The way I understood the presenation, they plan to use a single piece of steal, bent at an angle and rolled around (think one of those Pillsbury roll cans) with a single weld seem, in a giant helix.
>Raptor production is the real bottleneck, though.
They are shooting for one per day, no? Based on the differences identified in the three hanging under the Boca Chica vehicle now, it’s still in development.
They just shipped he 12th one. Definitely still in the development/ramp up process.
Re:Starship Prototype Unveiled
by de_watcher on Monday September 30, 2019 @03:30AM
(#21112592)
He said that it's about one per week. One per day will be in several months.
The number of rings is roughly 35 for Starship, with about ten vertical seams each.
For easier thinking, line the vertical seams up and you see that this gives 50m length per vertical seam from bottom to top of Starship. So there are a total of 500m for that.
35 rings with ~28m circumference add up to about 1km of seams between them.
Now if they can use rolls twice as wide and only a single vertical weld each, then that's 500m between the rings and 50m for a single vertical seam. 550m of welds there instead of 1.5m before. This should speed things up quite a lot and reduce the cost of labour.
Raptor production is the real bottleneck, though.