someone [comrade/them, they/them]

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Cake day: January 11th, 2024

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  • Starship is a huge vehicle. It holds a lot of methane fuel and oxygen. Artist’s impression size comparison with the space shuttle. The Starship/Super Heavy stack is the biggest rocket ever to fly, even bigger than the Saturn V that launched the moon landing missions.

    All of the major Starship/Super Heavy R&D problems in the past few years seem related to a big redesign of Starship. V1 was the original test design and it worked pretty good as a testbed for the flight systems, but it was too heavy to be used as a production design. Starship V2 was intended to reduce the ship’s mass to improve cargo capacity, but it’s been unreliable even beyond the normal unreliability of prototypes. I’d bet that we don’t see another Starship test flight until a Starship V3 redesign.

    Some people have tried to pin the Starship issues on the Raptor V3 engines, but the Super Heavy booster uses literally the exact same engines from the same production line, and Super Heavy has proven to be very reliable. They’ve even successfully done that crazy “catch the booster in midair back at the launch mount” manoeuvre a few times.




















  • I would love to read a tell-all book by Rian Johnson after he retires and no longer has to worry about pissing off entertainment industry VIPs. I strongly suspect that The Last Jedi was the victim of huge levels of executive meddling. There’s some really solid ideas in that movie. My two favourites are the open critique of the Jedi in both their philosophy and actions, and calling out the military-industrial complex. But it’s buried in overly-long and often-unnecessary action setpieces that bring the whole plot to a screeching halt and feel shoehorned-in - such as literally everything that happened after Ben offered Rey a partnership after the throne room fight.