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Comment Re:Refuel in orbit [Re: I'm rooting for it!!] (Score 1) 166

I want to remind you that I never said 400 tons of fuel, I just used your numbers. I said 8 launches, calling Musk's 4 bull. Even with only 100 tons/fuel per launch, that's 800 tons without changing stuff up should be allow them to stuff more fuel into starship, saving weight via not needing other cargo stuff, just bigger tanks.

Also, I said "reach the moon", not "land on it".

And changing development timelines is pretty normal.

Comment Re:Refuel in orbit [Re: I'm rooting for it!!] (Score 1) 166

You're still rewriting the proposals to get your figures.
It isn't 100 tons of fuel per launch, it is closer to 150 that they are figuring. Hundreds of m/s is still many tons of fuel.
10 launches, not 16.
400 tons of fuel plus 220 tons is 620T total, that is about 65% fuel, easily enough to reach the moon.
Landing with 220T would need some more, but as I said, i discounted Musk's statement.

Besides, who says we'll go to the moon with v3 instead of the 200t v4?

And with saying a year or more for 5 launches, SpaceX is expending starships faster now. There isn’t any real reason to thing that they won't have 4 or more rockets and be able to turn them around quickly to get the fuel launched rapidly. Lots of testing and development first though. I'll fully admit that.
Basically just figure that starship will have to same reuse abilities as falcon 9, roughly.

Comment Re:Refuel in orbit [Re: I'm rooting for it!!] (Score 1) 166

They still aren't reducing payload. 200 tons is intended for block 4, block 3 is 100 tons. 100 tons was the planned payloads for the starships I was looking at.
What you might be missing is that a "refueler" starship isn't necessarily restricted to just its payload capacity for fuel transfer. It could be deliberately redesigned for holding more fuel more efficiently, so when I looked it up, the plan is 8 launches. Not to mention that maybe Starship doesn't need the full 1600 tons for a moon mission. Right now, I'm seeing estimates of 8-10, though higher is possible of course. It's active development, things could change. Musk said it could be as few as four, but I tend to discount him.

Looking, it's around 6 km/s of delta-v to land on the moon from LEO. It should have right around 6 km/s when fully loaded (100 tons). So a full fuel load would be mandated. But they're also figuring on the lunar starship having some fuel on board after launch, and tanker starships being able to move ~150 tons per launch.

16 flights would be a worst case scenario.

Comment Re:Refuel in orbit [Re: I'm rooting for it!!] (Score 1) 166

I moved zero goalposts. Moving the goalposts is when a person initially supports one position, then changes it when challenged. Given that I'd only made ONE post of the topic, that's hard to do.

The discussion was about equivalency, as you say. Personally, I consider "cost" a very important metric when considering equivalency. It's not like I only looked at cost either, I looked at the total payload as well. I considered the number of launches as well, for which Starship would still be cheaper even if it takes 10 times as many launches.

As for it being a "fucking month" of launches, who says? SpaceX is building multiple starship launch points, they've launched 3 falcon rockets in a single day before, 14 rockets in a single month.
If it takes 10 launches for the mission, that would be closer to two weeks, not a month. They CAN keep it up right now. They've done it before. Yes, lots of stuff to scale up, but you should recognize that Starship is still in development, they can build more hardware and ground equipment as necessary to support this stuff.

Also, is it really worth spending 10 times as much in order to send 1/3rd the stuff "in a single shot" in order to save a week or so? Odds are, given the costs of SLS, that they wouldn't save the time anyways - delays and overruns will still let Starship launch faster (once in service).

And you've actually identified yourself as the moron, thank you very much. You see, I'm not the one that called SLS obsolete. You did.

Comment Re:Refuel in orbit [Re: I'm rooting for it!!] (Score 1) 166

Somebody did make a price comparison, I did.

And yes, I looked into it. Looking into something doesn't have to be a deep dive, I don't need to be 100% up on the topic.

Besides, v3 is only v3. There's more development room. Besides, you must not have looked into it by your own standard, because v3 is bigger than V2, increasing capacity, bot decreasing it.

For all the savings of launch capacity if it takes 3 launches of starship to equal 1 launch of SLS, Starship costs so much less that we can just build more launch capacity. Ground facilities are not that expensive.

Comment Re:Refuel in orbit [Re: I'm rooting for it!!] (Score 2) 166

I've looked into that.
1 SLS launch to the moon, ~46 metric tons to lunar transfer orbit, $4B for the launch.
Starship: 100 metric tons to the surface of the moon, around $100M for the single use lunar craft, around $10M a launch for the reusable refuelers. It is expected to take about 8 refuelings for the moon trip, not 16.
So, still around an order of magnitude cheaper for around 3 times the payload to the surface.

Comment When I was 15 I went on IRC and USENET. (Score 1) 44

What's the difference? We also posted web articles and had lengthy, sometimes heated discussions about it. People were a lot nastier back in the days, angry RTFM nerds were abindant. On IRC people would crash your computer for fun. We had cybersex and warez and all the good things that are technically inappropriate for a 15 year old.
Now we have censorship all over the place. Nobody stopped you from posting porn on USENET, we had specific newsgroups just for that. Try posting porn on social media nowadays. Nobody cared what you had on your F-Serve on IRC.

Comment Re:Do you hate poor people? (Score 1) 159

I wouldn't ban the businesses, just cap their fees and the exorbitant interest rates that they (and the payday loan places) are allowed to charge. Of course when you have congresscritters and high party execs personally invested in that industry we all know that it's not going to happen.

The problem is not really the interest rates. These are short-term loans. If your mortgage was a short-term loan your calculated interest rate would be 200-300% because of all the fees.
The problem is that they let people roll over the loans by just paying the fee again, and they turn into long-term loans. They should require some principal payment every time, reduce the fee with each rollover, and strictly limit the number of rollovers.

Comment Re:police officers working from home? and not on t (Score 5, Informative) 57

Police detectives tend to not work "a beat", but instead a selection of cases. Reviewing paperwork from the field can easily take up most of their time. They could have to be reading like a hundred witness statements to try to figure out what actually happened, most likely, who's lying, and why. Collaborating testimony with other evidence, reviewing security camera footage, reading test results - DNA, fingerprint, drug, residue, etc... Deciding whether or not there's enough evidence to try for a warrant or the UK's equivalent. Following up with witnesses, scheduling interviews, etc...

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