Commenting to boost this post, but roll again if you land on me. Thanks OP :)
clothes
joined 2 years ago
Yeah that's fair. I'm pretty low on these Mavs and would bet against them in a re-run of these playoffs, but they've certainly made a good case for themselves and initial odds are partly hype-based.
I'm not sure how to justify those Mavs odds. They had a great run, but will anyone be picking them over the Nuggets or Thunder (or Grizzlies?) next year? I'd expect them to be a 5 or 6 seed.
What a weird situation. I suppose it's nice those workarounds exist, even if they're not ideal.
I think I've come to a similar conclusion after IFT-4. Reusability is the top priority, not a stretch goal like with Falcon-9. As such, the expected value of testing reentry is a lot higher than that of orbital maneuvering.
What an insanely aggressive development approach!
It stands for "maximum dynamic pressure", and is a fluid dynamics concept. It's the moment when the spacecraft is under the most stress, and therfore where certain things are most likely to fall apart.
It's caused by a combination of atmospheric density and velocity. To avoid issues, there's a rough rule of "don't accelerate too much until you're high enough that the atmosphere thins out" during launch, and "don't hit the atmosphere too fast" during reentry.
Here's a chart for the IFT-3 launch. At one minute you can see that acceleration decreased for a few seconds, to minimize the strength of max-Q.
Interesting that there's nothing special about acceleration at max-Q, unlike during launch.
Interesting! I assume it involves a smart plug and an automation script that monitors battery level?
Wow, Graphene really doesn't have charging limits?
I assume this is the discussion you referred to, and I think it broke my trust in the project.
Edit: As far as I can tell, many of the frustrating parts of that thread are from random posters and not devs. I'm still annoyed that such a basic feature is considered controversial.
If it's only the on-screen flap that had issues, hopefully that points to a minor fix instead of a major one. I wonder what sort of data they have on this. How many thermal tiles were lost on each flap? Where did the issues start? Are the other flaps alright? Hard things to track.
I can't believe they (maybe) completed the landing burn with a shredded flap.
Between that and the booster engine issues, this seems like one of the best possible learning scenarios.
This is really well done!