People can write all manner of stuff, but until someone tries, no one has a definitive answer. That’s why SpaceX is doing these launches, to figure out how to build a spacecraft that can actually handle that heat. The last three flights have been such a bummer cause none of them have given actual data on the redesigned forward flaps and the various heat shields.

I wouldn’t count Starship out yet. People also wrote all manner of stuff about Falcon 9’s first stage reusability and at this point, it’s safe to say everyone who thought it wouldn’t work has been proven wrong.

deleted by creator

As opposed to Blue Origin’s solution, which was to be assembled from three different spacecraft in orbit? Or the Dynetics solution, which was over its own mass budget?

It’s wild that there’s no configuration of SRBs that doesn’t have offset thrust. Wonder how much of the energy was lost because the boosters and main engines had to be angled, so the overall center of thrust and center of gravity were still in line, and the damned thing could fly straight?

NASA is funded with tax money and failures mean they get called in front of Congress like a child who sharpied the brand new tv. They don’t have the luxury of failure, so they over-analyze and over-engineer everything, to the point that everything they build is reasonably expected to work on the first try.

SpaceX doesn’t have that restriction and so they’re free to blow up as much stuff as they need to. How many Falcons failed along the way to building the safest, highest flight cadence launch vehicle in history?

The Starship is in development. The Shuttle is retired. Assuming that SpaceX doesn’t decide to can Starship before operational flights begin, make this comparison again when it’s retired.

They get to claim it because we let them. Every time an article comes out with “____ is a Nazi dogwhistle,” there’s a set of people who don’t want to be associated with Nazis (or insert relevant disliked group of choice) who will immediately drop whatever the thing is. This creates a cycle where something does eventually become a dogwhistle, because everyone who didn’t use it as such has stopped using it altogether.

TL;DR: Fuck 'em. Don’t let those assholes control how you express yourself.

Along with the antenna, there’s another problem to solve - power. The probes need a power source that, after the better part of a century, can still output enough power to send a signal home. That doesn’t leave a lot of options. RTGs will not do for this, their power output is too low. It’s theoretically possible to build a battery large enough, but it’ll add tens of tons to the probe’s mass. A nuclear reactor would probably be lighter, but has the same problem as an RTG, in that its fuel supply will decay along the way. And if you need to make course correction maneuvers on the trip (cause let’s face it, we’re not going to bullseye a dwarf planet sized target from lightyears away), the probe has to stay powered for the entire time, so the propulsion system doesn’t freeze up. And now you need to worry about propellant losses.

EDIT: Finally got around to reading the article and I’d love to know what the author of this idea considers unrealistic if decelerating from 0.3c into orbit around a black hole >20 lightyears away sounds plausible.

Worth it if it’ll get them actual flight data. I’d rather have Dreamchaser do a little wave and come back home than go up with the goal of berthing, then run into a problem that flight testing could’ve discovered and be forced to abort. Sims and groundside testing run into diminishing returns eventually, while flight data can be fed back into the sim parameters.

I get the vibe that the holdup with the propulsion system is “sufficient margins”. If that’s the case, fly her, see how she performs, and fly a berthing mission on the second go with improvements to the entire craft. But if it’s an uncertainty that the thrusters will perform as they expect at all, yes, groundside testing and development is the way to go here.

Or that everyone else is just as horrible as they are, so they’d feel justified in being a sloppy fart of a person.

Hot take: I’m fine with this. Film, TV and games are audio-visual mediums, they depend on the sound just as much as the image. All the awesome space battles would lose from being dead silent. No sound, no music. You’re in a vacuum, where’s the music coming from?

The silence of vacuum should be used when it would enhance the drama and impact of the scene, not for a slavish adherence to realism.

Interstellar and For All Mankind benefit from the silence because they’re not about the excitement of space, they’re about the drama of space and the characters. In those, space is a character all on its own. Star Wars and Star Trek are about the adventures and the action. Space is just the setting. And in that context, silence is jarring.

Man, I hope Kotobukiya gets around to making HMMs of Genesis zoids. I’d absolutely love a HMM Murasame and Mugen Liger.

Inb4 the Chinese knockoff kits. They don’t have the detail of an HMM kit. And after seeing how much their engineering has improved with the König Wolf, I want to see Koto’s proper effort put into these.

This is bullshit. I’ve been staring at it from every angel. They’res no hippo in this picture.

The edges of the opening are effectively the same lengths as the edges of the rotating pieces. If the walls were angled enough to avoid clipping, there would be a visible gap as the rotating bit moves through and its inner face moves away from the inner face of the opening. To avoid clipping and still have continuous contact, the inner surfaces between the openings would need to be rounded all the way to the edge.

The openings are straight vertical. The rotating bits clipping through the inner corners bothers me to no end.

Your friends are constantly spewing EM radiation at you. So is your home. The trees outside. The very sky. There’s no escape. Even if you were to enclose yourself in a Faraday cage and exist in complete darkness, your own body would still be bathing your surroundings in EM radiation that bounces off the cage.

I was gonna call out omitting the Sea Dragon, but I see you already did.

The Boeing freighter had to be a joke, right? No one thought that’d actually work?

Nice Zugock, bro!

I’d absolutely love to play it, but I don’t know any Expanse fans who’d also want to run it. My own skills as a game master are sorely lacking in the “actually running a game” aspect, even after years of practice. Honestly, I bought the books mostly for design inspiration for my Space Engineers builds.

It’s also a tabletop RPG again. Green Ronin made one, based on their Modern AGE ruleset. I believe it’s explicitly based on the books and ignores show canon.