Slashdot Mirror
Elon Musk Explains Why He's Building 'Starship' Out of Stainless Steel (popularmechanics.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader darkwing_bmf writes: In an exclusive interview with Popular Mechanics, SpaceX founder Elon Musk explains why stainless steel is the best material to build rocket ships, beating carbon fiber in cost, durability and even weight.
"As far as we know, this marks the first time the material has been used in spacecraft construction since some early, ill-fated attempts during the Atlas program in the late 1950s," reports Popular Mechanics.
"It took me quite a bit of effort to convince the team to go in this direction..." Musk tells them. But among the other benefits "It has a high melting point. Much higher than aluminum, and although carbon fiber doesn't melt, the resin gets destroyed at a certain temperature... But steel, you can do 1500, 1600 degrees Fahrenheit."
"As far as we know, this marks the first time the material has been used in spacecraft construction since some early, ill-fated attempts during the Atlas program in the late 1950s," reports Popular Mechanics.
"It took me quite a bit of effort to convince the team to go in this direction..." Musk tells them. But among the other benefits "It has a high melting point. Much higher than aluminum, and although carbon fiber doesn't melt, the resin gets destroyed at a certain temperature... But steel, you can do 1500, 1600 degrees Fahrenheit."
funding secured, my man. Now pass the Doritos
Musk not using SI units?
Maybe the shorts were right.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I was frequently Debbie Downer about using CF for BFR. It's not a resilient material, and organics don't play well with LOX, nor does CF like operating at cryogenic temperatures; you're fighting against its innate material properties. I love the use of stainless. It's so much more forgiving, and people who know how to work with it are a dime a dozen. Just everything about this design will be so much easier. And cheaper. And faster. And safer.
I wouldn't be surprised if they outright build Starship and Super Heavy outside, shipyard-style. It wouldn't exactly be the first time giant pressuretight steel vessels designed for dealing with harsh conditions were built outside in salt-air conditions (e.g., almost every refinery on Earth). Corrosion rates in marine environments are on the order of decades to centuries per millimeter, depending on the stainless alloy (unlike alumium which is sensitive to salt) - and galvanic corrosion due to junctions with dissimilar metals (such as alumium) tend to corrode the other metal, not the steel (again, unlike alumium). There should be no issues with an under-construction rocket shell sitting outside for months until they can get it enclosed for more sensitive work on the interior. The LOX tank would need to be well cleaned, mind you, since LOX doesn't play well with contaminants (CH4 isn't particularly sensitive), and as always, welds need to be properly inspected.
It's an unconventional choice, but one which I've been really glad to see.
"Are you hungry? I haven't eaten since later this afternoon." -- Primer
Wow, that's a pretty negative view after his all his successes.
You know that some of his revolutionary ideas really worked out? Like landing rockets. Also his electric cars were far ahead of the competition for a while, although you could just attribute this to putting a large amount of money in it at the right time. Well, that's what he is really good at.
It's actually going to be a time machine, not a spaceship. Musk: "If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits .88 C... you're gonna see some serious shit."
Going by Mr. Musk's other fancy projects like the Hyperloop and his tunnels or even the flame thrower, the outlook for a stainless steel rocket is... ...fantastic.
The hyper loop already has a demo tunnel built when many said NOTHING would ever be built. It completely validates the concept, to the point you can be sure to see commercial implementation.
The flame thrower turned out really well, to the point I was very sad I didn't get to order one before they were gone.
And of course, Tesla is practically the definition of success (so funny how you left that example out). Not to mention the many fantastic success SpaceX itself has had - in fact the most directly pertinent example, vs. the flame thrower.
It seems you lack the vision to understand when early phases of something portend future success.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How on earth do you discount the success of Tesla and SpaceX? Musk is obviously far more than just a byproduct of PayPal.
Musk may not be the smartest guy in the room but he has a very solid track record of saying his companies are going to do something people consider outside the envelope, and not just making it work but making it work really well.
It sure seems like with the success that SpaceX has had, anyone discounting what Musk has to say about how rockets should be built and operated, is very probably either a jerk or an idiot. In either case they are even more probably wrong.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...Rearden Metal instead? Dagny Taggart thought it was superior.
You do seem a bit confused, Confused.
Hyperloop isn't a project, it is an idea that was proposed in general terms.
The BBQ "flame thrower" was a huge success.
: "If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits .88 C.
Someone above was asking why Musk didn't use C instead of F to refer to the temperature the hull can take...
You just demonstrated why - when talking about spaceships you only want to use F for temperatures so you don't confuse it with the use of C for speed. :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They built something like 500 balloon-tank Atlas missiles at Atlas II and they were extremely successful, every single one of them was stainless steel. They launched the last one in the early 2000's , and the Atlas II has a perfect success record. Hardly "ill-fated attempts one the Atlas program in the late 50's".
Musk, of course, is not using the stainless in an ideal manner, mostly for show. That's because he is more PT Barnum than Werner Von Braun.
The funny part is that the quote is incorrect - either he said Celsius and the article misquotes him or he said something wrong. The melting point of stainless steel is roughly 1500-1600 C (well somewhere in the range from 1325 - 1530)!
E.g. see: https://www.bssa.org.uk/topics...
I think whether you want temperature in C or Fahrenheit is a matter of taste. I grew up with C and think it is easy enough -
0C - melting point for ice - if it is below roughly 0 it might be icy and you should be carefull
17C or so is ok to swim in
21-23C nice indoor temp.
30C a bit too hot.
100C water boils.
What more is necessary to know?
And if they work, liek the tunnels, they end up being about the same as those made by others.
Musk's tunnel cost $10m for a 1.4 miles. For comparison my city just built a #)!@ bike lane for $12m/mile. They could have built an exclusive right-of-way bike tunnel for less with Boring Company.
By the way I assume this is what you're reffering to for "about the same"
For a better comparison Super Excavators (the previous owners of Godot) used the exact same machine to build a 1,640 ft sewer overflow tunnel for $12.4 million, or scaling up $38 million/mile
Hardly "about the same" and this was their very first attempt which was more about fact-finding than a finished product. Not to mention the competitor using the same boring machine is using it for sewers. Even at $40m a mile vs $10m or $1m a mile that's an innovation to repurpose a small bore tunnel for transit.
If Linux hadn't existed we 'd be running FreeBSD or even some microkernel OS instead (like Darwin). Linux was politically superior (due to its copyleft license empowering the million-man army of Stallman zealots) not technically superior.
Well that's the first time I hear it was done forty years ago. Was it some short-lived experiment?
His "tunnel" was literally that: a tunnel. It didn't contain anything that you need to make a real transportation tunnel. That is why it was $10m. More marketing BS from Musk desperately trying to convince governments to fork over more public money.
No we wouldn't. We would be using some stupid Microsoft OS or Sun OS. You guys don't know what innovation is.
The problem with stainless is that it's a bit brittle subject to stress cracking.
This is why here on earth steel or aluminum rather than stainless is used on boats for any structural/loading components. It's why more mundane things like "spiders" in washing machines are made out of heavy gauge aluminum and not corrosion resistant stainless like the rest of the drum.
I am not a rocket scientist or a materials scientist and can only assume they've done their homework but it just seems dumb on its face.
The reason you have never heard of it is because you Musk zealots only "know" about things that Musk does. You aren't interested in science, or technology. You just worship the P.T. Barnum of the tech world.
You know there are many varieties of stainless steel? Some are extremely tough proprietary alloys like Inconel or Monel. This isn't your cheap 316 kitchen sink steel.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Have you looked at car prices lately? Ford somehow made people think pickup trucks are worth $60k and they can't build enough of them. The 0.01% are not buying Teslas.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Tesla makes cars for the rich, sure. But it has also revolutionized the industry by creating the first production electric car that wasn't a glorified golf cart.
As for launching satellites to LEO, most *nations* can't do that yet.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What more is necessary to know?
I like K. It's better than C or F because it appears later in the alphabet. And you don't have to bother with those silly negative numbers -- HOW can you have a negative temperature?
0K - a bit too cold.
300K - reasonable
3000K - a bit too hot.
6000K - a bit too hot AND bright. (Link)
-1K - you divided by 0.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Just kidding, though his spaceships (like the Skylark) made out of special steel were the first thing to come to mind on reading this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... A lot of today's Science Fiction writers stand on the shoulders of JMS, who created Babylon 5, just as he stood on the shoulders of Doc Smith. 25 years just went by since the first airing of B5's first episode by the way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What more is necessary to know?
Steel glows cherry red around 1400-1500 F, at which point work hardening is removed. Aluminum melts at around 1250 F. Those are both pretty important to me....
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm in full support of metric units elsewhere, but that doesn't look, nor sound, nearly so exciting... C is just a terrible unit of measurement for expressing temperature. Even more true of weather ranges.
Maybe if you're a dullard...
Says the guy backing the system that's based off of the number of fingers humans have. Converting between cm, meters, km is done by moving a decimal point. Converting between inches, feet, yards and miles isn't some simple shit you can do on your fingers. Plus you have to know how many inches are in a foot, how many feet in a yard and how many yards are in a mile. And none of those are some base 10 crap you can do on your fingers. Hell, it's not even the same from one unit to the next. 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 1760 yards to a mile.
Then if you think you have that figured out, you go to a horse race and they measure distances in furlongs, nose, head, neck, and lengths. A furlong is 660.001 feet. A length is 8 feet, a Nose is 0.05 of a length or 4.8 inches, a Short Head is 0.1 of a length or 9.6 inches , a Head 0.2 of a length or 19.2 inches, a Short Neck 0.25 of a length or 24 inches, a Neck 0.3 of a length or 28.8 inches.
Then you think land would be sold in some square of those units, but it's not. That's done in acres or partial acres.
Imperial units may be a pain in the ass, but they're not easy for a lot of people to use. If anything, metric is more suited to dullards than imperial.
Most of the time, Mr. Musk's cunning plans overlook some aspect and in the end they either fall very short on the original expectation or don't work at all.
What? Name one major project which has failed. What actually happens is that they are all late, but that's very different from the never that you claim. And you know what they say about late and never.
And if they work, liek the tunnels, they end up being about the same as those made by others.
The tunnels are just tunnels. They're not meant to be different from other tunnels, they're meant to be cheaper and faster. They already are (slightly) and the next borer will be much better.
In engineering there are very few overlooked secrets to revolutionise things like Mr. Musk always twitters. Fortunately most engineers aren't the fumbling dolts he thinks they are.
Absolutely nothing Musk has done has been a new idea. All of it has just been him deciding to bankroll things which nobody else seems to want to pay for. So really, nobody but you thinks that Musk is trying to trade on overlooked secrets. He's rather taking ignored opportunities.
Probably this is just another case of dangerous half-knowledge - as usual.
Pot
Kettle
Black.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sorry to burst your bubble :P
Of course, if it's below 0K outside, you'd probably want to just stay in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I wonder if they'll make it to the planet Mongo in that thing?
The reason you have never heard of it is because you Musk zealots only "know" about things that Musk does. You aren't interested in science, or technology. You just worship the P.T. Barnum of the tech world.
From what I can tell, Blue Origin had the first flight, but SpaceX had the first useful flight. Kind of like how GM had the first modern EV, and Toyota made the first one that normal people wanted to buy but only produced it in small numbers, but Tesla made the first one many people wanted to buy (and actually sold it.) I'd compare Elon Musk to Steve Jobs, except he'd probably be smart enough to get cancer treated if he had it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And I think I started with that one as well. Only later did I read the prequel novels of the IPC, and Smith's other famous series with the characters of The Skylark of Space.
Tesla makes cars for the rich, sure. But it has also revolutionized the industry by creating the first production electric car that wasn't a glorified golf cart.
You forgot the Toyota RAV4 EV. Not much range, but otherwise highly credible, and owners adore them.
What Tesla has done is made the first EV that the masses want to buy, and then actually gone on to sell them to a lot of people. Most RAV4 EVs were leased, all GM EV-1s were leased... But this is not a trivial achievement, especially given that Tesla is a brand new automaker.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Nope. Like the GM EV1, the 1st Gen RAV4 EV was lease only. The second gen RAV4 EV was designed in conjunction with, wait for it.... Tesla.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
because no other rocket has successfully used stainless steel? you might want to check up on that before the space/missile buffs make mincemint out of you
Stainless steel (304) is about 3 times more dense than 6061 aluminum. Yet it's only about 10% stronger in tensile strength, and about 2.8 times better in Young's modulus. Meaning that you need more mass for the equivalent strength of aluminum. So you have to have more fuel, and more fuel (and volume in the tanks - which means they are also heavier) to carry that additional fuel.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
What the fuck does horse racing measurements have to do with anything but horse racing?
Nobody in aerospace engineering gives a shit about furlongs or short heads, and never has.
That's like saying that anyone in aerospace engineering is measuring things in (american) football field lengths, or sides of a baseball diamond. It's completely irrelevant.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Nope. Like the GM EV1, the 1st Gen RAV4 EV was lease only.
Nope. It was lease only at the beginning, but "at the lessees' request, many units were sold after the vehicle was discontinued." and also "A total of 328 RAV4 EVs were sold directly to consumers throughout 2002 and into 2003."
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Mine wasn't NEW so as far as "in stock", didn't really apply - I got my copy from my Dad who got me into reading & we got our material from used bookstores (often minus covers but didn't matter to me, it was "what's inside, counts" (as it does w/ people MOST of the time (except women, lol - has to be appealing OUTSIDE too if you 'catch my drift')). I always VALUED those places right into the early 90's (when I began seriously 'drifting' towards computers more which later on in this post, makes sense on another 'point' of mine imo). I had 1 such spot near me (the "1/2 price bookstore" which closed 2nd year I was living near it, bummed me out bad) right before computers "re-hit" me (started on mainframes & midranges, didn't like charmode interfaces but GUI "got me" (art & science combined imo)).
* The ENEMY was the 'Boskone' right? (Testing my "memory banks" on that note).
Anyhow - pretty cool running into someone w/ common-ground here! QUESTION: How old are you? I'm 54 as of last Thursday - & you? Just curious. I don't see a LOT of readers in the past 2 decades++ or so & especially from the youth. Perhaps THEIR "books" are what WE are on, NOW (computers & the internet (most fantastic library I've ever seen, great learning tool)).
APK
P.S.=> I'll always be grateful my Dad got me into reading around 5-6 yrs. of age - 1st w/ comic books (army & horror comics THEN 'superhero' ones w/ HULK) & then onto Sci-Fi "pulp" short stories (which I thought ROCKED) - I can't help but feel it helped me later get a NEAR PERFECT "SAT" verbal score & helped me become a national spelling bee contestant in 5th grade (reading a lot helps, no questions asked)... apk
Because engineers never over-think anything, or immediately discount ideas because of past failures.
Sometimes "why not? I want a real answer" is a very useful exercise for an engineering team, as it requires challenging assumptions.
If this team discounted stainless steel from the beginning in favor of other materials because reasons, and then was made to actually enumerate those reasons and found them lacking, then good work was done.
As always, the proof is in the testing. If the rocket spectacularly fails due to the stainless steel construction, then I guess your idiot trolling will be justified. But if it works, then you're just an idiot troll.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
After which they halted production, even though they had customers who wanted to buy.
The point is not to take anything away from Toyota or GM, but what they built in the 90s weren't intended to become production vehicles; they were more like large-run prototypes used to obtain real-world data on EVs. These vehicles were historically significant, but they didn't shake up the market and force other manufacturers to get into EVs.
That's partly a matter of timing. It couldn't be done prior to 2000; ten years in technology makes a big difference. But Tesla invested to get out in front of the curve, which is why Toyota turned to them for the 2nd gen RAV4 design.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Everyday Astronaut
but has little practical value.
Aside from being dramatically cheaper, you mean, and letting SpaceX under-price the competition in multiple countries by large margins.
His argument is based on global income figures, because clearly Tesla (and every other car manufacturer) is directing their marketing at poor people in war-torn countries that barely can feed themselves. But somehow that matters for Tesla, and not Jaguar Land Rover, Volkswagen AG, Daimler, etc.; you know - all the other car manufacturers that sell similarly priced vehicles to the exact same markets, and have all announced EVs meant to directly compete with Tesla.
Oh, but Tesla makes "niche" cars that the rest of the industry is scrambling to compete with...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Well that's the first time I hear it was done forty years ago.
It wasn't. The guy you're talking to is just an asshole who is heavily invested in shorting Tesla, so will regularly tell all kinds of lies about anything Elon touches.
If you scroll up on the page you can watch him claim that the Linux kernel was more revolutionary than anything SpaceX has done. And as insane as that it, it's not even the most ridiculous thing he's ever said!
A demo tunnel, that can't do jack else
I dare you to drive a mile in LA at rush hour in under 4 minutes.
Musk can.
And as the tunnel obviously works and was built as easily as he claimed, at the low cost he claimed, there will be many more to come.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
OMG, you're right! Musk and all his rocket engineers are idiots!
Oh wait, they're going to cool the skin on reentry.
And if any engineering let themselves convinced by that, fire them. What is important is the tensile strength of steel versus temperature. e.g. in a fire steel beam get weakened at far lower temperature than melting point. At about 600-700 degree celsius your steel lost half its strength. You can see that at warehouse fire among others, steel beam get weakened and it crumples long before meeting melting point. Now the question is, what do carbon fiber at those temp, and is that important versus steel weakening. I can't answer that. I was just indicating melting temperature is not what you look at in most applications.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Which is why they plan on using active cooling during reentry. The fact that it's harder to melt just means less need for cooling.
I'm a bit over 60 years old, fwiw. Yes, used book stores ftw. I scored a used first edition of Babel-17 at one. It's in good shape, and it brings back memories of the first time I read it. I still like physical copies of books, though I buy the e-books of authors I like to support. My local library has a thrift shelf where they offer their retired paperbacks, hardcovers, and even DVDs and Blu rays, for a quarter or less (a buck for the disks though), and they also have book sales in the basement once in a while. Btw, most of Galaxy Magazine has been scanned and uploaded to archive.org. Amazing stuff! Just look for the zoom feature on the page, otherwise the text is too small to rad, imo. Many classic SF novels have been scanned at archive.org as well, and can be checked out. All totally legally of course! https://archive.org/details/ga...
Where the hell does the .001 come from?
It's 220 yards, and a yard is 3 feet. int x int = int.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The world is not big enough for two genii. Either Musk is a genius or Linus is. Both can't be. Not at the same time.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Much harder to work with, and likely more expensive than just 1.5 times the steel cost. They have a lot of people working on it so I'm sure they have reasons
It is considerably more expensive going by mass, but because it is so much less dense, the same volume going to be that much less massive as well. Per unit volume, titanium costs only about 1.5 times what stainless steel costs.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
C is just a terrible unit of measurement for expressing temperature.
You're right. K is where it's at baby. Until someone points out to you that the size of 1K is exactly the same as the size of 1 C....the only difference being where the scale sets the zero point.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You picked a single example from his post and made the most ridiculous comparison. I'm sure there's a name for that. Wow, I'm totally convinced. I'm switching to imperial right away. Base 10 makes as much sense to humans as base 16 does to computers.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
HOW can you have a negative temperature?
You've obviously never been outside in Canada at night (any time after 3pm) in February. When you feel your balls actually entering your abdominal cavity and sheltering somewhere between your kidneys and your liver, you have reached negative temperature.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I bet you're great fun at parties.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'm sorry I was thinking of an entirely different R so I was confused for a second... I mean I know PV = nRT can throw up some pretty weird shit sometimes but...... never mind, it's late.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Why who does your car company make cars for, and how high do your satellites fly? I mean come on, you just called it RIDICULOUS NONSENSE so surely you must do much better before your morning shit. Oh wait, I see, your posts are your morning shit. I get it. Carry on.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You miss hey!'s point.... NONE of these fuckers started seriously caring about making electric cars until Tesla came on the scene. Them most of them banded together against him to try to legislate him out of business. Then finally when Tesla actually started selling cars and it turned out they were pretty decent, got the shit scared out of them and started looking into making their own cars. Even if Tesla is a total failure, Must has brought about the age of the electric car.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Shit I have a Honda that cost me $60k. Granted I live in the 3rd world so about $15k of that is straight up import tax, but fuck you can't get a new car for $3000 like when I was a kid.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It's pretty simple. You round up a group of experts who say one thing, and a group of experts who say the opposite, then you force them to defend their positions to you. The team with the most "uhhhhs" loses. Next.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The reason it hasn't been done since is because it is a dubious idea.
If only Mr. Watt had realized that sticking a bunch of water into a barrel and sealing it then lighting a fire on it was a dubious idea because everyone knew it would blow up and take half the building with it....
He made it work. And not you or anyone else will EVER be able to take the credit for that away from him.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It was done by NASA I guess. The fact that it could save millions and millions of dollars was obviously of "little practical value" to a government agency.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That's why I have a doctorate. Because I am not interested in science.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Steve Jobs got as much cancer treatment as can be gotten for an aggressive, uncurable cancer. The removal of his liver and liver transplant was 100% anti-ethical (ask yourself why a person with cancer of the PANCREAS would need a LIVER transplant - there's only one reason - liver metastases), but of course little things like ethics don't matter if you're Steve Jobs. Just don't expect to have it done on you even if you're a mere millionaire, because you'll be told that other people have been waiting years for that liver... people who might actually live longer than a year. He got treatment alright. But it was his time.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
How many of those did it from suborbital flight after delivering a payload?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Takeoff, hover and landing was done forty years ago.
Exactly. He's saying that all Musk and SpaceX have achieved is basically, well, Grasshopper.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"Stuff that impresses you isn't groundbreaking. You know what is groundbreaking? Stuff that impresses ME!"
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Educate yourself faggot.
I educated myself with WP before posting. Naturally, I'm not going to watch your video. Do you actually find people who do what you say? Sad fucks, if you do, but not as sad as you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Solar City did pretty poorly, but only because it required that Americans pay their bills on time.
Yes, it certainly has done so far. But it's not dead, just on standby. It can be spun off again if that makes sense.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I hate that about some stainless steel refrigerators and other appliances. Some stainless is ok. Others are fingerprint magnets. All those smudges and fingerprints make it look so unkempt. It's really embarrassing when company comes over. "Look where they put the BFR honey. They knew we were coming and couldn't even take the time to clean it up a little. Tsk Tsk".
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Where the hell does the .001 come from?
It's 220 yards, and a yard is 3 feet. int x int = int.
Intel processor.
160 degrees for slow cooked meat ? Certainly not "celcius" or we don't have the same definition of "slow".
who hasn't ?
Tell someone "That material can withstand 815 to 871 C!".
I'm in full support of metric units elsewhere, but that doesn't look, nor sound, nearly so exciting... C is just a terrible unit of measurement for expressing temperature. Even more true of weather ranges.
As an American who uses both systems, I agree that Fahrenheit "seems" more intuitive for weather forecasts; but if all that I grew up with was solely Celsius, I would think that a 37 degree day would be a nice hot day (& a good body temperature*).
*check math, never liked doing the conversions...
According to TFA: Musk wants to use 301 steel at about $3 per kg.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Ya, they should probably measure temperature in Java instead.
Biggest problem with Titanium is it doesn't melt in atmosphere - it'll oxidize (burn). So welding has to be done in a neutral gas. Huge PITA.
Which part of a rocket structure, the tanks, hull, fairing etc. is expected to resist temperatures much above two or three hundred degrees Celsius? The engines, yes, but they run a lot hotter than the melting point of stainless steels and are actively cooled where necessary.
I can't think of a cost benefit for using stainless steel in an aerospace environment except if Musk plans to build something like the trans-Pacific Tokyo Express, a multi-Mach ballistic passenger transport which would have a hot re-entry as it re-enters thick air from the troposphere. Using a heat-resistant stainless steel would reduce or eliminate the need to replace ablative thermal coatings after every flight.
There's an experimental supersonic aircraft, a precursor to the SR-71, the BAC-188 (now in in the RAF museum at Cosford) which was made from stainless steel to investigate aircraft skin temperature effects at high speeds. It was never intended to be a production aircraft though.
Réaumur and Rømer are better.
-1K - you divided by 0.
Pffft, Quantum Physics laughs at your division by zero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You speak as if battery technology is something that appears out of thin air or that somehow Tesla licensed, not developed in-house.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
So I should let 20 year old patient A with Wilson's disease die, to save 50 year old (rich! let's not forget rich!) patient B from pancreatic cancer? Patient A will survive and live another 40 years with 80% probability. Patient B will be dead in 6 months if I do nothing, and in 18 months if I give him a transplant. Now in the IDEAL world of course I save both. In the REAL world, I only have one liver (if that) and two patients. What do I do? That's ethics. They teach courses. You're kind of required to pass them to graduate from medical school and again to get your license. It's the reality of the world we live in. Every doctor on call can only work so many hours. Every hospital has only so many ICU beds. Every country has only so many pediatric neurosurgeons specialized in condition "x". And I say Jobs' transplant was anti-ethical. It only happened because the patient was Steve Jobs. No one else on the planet will ever get that treatment, ever, in the same condition.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The moon landing was a computer assisted, piloted landing on a body with 1/6th the Earth's gravity and NO ATMOSPHERE. Fucking docking in space without ending up with two wrecks is far more complicated than the moon landing. Seriously that's all you've got?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You speak as if battery technology is something that appears out of thin air or that somehow Tesla licensed, not developed in-house.
The battery is the easy part, the cells themselves (and their chemistry) are the hard part, and Tesla didn't design the cells. Tesla has the best battery, but not by a wide margin any more with the new EVs coming out. Remember when the height of cell technology was NiMH? That was enough for a good hybrid, but not a good EV. Now we have Li-Ion, and hopefully ere long we'll have solid electrolyte batteries that are good enough for EVs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you ever sat in a same priced luxury car you would immediately know the difference.
Yeah, it would be broken down and it wouldn't go anywhere. Those cars are unreliable AF, almost without exception.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually there were groups of people who used the gaps between fingers to count and used base 8. Base 8 is a lot nicer then base 10.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Huh? I'm in Canada and yesterday the official high (at the closest airport) was 7.9C and the low was 3.4C. Sure you need to put on the Stanfield but not exactly ball freezing. Even seen girls in halter tops the other day. Whole winter up till now has had similar temperatures, again. It is finally snowing today, which will protect the flowers when it freezes tonight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Its true; Kelvins are the only sensible units.
Ok, I could definitely go for that. :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That deserves a +1 funny.
Too soon, I suppose.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
An acre is a furlong by a chain. Or ten square chains, if you prefer.
I have no idea what that is in elephants, Belgiums or libraries of congress.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Transpiration cooling isn't used because it is fiddly and typically it's easy to clog the holes and rein the performance. However there are film cooling techniques used in rocket engine nozzle walls which do work.
You are talking about the FFC Cambridge Process. AFAIK it is not used in any major way because of, well, complications.
Tell someone "That material can withstand 815 to 871 C!".
I'm in full support of metric units elsewhere, but that doesn't look, nor sound, nearly so exciting... C is just a terrible unit of measurement for expressing temperature. Even more true of weather ranges.
At least you know where you stand with C. 0 is water freezing 100 is boiling, everyone knows how cold ice is and how hot boiling water is and can work from there. What does F relate to? Apart from giving you bigger numbers that is.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Well base 8 easily convertible to base 16 (32, 64, or any greater power of 2) which makes octal also a fun thing for computers. Hey if you add the gaps between your toes you get base 16! It's destiny.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Sorry I meant a part of Canada that actually gets cold like Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Etc. Not BC... (I'm from Montreal - don't live there now but I remember -40 this time of year.).
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Easily subdivided by 2 or 4 as well. There's also the Babylon's base 12/60 which still affects our math and might have been the best. 12 is nice and divisible and there's no reason that computers couldn't have evolved with 6/12 bit registers instead of 8/16 bit. Base 10 is actually a crappy base but it has such inertia that it seems natural.
Then there are the imaginary beings such as Clarke's Ramans who may have used base 9 (everything in 3's), which is really alien to our way of thinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Is Musk only an engineer... or more ? ;)
It did used to get cold here. I can remember close to 0F in the west end of Vancouver, and the icicles. Lots of snow with school being closed for weeks when I was in Burnaby (mile or so outside of Vancouver) and in the interior, minus 30-40 common. Looking at the records for this week, they're all close to -20C, not as cold as back east but with the high humidity, sure seemed cold. OTOH, all the record highs are about 15C. This is in the Fraser Valley, perhaps 40 miles east of Vancouver.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Everyone knows water freezes at 32F, and they don't care what temperature water boils at as they can just see it's boiling (or steaming and don't enter a temperature to boil - they just turn on heat until it boils.
So the numerical alignment of 100 to boiling is totally worthless, while having weather forecast temperatures that do not need decimal points to be accurate is much nicer for comprehension. When you get between 70-80 degrees there starts to be a lot of variance in what temperature people adjust clothing, In C that is 21.1 to 26.6 which gives you half the whole numbers to express what it will be like outside.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley