Bimfred

Definitely a mission to keep an eye on, but when Orion drive?

Your personal hatred is blinding you, OP.

Hate to disappoint, but it’s far more than you could possibly imagine. You could dump the equivalent mass of the entire human civilization, every single person and everything we’ve ever made, on the Moon and it wouldn’t have a noticeable effect.

And the gravitational pull of all the other planets. I’m sure Jupiter is totally cool with us trying to precisely align and balance a satellite swarm on the point of a needle.

Even if the US and EU pony up the not insignificant amount of cash to do it, there’s still nothing that can put 1000t into orbit, let alone L1. And splitting it up into 100t segments isn’t a solution, since L1 is unstable. The segments will need power, thrusters, gyros, propellant and guidance for station-keeping, so there goes a large chunk of your mass budget. To compensate for that, you need more mirrors. And they need to be continuously replaced as they break down or run out of propellant.

Horizon: Zero Dawn. I got absolute shite aim on the best of days and playing on a controller just makes it worse. Switched to m+kb eventually, but by then, the experience was already marred. Think I’ll give it some more time, then try again.

Most likely? Nostalgia and familiarity. We’ll probably never know if the decision to make it Baldur’s Gate 3 was WotC/Hasbro’s or Larian’s.

There’s precedent, though. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance had less of a connection to Bioware’s BG than this one does.

And it shouldn’t be. Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 are amazing games that pioneered or popularized many things we’ve come to expect in modern RPGs, but they’re also 20+ years old. If Bioware’s Baldur’s Gate was released today, it wouldn’t be revolutionary. It would be an excellently made throwback to how RPGs used to be.

BG3 isn’t made by the same studio, let alone the same people. Their admiration of what they’re building upon is clear as a sunny day, though. So let this carry on the spirit of what was and be the foundation of something new.

Aren’t the batteries and electric motors driving the grid fins at the top of the booster? That and the entire interstage are gonna get blasted with the thrust plume of three Raptors. Reinforcing them enough that it doesn’t affect planned reusability targets could take a bigger bite out of the payload than they get from hot staging.

That said, assuming the booster doesn’t get royally annihilated immediately, they’ll surely do a thorough analysis on just how much damage the booster takes. Might be that hot staging doesn’t work out for regular use, but they’ll keep it on hand for launches that need every last bit of delta-V.

I think Soyuz boosters currently do hot staging, the interstage is open IIRC.

You are correct. I believe most Russian rockets have used hot staging. It may be destructive, but it works.

The technological developments that built modern civilization have always come with tradeoffs at the expense of nature. This is simply the next step on that path. It’s unfortunate that it’s necessary, but commendable that they’re making efforts to minimize the impact as much as possible.