody really tried it before. All the Apollo engines e.g. are still where they were dropped (unless recovered by the US), because you'd really need to abduct a few of the designers or engineers involved to gain useful insights.

I think you're definitely wrong about that. It's generally believed that the US Navy puts a lot of effort into picking scraps of foreign missile tests up off the ocean floor, to see what they can learn. Hard to confirm from unclassified sources, but I believe it.

You're wrong about why the US Navy is doing that. They don't care about how those missiles were manufactured, they want to figure out what their performance is – what's their real fuel capacity, their real fuel efficiency, their real turn rates, etc. pp., to figure out how dangerous they are, and how they're best intercepted. Whatever the official performance figures are, they're guaranteed to be wrong (either exaggerated to scare enemies, or downplayed to lure enemies into a false sense of security).

None of that applies to civilian rockets. ITAR regulates them because exporting either the finished rockets, or their components, or the tools and processes used to make them, might help foreign powers build their own. Salvaging wrecks isn't very useful for that. Meanwhile, if you want to know the exact performance figures for those rockets, you can just look them up on the manufacturers' websites. Nobody has any reason to lie about them; if you exaggerate them, customers will find out quickly, and if you downplay them, customers won't buy it.

This is why the Chinese and Russians (and before them, Soviets) tend to keep "fishing trawlers" full of SIGINT and recovery gear around NATO missile exercises, but not civilian launches. They care just as much about NATO military missile performance as the USN cares about their own. (And both sides rely on good old industrial espionage to copy manufacturing technology.)

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#740
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is unlikely. We don't really do this on airplanes, where servicing procedures and airworthiness criteria are very strict, and space is orders of magnitude more unforgiving than flying in the atmosphere at ~10km altitude. If there's cabin decompression on a plane, you get an oxygen mask and land safely in the nearest airport. If there's cabin decompression on a spacecraft, you're dead. If there's a problem with e…

Actually we do this on airplanes globally. There's many older aircraft or poorly maintained aircraft, as long as vital requirements don't fail, it's fine.

Yes it's different from a car's requirements, no the concept is not different, rusty pickup just means different things.

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