In this thread: /sci designs a spaceship

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No they are not. No ome has made a nuclear salt water rocket

>A ship...
>a living ship...
Nature's a better engineer than I am.

what about this?

Terrible design.
Looks like it was pieced together out of assorted parts from a scrapyard.
Handles horribly in atmosphere.

X-33, sadly they stopped development after they couldn't figure out making the tanks lighter. You would have a reusable SSTO with a payload of >10t.

>No they are not. No ome has made a nuclear salt water rocket

of course they haven't made one.... it's spews nuclear death.

I'm saying that we have the technology to make one, and it would work.

Maybe.
I sometimes wonder just how hard Lockheed Martin tried.
Success would have undercut their highly profitable expendable launch vehicle business.

>because of this piece of shit the dc-x was killed
im still mad

Falcon 9 > DC-X.

Biggest joke is a couple of years a later they actually developed a fuel tank that was light enough.

Aerospike engines are superior, who disagrees has no clue what he is talking about

aerospike engines are heavier, lower thrust, and lower Isp

They also use way less fuel so you end up with a big weight advantage. The only reason we are not using them is because in the space race we used nozzles and sticked to that because governments work like that.

>tfw no sheep specs
Those big military industrial contracts are always just hilarious black holes of retardation and money furnaces, usually by design since these are huge projects that usually employ a lot of people at all levels who bring a lot of money into an area, so they become political assets, and the bureaucracy just feeds on itself until it's an out of control monster.
Look at the F-35 and how much money we spent on that for what we got, compared to what it was originally sold as. Everyone is getting filthy rich so no one wants to be the guy who stops the gravy train.
Pic related is a good example about the bradley fighting vehicle and the hilarity around it's development.

"Lower Isp"
"use less fuel"

Wait. One of you HAS to be wrong.
Anybody got citations? Preferably under equal conditions. I know aerospikes are 'supposed' to adjust better to changing external pressure.

"governments work like that"
What's Elon Musk's reasoning?

>What's Elon Musk's reasoning?

He's also using nozzles.

That's what I meant.
said "only reason governments use nozzles is because governments are stupid."
Musk is not a government. If aerospikes ARE superior, must think Musk's stupid too. The only alternative is he concluded aerospikes were NOT better.

>Wait. One of you HAS to be wrong.

aerospike nozzles have better isp at low altitude.

IIRC they have worse ISP in a vacuum and at high altitudes.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerospike_engine

It's cheaper to take existing technologies and improve them than to develop a new one from scratch. He doesn't have the ressources to develop aerospikes even if he thought they are superior.

No
Aerospikes are a fucking meme because people wanted to do retarded SSTO's and you can use aerospikes from sea level to vacuum
It is NOT superior in Isp, its actually worse at all pressures compared to a nozzle.

Mil-Ind complex is an old commie meme, increasing military project costs are 90% because of Government/Bureaucratic fucking around such as changing specs years into development, or demanding impossible things

BRITON GO THE RESCUE

you have done nothing to prove that it will work.

Yeah, the Brits always have the best spacecraft.

They wanted to use Aerospikes for the Space Shuttle and government said no because we need the industries that are already existing and military said no because they feared it could endanger the potential to quickly up-scale ICBM production in case we need it. So they ended up continuing with nozzles and now we have 50 years of experience with nozzles so nobody really wants to switch anymore.

>you have done nothing to prove that it will work.

I don't have to, Nasa did all of the calculations.

>I don't have to, Nasa did all of the calculations.

Okay, that was wrong, NASA didn't do any research into the NSWR, it was Robert Zurbin, although he DID do some work for NASA.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket

But if you like, we can talk about Project Orion.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

Which also would technically work, although the same problem is there.... turning the launch site and everything downwind into a radioactive wasteland.

We HAVE the technology to make single stage to orbit craft, and we have since the 50's or 60's... it's just that they are FAR to dangerous to even be considered.

you've posted nothing in support of your argument.

SS M'dick
~~~~8======>

It would make sense in the context of the shuttle, though the shuttle design itself didn't make any sense.

Since the shuttle burnt from sea level to vacuum
Doubtful it would have been significantly better than the nozzle though

>you've posted nothing in support of your argument.

What the hell are you on, dude?

he is correct

Are we allowed to use Cavorite?

You say that, but it seems to handle just fine in the atmosphere in movie after movie...

I doubt he concluded much one way or another. He has people for that.

Making Musk personally into some sort of space guru is retarded.

Looks not too bad, tough the yaw is a bit random.

youtube.com/watch?v=GRtXd1eiH-s

Was speaking figuratively.

But it says "investor, and engineer. He is the founder, CEO, and lead designer of SpaceX"
so he must have SOME input.
Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, is not an engineer, SFAIK.

Since when have you started believing George Lucas ever got anything right?
^_^

Yes, but needs redesign if you expect to meet the "looking cool" criteria.

THIS is what SSTO (and beyond) ships should look like.
Fission pile and a water tank. What's so hard about that?

You launch from the desert in the Southwest. According to the "no nukes" fanatics, the area is ALREADY permanently uninhabitable due to bomb tests, so no further harm being done.

sorry dude, you need better citations than just wikipedia.

debris could be deposityed over inhabitated areas. NOT IN MUH BACKYARD

I think that open-cycle gas core rockets could really benefit from the in-atmosphere thrust boost provided by combusting the radionuclides and propellant as they exit the nozzle. Like LANTR but with massive quantities of fallout.

Congratulations! The US government now considers you a terrorist organization for attempting to detonate a dirty bomb.

>> by combusting the radionuclides
that's the dumbest idea I've heard since direct air cooling of nuclear reactors:
youtube.com/watch?v=vcsyMvQtlKs
you're dumping expensive fissile materials into the atmosphere for low gains in thrust and certain assassination by the US military

Then it's a good thing he isn't in charge of developing SpaceX's rocket engines then. This guy on the other hand is: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller and he's the real deal. People seem to think that SpaceX is just an army of expendable interns led around by Elon (to some extent it is) but they fail to realise that both Elon and the expendable interns are directed by an experienced group of engineers in high positions within the company, who have been in the rocket building industry for a while.

youtube.com/watch?v=bdvv8qIl_WI
Also first Falcon 9 test fire.

I dunno, I sort of like the retro look.

>A thread about "design a cool spaceship-" derailed by Musk fanboi-ism.

Who else is designing one at the moment apart from him?

Memespikes are bigger and certainly more expensive meme than the memedrive.
Indeed, they are superior.

ULA
NASA
Blue Origin
ARCA
Arianespace
Roskosmos
CNSA
JAXA
among others

Is that Musk's rocket? Literally a giant vibrator but it does look cool regardless

>500 tonnes
>enough to launch the ISS in one go
jesus fucking christ

It's supposed to take off and land standing up too so it looks exactly like one of those comics from the 60s. It's neat as fuck

ITT: We are.

It's not about what somebody else has already designed.

Imagine the vibrations as that bastard starts to go.

>Sciencegasm are best gasms.

Imagine the jiggly titties of the female colonists who will serve as the new Eves, with your hot and eager help of course