First attempt to catch the booster back at the launch site.
The "mechazilla" launch tower has two "chopstick" arms which are used to pick up and stack both stages and which are intended to be able to catch the returning booster and maybe also the returning Starship upper stage.
Yes. The booster has two pins that stick out at the top that are designed to hold the weight of the entire booster when empty. The plan is for the booster to return to the launch tower, position itself between the arms which will close on it and then the pins will “land” on the arms, completing the catch.
I’d say the main difference, then, is that the booster will be supported by those pins resting on top of the arms. Chopsticks use friction to hold up their load.
yes the booster’s structure is very strong vertically but not nearly as strong horizontally. There may be some “squeezing” forces from the chopsticks but this is effectively for fine positioning only. It will not support the weight. The booster will “land” by getting its pins (which stick out a bit) on the top rail of the arms.
It should be better described as having the booster land on the arms. The arms will probably be able to adjust a little to assist in alignment, but the booster is doing most of the work to be 'caught'.
How could it possibly be meant literally? Do you consider it possible for a rocket to be caught by a literal person with literal wooden sticks?
I guess I don't really understand what you are asking. There's a tower with some huge metal arms that is meant to catch the rocket. They call them chopsticks in a joking manner. Obviously, I would have thought.
Yeah I totally envisioned a person holding wooden chopsticks trying to catch a booster /s
You missed the quoted part about > which are intended to be able to catch
Which would be the unique thing to clarify. As in "something like" the "chopsticks" moving to > catch < the thing -- Like Mr. Miyagi moving the chopsticks to > catch < the thing
It allows removing the landing gears on the booster, which saves wheight, which saves fuel, which increases efficiency and reduces costs. It also avoid having to fetch the booster from wherever it would have landed.
Given that a lot of the landing failures we've seen started with a near perfect landing followed by the rocket tipping over, I suspect one benefit is that the contact point is now above the center of gravity and thus it can't really tip over.
Of course, it can't tip over unless something fails or the rocket ends up in the wrong spot (and fails to get caught) and the previous tip-overs also had to involve failures (of the landing strut, in the latest loss) or landing in some way that isn't perfectly aligned.
Their launch license requires them to initially aim at the water, and only shift to aiming at their tower if both the booster internally judges it's in perfect health, and they send the signal from their control system.
I think there is a reasonable possibility that something goes wrong enough at some point for the booster to go in the drink. But if that happens, maybe it'll be close enough to the shore that we'll get some nice video of it?
This is also standard procedure for Falcon 9 landings. They would do it this way even if the launch license didn't require it, because they know the probability of some sort of failure of the booster is high, and they don't want to destroy the launch tower if they can help it.
"According to the National Fire Prevention Agency, if an EV ever catches fire while you’re behind the wheel, immediately find a safe way to pull over and get the car away from the main road. Then, turn off the engine and make sure everyone leaves the vehicle immediately."
They should have written turn the ignition off ("ignition" also being a misnomer for EVs!). That will disconnect the battery, which won't stop the fire but will make firefighting slightly safer.
That was what I thought at first too. However if it were pressure change, the sound would change when you move the knob, not when the hot water reaches the shower.
I turn on the tap in the sink in the bathroom, when waiting for the hot water coming from the cistern. The water in the pipes have cooled down over night. I can hear the difference in the sound when it splashes in the sink, when it is hot. So yeah.
Your previous employer never bought AutoCAD, they licenced its use, paying a subscription. When you start working for them that licence was no longer available to you. So you would be unable to subsequently use it.
Unable legally, but I may find illegal ways. And the reason it is illegal to copy is copyright at the end. The license is only (legally) required because of copyright.
Is it weird that Google should go to all the effort to advertise Chrome as much as they do? I'm thinking of the las Vegas grand Prix, and the sphere lit up like a big chrome ball
I often notice comments made regarding ancient or historical locations and civilisations, when discussed by a historian in a documentary, often seem to be opinions based on pretty flimsy evidence. In some cases no evidence at all, just things could be likely maybe possibly. Relying on the fact that there's no written evidence for or against any claim.
Along these lines, a well established rule in Archaeology: "Was man nicht erklären kann, sieht man gleich als kultisch an" (what cannot be explained, is immediately perceived as religious)
I love me some history information, documentaries, and etc. But yeah I get strongly allergic to stuff where suddenly I wonder "Wait did you just logic that out in your head? Like there's no basis for that other than you observing how the thing / situation is?"
I'm sure it has been an issue forever but online especially it seems painful how much of that information there is.
Even if there is written evidence, nearly all past written information is also difficult to verify, and writers in the past were not necessarily unbiased or above lying and distortion.
Yes, it would take not just a real historian, but someone who had done research, to answer this question. Having been up and down a few of those, it certainly seems more than just plausible to me, even taking into account the numerous recorded sieges. On the other hand it is also true that spears and shields play a much greater role than swords. Hard to imagine wielding a full-sized shield, let alone a spear, in one of those staircases, though!
I think the bigger point from the article is that by the time people are fighting hand-to-hand in the tower stairwells, the defenders have already well and truly lost: comeback from such a state was probably impossible (and if the walls were breached the defenders would almost certainly have surrendered rather than fought to the last man). So it wouldn't have really made sense to design things for this possibility.
A castle staircase takes a lot of time and effort to build. Choosing to build the staircase in one direction or the other has negligible cost. If there is even a slight or possible advantage to one direction then it would make sense to build it that way.
Any defenders defending a tower are obviously above the ground floor, which is where access to food and water is. So why bother fighting up the stairway, when you can just block all the downstairs exits? The castle's defenses are the walls; if attackers are in a position to go up the stairs then the castle's defenses have failed, and the only defense left is the manpower of the defenders. So instead of being "besieged" up their towers, the only realistic strategy the defenders have is to come down from the towers and join the melee. Or just surrender, because the attackers have an army and the castles only had dozens of defenders (if that). What tactical situation do you have in mind where the success of the attack depends on success in a staircase battle?
Defense in depth isn's about justifying in advance how every measure will win the battle; it's about giving yourself as many small, incremental advantages as possible so that the odds steadily tick up in your favor. Battles are famously difficult to predict so every advantage is sought, and even small advantages can have multiplier effects.
Every day the attackers besiege you is one they have to defend against potential counterattacks from your allies. And even if your castle falls you might buy your empire time to raise a bigger army and rally more allies in order to win the next bigger war. Delaying enemies could be an important function of castles.
It's a really good explanation. Castle sieges were big events, so historically we know the outcomes. Nearly 100% of the time, the garrison has already surrendered if it's this bad. Medieval sieges come in three major flavors: ones where you sneak in, ones where you bombard the fortification, and ones where you don't let anything in or out and you wait until they give up.
If you examine a military you will find volumes of plans for incredibly unlikely situations. Once you have addressed all the likely and significant threats, you don't just stop planning--at least not any good military.
Saying that castle sieges didn't tend to involve stairway fights doesn't imply that stairways wouldn't have had defensive measures built in. That is post-hoc rationalization.
> If there is even a slight or possible advantage to one direction then it would make sense to build it that way
If it's true that the battle at this point is lost for the defenders -- and known history indicates this is so -- then why would the builders choose directions based on this extremely unlikely scenario, instead of on just about any other consideration (aesthetic, practical, or even random)?
I'll take a stab at guessing (mind you, this is blind guessing, happy to be corrected!): the USMC still issue bayonets because of both tradition, which is important to the military, and also because they are actually useful in close quarters battle, which still occurs on occasion, such as in urban warfare and house-to-house combat clearing, etc. The likelihood of having to use a bayonet/knife in modern CQB is probably significantly higher than the likelihood of medieval defenders recovering from an enemy army that has stormed their castle.
An interstate takes a lot of time and effort to build. And yet which side you drive on doesn't matter; it simply needs to be consistent with all the other roads you're connected to. There are plenty of countries that, through historical happenstance, drive on the opposite side of the road, and it's fine.
So in other words, just because the staircases take a lot of time and effort to build, simply means that having the staircase itself is important, not necessarily that its chirality is important. It has to have a chirality but it may well not matter which one, just like roads.
If there were evidence that driving on the right side or left side of the road slightly reduces car accidents and a country with previously no roads or cars began planning to automotize the country, then, all things considered, it would make sense to have people drive in the lane with a slightly reduced fatality rate.
If there are two choices where one presents a slight advantage but no additional cost then a rational actor will go with that choice.
The event has to occur relatively frequently for that slight advantage to become statistically noticeable. Direct assaults on castles with hand-to-hand combat occurring in stairwells were extremely rare as far as we know.
For perspective, Norman keeps were often built with a large internal cross wall, so even if troops made it through the stair door and swarmed into the room they'd still have to fight their way into the other half of the floor. By the stage these expensive and space consuming walls were defensively relevant, defenders would have already lost outer walls, viable long-term food and water supplies and much of the garrison defending it... and any real chance of holding out. But an invading army would still lose more men storming it; so it functioned as a deterrent.
I've heard this "it's a myth" argument before, but 70% of staircases is quite a large proportion of staircases spiralling in a particular direction which would offer the defender a marginal advantage to be pure coincidence. Particularly when the ratio of clockwise to anticlockwise staircases in Norman castles was about 20:1; it was later generations of castle of builders who added many more anticlockwise stairwells, in an era when individual tower defence was less importance, and builders may have simply forgotten or come to doubt arguments about the defensive advantages of clockwise spirals (the blog's arguments for why spiral staircase defence is rubbish work here of course!). Contemporary cathedrals which were not at all defensible tended to build clockwise and anticlockwise spiral staircases as matching pairs, so it wasn't like there was some other sort of massive aversion to stairs in a particular direction.
That's a bizarre line of thought to me. If you build an expensive structure for fortification, you don't usually get to the interior design and then go "Oh fuck it, this extra safety measure wouldn't cost anything, but if they've got this far we might as well surrender, so let's not bother."
Going by that logic, the president's bunker under the pentagon would've been built without a lock. After all, people don't usually have to physically drag a country's leader out of their locked bunker, right? By the time anyone's knocking on that door, usually the war is lost and the country has surrendered.
And yet, if you're designing for defense, why NOT take such a cheap and easy countermeasure as putting a lock on the door or choosing the more defensible way to spiral your staircase? You might want to buy a few more minutes to negotiate in a desperate situation; you might want at least the option of taking that futile last stand; you might be facing not an invading army but a single lunatic with a sword who snuck past the outer guards.
I imagine that it would be more difficult to gain entry to an upper floor (at the top of a narrow staircase so single-file attackers) and a sturdy door with a couple of guards outside, than it would be to gain entry to rooms on the same level. Perhaps the women were tucked away on the upper floors, in relative safety.
Fighting on the stairs would be kinda silly. Better to wait outside the doorway so that after your attackers are done running up the stairs with armor and weapons, you and your pals are waiting there at the choke point to layeth the smacketh down. The only real benefit to fighting on the stairs is that you still effectively impede progress if you're dead.
If you are the attacking army, just wait it out. You've won the siege, and any defenders up the stairs will have to either come down or starve to death. Why risk attacking up the stairs?
Yeah, just burn/smoke out the defenders. If you're already in the bottom of the building it's over, just a matter of time when. You can also take the castle apart and cause it to collapse.
A lot like evolutionary psychology; it seems like a reasonable explanation or story and is supported by at least some circumstantial evidence, so it must have been the way things were
You expect pop documentaries to contain evidence? I do not mean it as snark, it is just that evidence is something popular entertainment ia not even supposed to have.
According to the OP, there is written evidence for it, from the Victorian era, which was 400 years after cannons made castles obsolete. It's hard to fault modern historians too much if they're simply trusting the old records to be accurate. Or as we say in computer science: garbage in, garbage out.
> It's hard to fault modern historians too much if they're simply trusting the old records to be accurate.
Basically the entire job of a historian is to determine the credibility of old sources, so they can interpret all the data and come to the most accurate conclusion about what happened.
If you click through, you can see there's no 'evidence' there. He simply offhandedly, in a sentence or two, makes the same speculation about fighting, with no sources, and the whole discussion of staircases in general is based on only 2 named examples. Chesterton's fence is satisfied: he knew no more than we did.
Theodore Andrea Cook wasn't a historian. Xe was a writer for the Daily Telegraph, amongst other things, who wrote about sports such as fencing and rowing; and who was also an art critic.
Theodore Andrea Cook wasn't writing in the Victorian Era. _Spirals in Nature and Art_ was a 20th century work, in the Edwardian Era. _The Curves of Life_ was from the subsequent Georgian Era.
Theodore Andrea Cook is the earliest person found espousing this hypothesis. This is, as far as anyone has determined, Theodore Andrea Cook's own original hypothesis, based upon zero evidence. That is certainly what the text of _Spirals_ implies.
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