• 0 Posts
  • 39 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 23rd, 2024

help-circle





  • The show made a fair few changes from the books, mostly for the better. Off the top of my head, Avasarala and Draper are introduced earlier in the show, Drummer got the consolidated stories of several other side characters and Elvi Okoye’s and Ashford’s personalities were significantly changed. IMO, Show Ashford is a much more interesting character than Book Ashford. In addition, the season 6 side plot with the kids is told much later in the books.


  • Thunderfoot’s psychotic obsession with Musk and the complete denial of reality happening before his eyes it necessitates has destroyed any credibility as a scientist he ever had. The authority of a food chemist on matters of rocket science is questionable in the first place. Your blind, unquestioning acceptance of whatever drivel escapes his frothing mouth is no less pathetic.

    And with that, I’m going to toast to the memory of the brain cells I’ve lost over the course of this “conversation”. Hoping for anything even resembling a reasoned argument from you is clearly a fool’s errand.






  • I suppose I’m somewhat fortunate to have been a poor bastard for most of my life. 25fps with moldy potato settings was just fine, as long as the game didn’t crash or deep fry the CPU, so I’m not as sensitive to the occasional drop below 60fps and don’t feel slighted when I have to turn some settings down. Though I can understand being incensed when you’ve poured thousands into a bleeding-edge gaming rig that’s supposed to handle anything at 4k, maxed out and a stable 120fps and it’s the game itself dragging your experience down.

    But the stutters weren’t the only problem people reported early on. There were cries of the game being unplayable, on account of endless bugs, visual glitches and repeated hard crashes. Worst I got was the normal mapping on Cal’s face getting real weird in certain lighting conditions. That’s hardly game-breaking.








  • No they didn’t. They had, a mockup of an empty shell into which they might eventually fit the vehicle. And they still have that.

    Blue Origin: “Here’s renders and a papier-mâchė model of what our lander will look like. It’s assembled together in lunar orbit, from an automated cargo ship, our own lander and another Orion.” Note that this isn’t what they won the option b proposal with.

    SpaceX: “Here’s renders of what our lander will look like. We have a full scale prototype out in Boca and we’re blowing it up to see if our math and simulations are right on how much pressure the tanks can take. It’ll require some modifications, such as larger landing legs and dedicated landing engines.” And their HLS proposal isn’t a vehicle carried in the Starship’s cargo bay, it is the Starship.

    what you’re failing to understand is that this 2.94 billion dollar bid was already AFTER they were informed of the budget changes.

    I can find no source for SpaceX’s initial bid being higher, let alone 2x higher (to meet your claim that they bid on the same level as BO, not even gonna consider Dynetics).If you have one, I’d like to see it. And if it is the case that SpaceX was picked because they were willing to slash their bid in half, then I would expect BO’s follow-up litigation to be based around that. Instead, BO focused on the claim that NASA didn’t give their proposal proper evaluation and consideration.

    I doubt minimizing corporate loss was Lueder’s motivation there. Presumably neither Steve Cook or Jeff Bezos offered Lueders a large enough bribe job matching her qualifications.

    That wasn’t my point. The point was that if their proposal had been closer to the budget set aside for the award, as opposed to being double the budget, they might have been contacted to see if they could complete the contract for the lesser amount.


  • SpaceX didn’t need a mockup to present. They had prototypes of the base vehicle and a proposal for necessary modifications to perform the contract duties and an established track record of developing ambitious rocket engines and launch vehicles. BO had bits and pieces of other things they were gonna bolt together and a pretty model of how it’ll look like, we swear, scout’s honor. But if you’re talking about the Blue Moon that eventually won the secondary bid, that’s not what they initially proposed.Blue Moon Mk2 is a variant of a lander that’s been in development since 2016, so two years longer than SpaceX’s Starship prototypes. The one that’s planned for a lunar landing this year, Blue Moon Mk1, isn’t the one they bid for HLS. It’s a robotic lander, smaller than the HLS’s Mk2. So fancy that, they won a HLS contract when they bid a variant of something they were already working on, much like SpaceX did. And remember, BO is developing a lander. SpaceX is developing a fully reusable super heavy lift rocket, an interplanetary transport craft and a lunar lander as part of the same package.

    AFTER being told to do so. That’s the entire problem. Blue Origin and Dynetics both came forward and said they’d gladly match that bid, but since they didn’t get the special information that was only given to SpaceX, they couldn’t know this.

    Finish reading my post. SpaceX’s initial bid was 2.94 billion and the final award was 2.89 billion. Again, they agreed that they can do the job for 50 million less than what they originally bid. BO’s and Dynetics’ proposals would’ve suffered a much larger hit. And sure, BO got the secondary contract for 3.4 billion, after rethinking their entire proposal. So why did they not submit that one in the first place? If they had, they might have gotten a similar call.