It’s more, if you just scale a rocket up by 2x (or whatever), it generally gets more efficient. Like, build it twice as big, it’ll take four times as much into space.

It’s almost a new thing entirely. More like a shuttle, but not very much like one.

Space launch actually benefits from scaling up. The bigger your spacecraft, the better your mass fraction - the more of your mass that can be dedicated to payload, as opposed to the actual weight of the engines and fuel tanks and airframe. It’s one of those square-cube relations, a lot of limits like drag are…

Yeah, that part had me rolling my eyes a bit. Crazy Torch solutions are fun on cars, not so much on massive spacecraft.

It’s partially better reliability (Soviet quality control was pretty ass), but a big part is better computers.

Testing a rocket of this size is a bit dangerous, and Canaveral is a bit crowded. If you were another launch company with a Canaveral lease (ie. ULA, NGIS, Blue Origin, Firefly, or Relativity), would you want SpaceX having their prototype hovering around, deliberately testing the corners of the envelope until it…

Testing a rocket of this size is a bit dangerous, and Canaveral is a bit crowded. If you were another launch company with a Canaveral lease (ie. ULA, NGIS, Blue Origin, Firefly, or Relativity), would you want SpaceX having their prototype hovering around, deliberately testing the corners of the envelope until it…

“a11y” is not specifically twitter-speak for “accessibility”. It’s general programmer speak, following the pattern of “i18n” for “internationalization” and “l10n” for “localization”, the processes of making a program work in multiple languages, and work in a specific language, respectively. The number is the number of…

Note that this comes after they initially tried to pin the blame on an American astronaut going space-mad and drilling a hole in the side of the station so he could have an excuse to go back home early. I think that’s still the official story as far as RT is concerned.

A more powerful weapon is, at this point, useless.

This is an incredibly malformed opinion.

Has Kotaku ever picked one other than the Friday strip? As long as I’ve been paying attention, they’ve just plopped in whatever the most recent comic has been, regardless of whether it was the best of the week or not, or whether it works so well standalone.

Regeneration was already factored into the Model 3's range. Similarly, the mileage estimate for the Model 3 is based on reasonable acceleration, not the maximum performance the vehicle can reach. Even if it accelerates slower, it will accelerate for longer to reach the same speed and so will be consuming higher power…

Obviously you can get more and more complicated with how much you simulate, and get increasingly close to reality. I added one term and the figure changed by a factor of 8. That’s a big deal. I would expect further refinements to have diminishing returns - and I think my math is good enough for a back-of-the-napkin…

While your conclusion was correct, you arrived at it in a completely wrong way. A single Model S pack would not give equivalent range in a substantially larger and heavier vehicle, for the simple reason that it will be driving a more powerful engine harder in order to do so. Same reason a 12-gallon gas tank lasts a…

This is not “cheating” in any normal sense. In fact, many speedruns actually rely on knowing or even manipulating the RNG seed, and the effects of it. This is common in RPG speedruns - I know the early Pokemon games, and a lot of Square Enix games, have RNG-manipulated speedruns. So long as the manipulation consists…

Eh... it’s the worst Doom game, easily, alongside its expansion pack. It doesn’t feel much like the rest of the series, focusing a lot more on horror, especially early on, but it’s not actually all that good at horror. The pacing is too fast for real dread (yet still too slow for a shooter), and the jumpscares get…

The guy saying it was clearly an engineer, because only engineers think that way. Hell, not even all engineers would need to consider it that way - any engineers working further down the drivetrain just treat it as a 755hp motor.

Trademark infringement? I would expect nominative fair use covers it (it does contain both an Xbox and Playstation, stating that it does should be legally protected), but they might be able to win anyways, or at least rack up enough court costs to be unprofitable.

There was another factor, which I would consider almost more important than the budget: