Re:Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle ...
by usrusr on Thursday March 05, 2020 @10:46AM
(#22494503)
The pure, theoretical rocket equation still scales linearly, the tyranny lies in the hard limit of how much mass you can theoretically accelerate out of a gravity well per unit off fuel.
But bigger rockets can get closer to that theoretical optimum because some dead weight components remain fixed-size and because some masses scale with surface instead of volume. Rockets can scale better than linearly with size, but they will never exceed the rocket equation.
But bigger rockets can get closer to that theoretical optimum because some dead weight components remain fixed-size and because some masses scale with surface instead of volume. Rockets can scale better than linearly with size, but they will never exceed the rocket equation.