Bimfred

Deeper IR, microwave and radio. Within a galaxy, redshift can be ignored. In another galaxy, the issue is moot, you don't need to worry about them and they don't need to worry about you.

Our current scopes can pick up brown dwarfs with a surface temperature below freezing. An object the diameter of a planetary orbit, with the gravitational effect of a main sequence star and giving off just black body radiation is gonna stick out like a neon "Interesting stuff here!" sign the moment someone does a long wavelength survey of your general region.

Even if you build a swarm instead of a solid shell, you're still going to shift the star's apparent spectrum towards IR, from the swarm radiating waste heat. A star whose mass, diameter and emission spectrum don't match up with the math is inviting investigation, regardless of how you try to mask what you've been doing.

I would think it'd make it more likely that you're discovered when you turn your star into a black ball with a gigantic IR signature where a star should be. Any civilization with a cursory understanding of gravity and stellar spectra would turn every telescope they have on you.

The average velocity across the entire trip would have to be several hundred km/s. Average. Peak velocity would have to be a lot higher, to account for acceleration and deceleration. They're claiming to have built a torch drive that beats the thrust power of all other (currently existing or in early development) propulsion methods by an order of magnitude. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The centripetal acceleration. It's going to ramp up fast. There's also the concern of what's gonna happen to the payload when it's released, exits the vacuum chamber and smacks right the fuck into the dense low-level atmosphere at a significant Mach number. Cause that's what has to happen if the goal is to reduce the need for onboard propellant.

I'd imagine having the propellant tanks, plumbing, valves and engines survive 10,000Gs without crumpling or deforming to the point of failure is going to be a bit of an issue. Any thin and lightweight structures like foldable solar panels (and their deployment mechanisms) are also going to be tricky.

It's hard to tell, but I don't think it's from IFT-6. The banana cam gave us a view inside the payload bay and the reinforcing structures look a little different.

I believe the truss that the banana is strapped to is the same as the one running along the lower edge of the OP image. But if you look at the reinforcements noseward, the OP shows a closer arrangement of three ribs with cross-braces in-between, whereas the IFT-6 image shows more regularly spaced ribs with no extra bracing. The ribs themselves look different, with a uniform line along the entire inner side in the OP, and a shallower middle segment on OFT-6. The OP's low resolution makes it difficult to tell, but I think it's also missing a lot of the lengthwise stringers that SpaceX added on the later ships.

EDIT: I may be talking out of my ass. Had a look at IFT-3 and the view towards the payload door shows the same reinforcing structures as IFT-6. So it's possible that the OP image is from farther up the payload bay, the ribs we're seeing are reinforcing the flap hinges, an area that's not visible in the banana cam. We didn't get a payload bay view for flights 4 and 5, so can't compare those.

EDIT 2: The OP image is definitely farther up the payload bay, looking at the hinge area that we didn't see in other bay views. There's no telling whether or not it's from the 6th flight, based on the publicly available images.

I dunno, looks like the ankles should have good range of motion. If it's enough to be able to plant both feet flat on the surface, I think it'll be at least acceptable at standing poses.

The design is dope, but the HG kit is gonna be absolute sticker hell. Or they might just abandon the idea of color accuracy without paints entirely. Those dabs of yellow all over the place, the trim on the torso, pretty much all of the head that isn't red or white.

Because if you launch something from Earth, you inherit the Earth's orbital speed around the Sun. At that point, whatever you launched will just continue to orbit the Sun. It takes less energy to accelerate to a solar system exit trajectory than it does to scrub off all of the excess velocity and end up on a trajectory that intersects the Sun.

Even the Stream version doesn't require Steam. You can just run the executable. A few folks over on Reddit claim they've given the game to their friends just by copying the files from an external drive.

Most of the Falcon 9 launches are for Starlink and are paid for by SpaceX themselves. How is that "the government subsidizing them"? If you want to argue that they're using money they got from NASA to fund those launches, is your plumber feeding their family from you subsidizing their life?

There's two main benefits: faster reuse and more payload to orbit.

A Falcon 9 landing on a drone ship needs to be transported back to shore. That's multiple days before the engineers even get their hands on it to prepare for the next flight. The design goal of Starship is to launch a Ship into orbit, return to the tower, be restacked, refuelled and launched again in the same day. Will they actually get it to the point where that's possible? Remains to be seen. Until now, they had no way to see what real stresses a Starship booster goes through in a flight. They're gonna rip this one apart down to the spacers in its bolts to examine it. With the flight and physical inspection data, they'll make what improvements they can to the already built boosters and design future boosters to be more resilient. SpaceX has, by now, a well proven track record of doing what others think is insane to even attempt. If anyone can launch the same rocket twice in a day, there's no one better to give it a try.

The increased payload comes from not having the mass of the landing legs. The Falcon's landing legs weigh several tons. Starship, being 3x the diameter and 10x the mass, would need titanic landing legs. That's a lot of tonnage you won't be taking to orbit. Catching on the tower means that all but a fraction of the landing hardware's mass isn't on the rocket itself. As an additional benefit, the landing hardware needs to be built only once. Every Falcon has its own landing legs, but every Starship they ever build could land on the one tower they have now. That won't be the case, they're planning to build multiple towers, but the sentiment remains the same.

No. The pulse still took longer than light through vacuum. That's the limit that needs to be broken for any causality violations to happen and that's the limit that can't be broken.