Since you were so insistent that it’s simple, I told you to go and implement non-rigid capes to two old games that never had more than a rudimentary physics engine, and report back just how easy it was. And seeing how your reply, three minutes later, started with the words “Already done,” I can only assume that you did it. So do tell, how easy was it?

Cause that was the task. Add soft body physics to Jedi Outcast, which is running on a modified Quake 3 Arena engine. Or create a new animation rig and redo all of the character animations. And you did it in three minutes. So show your work.

Took you three minutes to implement soft body physics in the Quake 3 engine, huh? Show your work.

Right. Go add capes that aren’t just rigged to the existing skeleton to Jedi Outcast or Morrowind, then come back and tell me how easy it was.

I didn’t think I’d have to point out that adding a cape is a similar pain in the ass. Dynamic objects like scarves and capes are not the same as a shirt. If your character framework isn’t set up for them from the start, implementing them is not as simple as “just plop it in there bruh”.

A character model is made up of “slots”. The head slot, the chest slot, the legs slot and so on. When you equip a piece of gear, it replaced the body mesh in that slot. So a helmet model replaces the head, a cuirass replaces the chest, I think you follow. If you want a piece of gear to only partially cover the character, you need to create a new slot. But gear is easy to implement, since it conforms to the character’s “body” and uses the same animations.

Now add a scarf. First, you need to create a new slot, so that equipping the scarf doesn’t replace the head or chest. And then comes the question of animations. Are you going to have the scarf just lay flat against the character? That’s the easiest approach, but it’ll be completely static, look like ass and probably clip through at least some of your armors. You could use a cloth sim. If your scarf mesh has enough polygons, it’ll look the best. But it’s also computationally expensive, especially if you go with mesh-based collisions for maximum eye candy. And what types of objects can the scarf collide with? Just the character, or world objects as well? Every object the scarf collides with will create a whole new slew of physics calculations, all the time, dropping your performance in the gutter like a mob snitch. Or you could create a bespoke rig for the scarf. It’ll look better than a static object and won’t have a notable performance hit, but won’t look as good as the cloth sim, especially since it won’t collide properly with whatever else your character is wearing. And you’d need to create matching animations for literally every animation the character can possibly do. Every. Single. One. Your animators would want to murder you. And they will, when you come back to them a little later and say “Okay, real impressed with the scarf, now let’s make 5 different ones. And I want capes.”

TL;DR: It’s not just another piece of gear.

Counterpoint: Blender was the first 3d modeling tool I tried and I bounced off that UX so hard that I haven’t touched it in nearly 20 years. Sometimes a bad UX is just bad UX.

If the interesting thing about your character is that they’re not human, you don’t have an interesting character. Fite me.

Suppose we’ll see. Not unusual to have a long gap between the early launches, lots of data to analyze for the first time. Was 8 months between the first and second launch of Ariane 6, for example.

Their first orbital rocket, New Glenn, had its inaugural flight earlier this year. IIRC, it performed rather well in the “launch to orbit” aspect, but they lost the booster as it was coming back to land on a drone ship. It’ll take them time to iron out the kinks, but as long as they don’t scrap the project, I don’t see why it couldn’t become a contender in heavy lift.

The basics (getting the OS installed, some initial settings to your liking etc) is quick. Managed to go from “completely untouched build” to “we gaming on Linux now boys” in a couple hours and most of that was waiting for BG3 to download on my 100Mbit connection. Pretty much everything I needed worked right on the first boot. Then again, I didn’t have much data to transfer over.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong about this, but wasn’t the original thruster problem, on the second uncrewed flight, that the thrusters were too insulated and couldn’t dump enough heat, so they overheated? So for the crewed demo, they removed some of the insulation and the thrusters were dumping heat into adjacent thrusters, once again overheating? Seems like the doghouse is a poor design, at least in Starliner’s case.

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.

They shouldn’t try to land their reusable rocket as early as possible? Kinda not conducive to the whole idea of being reusable, don’t you think?

Right now? Effectively infinity dollars. Or Euros. Or Dongs. Regardless of the currency used, really. The only operational launch vehicles that have the diameter and payload capabilities to put up modules of comparable size are the SLS and Vulcan Centaur. Everything else comes up short in size, payload, or both. But getting the modules up there is only step 1, they also need to be attached. For the ISS, the Shuttle’s Canadarm was used to actually assemble the station in its early stages. Nothing currently operational has that capability.

Of upcoming launch vehicles, New Glenn and Starship are both capable enough in both size and payload. But of all the options, only Starship could be equipped with something like Canadarm. Starship is an orbiter with a payload bay. Everything else’s second stage is just engines, tanks and a payload adapter for simply deploying something into orbit.

You might ask “Why not design the modules to dock and assemble the station autonomously?” It’s a valid question, but it comes down to two things: complexity and mass. Every module would need its own full suite of guidance and control systems. And they’d be used only when a module is maneuvering to meet with the rest of the station. That’s a lot of mass wasted on something that only gets used once, mass that could’ve been put into making the module itself bigger. There’s also the issue of any leftover propellants and their residues on the module exteriors. It’s practically inevitable that some residue from the thrusters will end up on the connecting surfaces of the modules. A lot of the common orbital maneuvering propellants are toxic as fyuck and you don’t want any of it near unprotected people. And any residue could interfere with getting a firm seal between modules.

Another thought is to put something like Canadarm on the first module, but that also wouldn’t really work. Soon as it tries to move a second module into position, the two nearly equivalent mass objects would start tumbling around the common center of gravity, putting the entire proto-station into an uncontrolled spin on several axes. Stopping it would require, once again, thrusters.

Well, off the top of my head, the main issues are going to be the sleds, the rails and how much they allow to reduce the mass of the plane itself.

Accelerating the sled with something other than the vehicle’s main engines makes the most sense. Otherwise you’ve just overcomplicated a runway and end up back in the pit of spaceplane-style SSTOs. So assuming they’re gonna boost the sled, how? I don’t think liquid engines have the yeet to get up to a worthwhile speed on the rather short rail. Solid boosters? They have yeet, but once you’ve lit them, you can’t really turn them off and that leaves you with woefully few abort options between ignition and launch. Electromagnetic? Getting enough yeet is a matter of enough (and big enough) capacitors, but the rail erosion is going to be worse from the sheer waste heat. And any attempt at recovery of the sleds will require the rails to be extended to decelerate them. Cause you’ll want to get the vehicle going as fast as possible, within the limits of what the structure and payload (alive or inert) can handle. But once you’ve done that, you’re not gonna hard stop the sled and reasonably expect to recover anything but twisted metal and composites.

The other question is how much is it gonna help in reducing the vehicle’s mass? The friction from doing even Mach 1 near sea level means the vehicle has to be reinforced to handle it, maybe even require active cooling of the hull. So that’s going to cut into whatever extra payload mass they’d get from the launch speed. And the vehicle’s engines will still need to work damn hard to climb up the well, in which case low Mach numbers aren’t going to do much and might actually be counterproductive thanks to the high drag.

My most insane, pie in the sky, they’ll-never-try-this idea? The rail is angled up a mountainside at about a 45 degree angle. Electromagnetically accelerated, it’s basically a huge Gauss cannon and the sled yeets off with a 4g acceleration. By the time it reaches the end, it’s going at about Mach 1.5, at an altitude of 2-3km, at which point the vehicle lights its engines and disconnects from the sled (Spinlaunch has shown that fraction of a second precise release is possible). The plane continues to ascend, the sled just fucking runs off the rail and coasts to peak altitude, then deploys parachutes to descend back to the ground. But this is an entirely unreasonable idea. Construction and maintenance would be ludicrously complicated and harried by environmental concerns. The energy required would probably be comparable to that of a small town. There’s way too much risk of the sled colliding with the plane at the end of the rail, not to mention the parachute descent. On the other hand, goddamn, it would be awesome!

The skepticism is reasonable. The theoretical principles are sound and there’s a lot of math (done by actual scientists and engineers, as well as sci-fi writers) to show that, in some form, it would work. But this is a huge undertaking that’s never really been tried before, so no one really knows how difficult (and expensive) building and operating it is going to be. Honestly, I expect this to fall apart before they begin high altitude suborbital tests of the rail launch system. On the other hand, it’s such wonderful sci-fi shit that I can’t help but root for them. If they can secure the funding to continue developing this, it’s gonna be fascinating!

The rail launch is going to be interesting. Presumably, the sled is separately accelerated, to give the vehicle a little kick and save propellant. It won’t be much, even a 4g acceleration would only get it up to roughly Mach 1.5 before it runs out of rail, but it’s not nothing either. And unless the sleds are single-use, they’ll need to decelerate them somehow.

But man, bring it on! The premise of initially accelerating a vehicle on a rail or launch loop, before the vehicle’s own engines kick in, is probably the closest we can get to SSTO from Earth. At least without using nuclear propulsion.

Admittedly, I’m not up to date on how the preparation is going, but a Space News article from last month claims they’re still looking good for the launch window. Blue may have hoped that ESCAPADE wouldn’t be the very first launch, but that ship has sailed. Wouldn’t count them out just yet, not until some critical failure lifts its ugly head. But for my money, the most likely, and most disappointing, outcome is that they scrub due to technical problems and end up missing the window. First launches rarely go off without a hitch. Still gonna be rooting for them and watching whatever stream is available.