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Haptical Sales Slut
Mar 15, 2010

Age 18 to 49
Watching rockets land upright looks like some reversed video hackery, just unreal.


Stupid question: why bother with that type of landing at all? Isn't it 1000x safer to just make the rocket land like the shuttles do? Or is not having landing gear that important?

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Cactus Ghost
Dec 20, 2003

you can actually inflate your scrote pretty safely with sterile saline, syringes, needles, and aseptic technique. its a niche kink iirc

the saline just slowly gets absorbed into your blood but in the meantime you got a big round smooth distended nutsack
wings are very, very heavy. reusable rockets are naturally going to be a bit heavier than single-use ones because designing in robustness amd durability isn't free, but it's barely a rounding error compared to wings. the reason the shuttle had wings were mainly that it made it much simpler to do with the computer tech of the time, and because it made the shuttle able to turn during reentry and choose a landing spot that wasn't directly under its orbit with great precision, much more than anything without wings could have

e: this won't have nearly the ability to turn that the shuttle did, but it will have some, and much more of its thrust can be dedicated to lifting cargo instead of lifting its own wings

Haptical Sales Slut
Mar 15, 2010

Age 18 to 49
That makes sense, didn't realize the wings were so heavy.

SLICK GOKU BABY
Jun 12, 2001

Hey Hey Let's Go! 喧嘩する
大切な物を protect my balls


They still should just use a giant parachute and make it work like all the kids model rockets in existence... :smug:

Haptical Sales Slut
Mar 15, 2010

Age 18 to 49
How aboht helicopter blades unfold to assist with autorotation on the way down? Elon wtf let's mix it up

Call Your Grandma
Jan 17, 2010

train a flock of birds to grab the rocket on the way down and lift it up and fly it somewhere safe.
they would have to be desert birds because the rocket would be very hot.

Cactus Ghost
Dec 20, 2003

you can actually inflate your scrote pretty safely with sterile saline, syringes, needles, and aseptic technique. its a niche kink iirc

the saline just slowly gets absorbed into your blood but in the meantime you got a big round smooth distended nutsack
personally im a fan of warhammer 40k boarding torpedoes. just fill a bunch of unguided rocket with marines, fire them in a scatter pattern and trust that a few will get where they need to go

Haptical Sales Slut
Mar 15, 2010

Age 18 to 49

OMGVBFLOL posted:

personally im a fan of warhammer 40k boarding torpedoes. just fill a bunch of unguided rocket with marines, fire them in a scatter pattern and trust that a few will get where they need to go

I think i get blockchain now

GABA ghoul
Oct 29, 2011

Nuts and Gum posted:

Watching rockets land upright looks like some reversed video hackery, just unreal.


Stupid question: why bother with that type of landing at all? Isn't it 1000x safer to just make the rocket land like the shuttles do? Or is not having landing gear that important?

It's not that much safer. Landing the space shuttle was very difficult and any kind of fuckup during the process would have very likely killed everyone onboard. The wings were also very hard and expensive to protect from reentry heat. Most important reason though is probably that starship is explicitly designed to land on Mars and you can only do powered descent on Mars so it needs that capability no matter what.

Sjs00
Jun 29, 2013

Yeah Baby Yeah !
they should stop doing tests and just start launching poo poo directly to Mars if this is the success rate lets just roll the bones

chaosbreather
Dec 9, 2001

Wry and wise,
but also very sexual.

It’s also worth pointing out that the a) the shuttle was a massive political clusterfuck a la the joint strike fighter and never really lived up to its original mission nor could it after said political clusterfucking, and b) the shuttle mostly used boosters that were jettisoned in the usual fashion, and looked very very clumsy with them strapped on

Cactus Ghost
Dec 20, 2003

you can actually inflate your scrote pretty safely with sterile saline, syringes, needles, and aseptic technique. its a niche kink iirc

the saline just slowly gets absorbed into your blood but in the meantime you got a big round smooth distended nutsack
the shuttle could return satellites the size of a school bus from orbit though, and that's both cool as hell and never been done by anything before or since

poverty goat
Feb 15, 2004



OMGVBFLOL posted:

the shuttle could return satellites the size of a school bus from orbit though, and that's both cool as hell and never been done by anything before or since

Because it's not really a very useful capability

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Cactus Ghost
Dec 20, 2003

you can actually inflate your scrote pretty safely with sterile saline, syringes, needles, and aseptic technique. its a niche kink iirc

the saline just slowly gets absorbed into your blood but in the meantime you got a big round smooth distended nutsack

poverty goat posted:

Because it's not really a very useful capability

yes, but thats true of most things that are cool as hell

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