/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15833981
This isn't spaceflight but it's what I think of when I imagine large scale infrastructure being assembled in orbit. You should make big things in space.

>>12705508
Booster could land in a sort of "pit" with flame diverters in the ground (or constructed on an oil platform, which can be tens of thousands of tons in mass). In this way you can shorten the actual size of the towers to make them stouter, and by having multiple towers you can spread out the forces applied to them. Oil rigs are actually especially good for this, as they are enormously massive structures which can hold almost an arbitrary amount of weight. Just the structure of something like Troll A weighs more than half a million tons and is almost half a kilometer tall, of which about 170m sticks out above the waterline.
While the platforms SpaceX have currently bought for expedience sake are nowhere near as impressive, I don't think in the long term (2024+ to 2034+) they'll have much of an issue with the catcher structure, although personally I seriously wonder why Superheavy can't simply be made 10% taller to account for maybe 20 more tons of some very stout legs, it's dry mass is already almost a completely negligible fraction of it's wet mass.

>>12614809
You have to put them on many boats at once I believe.

>>12600971
I think they have to move it to another platform, don't they? I am not an oil worker I might be wrong but I thought rigs like that sat on top big-ass towers like pic-related and those are permanently set.

>>12444718

>>12355124
based

>>12022667