Highway Patrol officers fall into three categories:

Nozzle design isn’t going to be hugely impacted. Remember that typical first stages burn out at 200,000 feet or higher and are going to be optimized for the portion of the flight where they’re largely horizontal and approaching that burn-out altitude. So whether you’re starting at 0 ft or 35k ft, you’re still starting…

Orbital inclination is another big part of it. By being able to point the rocket in the right direction prior to dropping it, you avoid the need to perform a dog-leg maneuver to hit the desired inclination. So you save quite a bit of fuel by not having to perform a very inefficient maneuver and as a result your…

But there was plenty of room to use it to merge in. It’s not like it was an immediate turn.

And it can launch from different spots on earth at a pretty low cost. You aren’t just limited to orbits easy to obtain from a Florida launch.

You nailed the energy discussion, and I’m totally onboard. BUT, for the sake of argument, what ancillary benefits might be achieved in addition to the logistics? Brainstorm!

Not really. the delta-v (e.g. speed needed to get to orbit) is much more significant than the gravitational potential energy.

And that is a good thing.

attempting to flee and forgetting that walls are generally a barrier to egress.

79 A.D. seems like only yesterday.

I was walking by westlake the other day and there were a group of cops chatting, and this homeless dude walks up near them, picks up an undocked bike that had been knocked over and sits it upright. He turns to the cops, visibly irritated, and exclaims, “no problem that’s just the 240th one today!!”

Why change looks just for the sake of change? It seems their approach to design is like a men’s suit, not like a garment for the misses section of a department store. There are subtle tweaks, not a whole new design that looks dated in a year - like current Toyotas and Hondas.

I can’t really see Audi getting too bent out of shape about new cars getting leaked since they all look the same.

I swear, car design in this day and age has basically boiled down to “give it smaller, angrier headlights and a bigger grille” with each generation.

This is all you need right here..

Electric top fuel…

If you steal a dollar, you are a criminal; if you steal a billion dollars, you are a genius.

Already out of the barn. Remember back in the Israeli/Lebonon war where the media was full of faked photos. By today’s standards the images are laughable, but it it only goes up from there. Add to that the new “deep fake” tech that pretty much anyone can do, and you can’t even believe a video showing someone directly…

The ship is 510 tons (presumably metric).

Looks like they built some kind of roll bar cage around the bridge and antennas. The fairing is probably not dense enough to cause much other damage as long as it is under parachute. (Physics demands that a failed parachute would miss the boat, since the parafoil has a better glide ratio than the bare fairing, so the…