Well of Souls Forums

Well, SN8 did a perfect skydive and flip maneuver, and hit the landing pad dead center...with what looked like one engine out (assuming it was intended to be a 2-engine landing burn) and the other burning itself out (exhaust should be blue, not green), and a bit too much vertical velocity. https://y...

To be fair, I expect Grimes had input on that one. SpaceX's other launch vehicle engines are named Kestrel and Merlin, Raptor fits with the predatory birds theme. Naturally, but SpaceX is known for its unorthodox naming protocols (ships named "Of course I still love you," "Just read the instruction...

If it were a military rocket, okay. But a booster? Why not 'gazelle' or something? For a super-heavy launch vehicle's engine with 2.2 MN of thrust? Just be glad Starship ended up with a relatively normal name, even with the bit of silliness about using the name "Starship" for both the upper stage a...

"Raptor" engines? Who comes up with such a name? A person who would name a baby "X Æ A-12." To be fair, I expect Grimes had input on that one. SpaceX's other launch vehicle engines are named Kestrel and Merlin, Raptor fits with the predatory birds theme. Dragon was named after Puff the Magic Dragon...

If things go well, Starship SN8 will make its first high-altitude flight attempt tomorrow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf83yzzme2I This will test (depending on how far it gets) flight with 3 engines to 12.5 km, control during descent using the body flaps, restarting engines from the header tanks...

And what looks like some sort of channel to the upper right. I wonder whether it was a feature created by the flow of the molten lava, or something carved afterward by flowing liquid... maybe water that condensed from steam released by the lava. I think that's Rima Mairan/Mairan Rille: https://en.w...

Keep in mind that it's one thing to generate a laser beam capable of inflicting damage across light seconds of distance. It's quite a different matter to do so from a maneuvering warship that doesn't have hours to wait for vibrations to damp down after every movement, and to actually reliably hit a ...

The moon is just a big ball of rock. Simply being on the lunar surface isn't going to provide power or cooling, that's all stuff you're going to have to build. At most, you're making use of a tiny amount of surface rock for thermal mass. You could take this entire "death star" defense installation ...

The moon is just a big ball of rock. Simply being on the lunar surface isn't going to provide power or cooling, that's all stuff you're going to have to build. At most, you're making use of a tiny amount of surface rock for thermal mass. You could take this entire "death star" defense installation a...

You're right about the Vulcain as well as about the higher chamber pressures - up until the late 1990s considered 'extreme' - for closed-cycle/staged combustion engines. Although the RD-180 is still used to launch NRO satellites and has a spotless track record, it has never been man rated, presumab...

edit: Correction, the Vulcain is actually a gas-generator engine like the Merlin. It pumps both fuel and oxidizer into the chamber with a pump driven by a turbine running from a small fraction of the propellant flow and dumping its exhaust separately. Simpler to develop but less efficient. heh - yo...

That's the first full-flow staged combustion rocket engine to reach flight worthiness, with a 300 bar chamber pressure and burning methane fuel. Easily the most advanced chemical rocket engine in existence. Hmz, the Russian RD-170/RD-171 and derivatives like the RD-180 (ox-rich kerolox), or the Vul...

https://i.imgur.com/KZZcMf7.png
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EDAy_7sUwAAmMbl.jpg:orig

That's the first full-flow staged combustion rocket engine to reach flight worthiness, with a 300 bar chamber pressure and burning methane fuel. Easily the most advanced chemical rocket engine in existence.

The peak field strengths required ARE alike, or actually less for the fusion chamber. Except you have to apply those fields with a field topology suitable for bottling and directing plasma across a chamber with about a million times the volume, containing an explosion generating immense amounts of ...

A firing chamber 20m across can contain 100mt fusion reaction easily using the same level of technology behind the Terran Railguns. Accelerating a couple hundred kg of inert projectile is nothing at all like confining a detonating thermonuclear weapon in a chamber tens of meters across. How can you...

Any optical tweezer demos done with low power lasers are using lasers that are still many times more powerful than a laser pointer, and manipulating particles suspended in a fluid, using thermal effects on the liquid or air surrounding the particles. It should be obvious why this wouldn't work on ga...

All neutral plasma is "quasi neutral" the laser would effect a Casaba Howitzer beam in this regard just fine. I got a second opinion. Gradient pressure isn't theory, you can pick up a speck of graphite from a pencil with a decent laser pointer at home. Quasi-neutral or not, the interaction of plasm...

You're talking about funneling gigawatts through your rectennas and power system before reaching whatever you're using for propulsion, with some significant fraction being lost to heat at each step. Any failure will result in your craft doing a fair imitation of a moth hitting a bug zapper. Reduced...

So, I've just had a reeeeally crazy idea I've been mulling over for about two weeks, and I'd like to pass it by here. Firstly, I started from the concept of the Nuclear Thermal Turbo rocket, an idea for a Air Augmented Nuclear Thermal Rocket, that uses air-breathing propulsion to lofts itself out o...

On the 7th, Intelsat 29e developed a fuel leak and comms problems. On the 8th it was drifting from its orbital slot and pieces of debris were visible.
On the 11th: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqPrVn71IqY