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Messages - Oh

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2461
Think you can fight them all by next week?
Yep, I got through like 4 or 5 today alone. There are people with more games than me to play.
If you see one of them online, send them a PM and ask them to battle. That's what I did and that's how I got my battles done so quickly.
that's exacly what I did today

2462
Think you can fight them all by next week?
Yep, I got through like 4 or 5 today alone. There are people with more games than me to play.

2463
I still need to play:
TBlocks
Sceptile
Noodles
Luis
IberianHusky
Prehistoric(?)

2464

http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-212767297

Under records, feel free to put this under scummiest play.
Orion also gets platinum mad award.
Only 1 replay?
http://sep7agon.net/index.php?topic=25191.msg509144#msg509144
they're all there, was just posting that here for visibility

2467

http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-212767297

Under records, feel free to put this under scummiest play.
Orion also gets platinum mad award.

2468
Wrong thread, anyway I'm ready Das.

2474
Wait, maybe more than an hour.
BATTLE ME

2475
The Flood / Re: What was your most "liked" post?
« on: February 21, 2015, 03:22:00 PM »
This one, 18 likes.

http://sep7agon.net/index.php?topic=15701.msg317027#msg317027
I bet if you posted your boobs you'd get more likes.

I mean, if you're not too chicken.
Post yours fatty,

2478
I'm available if anyone else wants to battle.

2479
hey gais

plz
Alright, I'm on for the night. You ready?

2480
The Flood / Re: i can legally watch porn now
« on: February 21, 2015, 10:03:57 AM »
degenerate

2481
The Flood / Re: I sexually identify as a ghost pirate
« on: February 21, 2015, 10:01:41 AM »
Alright, I checked my undead-aquatic privilege, I'm still not acceping. What now?

2482
The Flood / Re: Do you like cosplay?
« on: February 20, 2015, 07:34:05 AM »
Why do you have a picture of Felicia?

Cause I'm friends with her on FB
That doesn't explain why that image is hosted on Imgur. You either bookmarked an album of her, or uploaded an image of her to Imgur, both equally creepy.

2483
The Flood / Re: Guys who's in the wrong here
« on: February 19, 2015, 05:44:38 PM »
she sounds like a bitch

2484
The Flood / Re: Whos drinking tonight?
« on: February 19, 2015, 04:16:05 PM »
I don't drink, because I'm not a fucking idiot.
Don't drink a lot and stay comfortable mate.

2485
The Flood / Re: Whos drinking tonight?
« on: February 19, 2015, 03:36:37 PM »
Verb is a mad man!

2486
The Flood / Re: why do you have your avatar
« on: February 18, 2015, 07:33:52 AM »
Proton-M is a sexy rocket.

2487
The Flood / Re: Do you consider yourself a "core member" of the Flood?
« on: February 18, 2015, 07:33:14 AM »
dunno

2488
How do you beat London, Manchester, and Scouseland?
I'm actually impressed.

2489
The Flood / Re: I found SecondClass
« on: February 15, 2015, 02:10:58 PM »
what a fucking lightweight

2490
The Flood / Re: SpaceX
« on: February 15, 2015, 07:21:48 AM »
I actually would.
You seem to have extensive knowledge in this field. :D
Okay, this is a fucking long post, be warned.


Alright, there are a few reasons SpaceX are in the news a lot lately.


For simplicity I shall only compare SpaceX to the most well known and reliable American space launch organisation currently operating, United Launch Alliance, which does the same thing as SpaceX, but is much more established in the market. I shall ignore other launch provides such as the European Arianespace.

The first reason is quite simple, they are new. As you can imagine, making reliable rockets isn't easy, so you have very few companies who actually try it, and even less who try to while still being profitable. United Launch Alliance is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. These two companies already had a large amount of experience in aerospace and rocket development seperately, so bringing them together to make rockets is a lot easier, as they both have experience.

On the other hand, SpaceX was a completely new company, that had no previous experience in aerospace engineering. For example, Boeing was formed in 1916, and has been making aeroplanes since then, that's almost a century of experience.
That has made SpaceX's job a lot more difficult, they haven't been able to build off their past successes in aerospace like Boeing has, they've had to start from scratch, which costs a lot of money, and as stated before, isn't easy when attempting to build rockets. They've done an incredible job from starting with nothing, to building reliable rockets like they do today.

_________________________________________________ ______________________________________________

The second reason is that their rockets are much cheaper than rockets offered from current launch providers such as United Launch Alliance, and that's because SpaceX is efficient.

SpaceX is a private company, they don't get money from selling shares on the stock market, so their business needs to be effective and profitable on its own, this means making cheap rockets. How do they do this? By making most of the rocket themselves.

As I said in my last post, NASA didn't make rockets, they paid different companies to make different parts of the rocket, then NASA brings them all together and has the finished product. Turns out this is expensive as fuck, and incredibly inefficient.
First you're paying lots of different companies, which is inefficient, and you can't find these parts anywhere else, so you're paying them a lot as you have no other alternative. And secondly, you've got to ship these parts from different part of America to the same place, which is a pain in the ass when you're shipping entire fucking rockets which are several stories high that can't be damaged at all.

SpaceX gets around these problems by producing around 80% of their rockets themselves, all in the same place. This means no shipping costs of moving entire rockets across the country, and not paying several companies lots of money for very specific things.

And given that SpaceX is a business, they're built around being profitable, whereas NASA isn't a business, it's a government organisation, and just like many other government organisations, they're inefficient because they're not built around getting the best bang out of their buck, they're built around simply doing their job, even if it's not done well. Then businesses will take advantage of that by charging stupidly high prices, simply because the government organisation will pay those prices, because they have no need to be efficient. Which just means more taxpayer money going to waste.

How does this apply to United Launch Alliance? Well they've had a monoply over the American launch market for a while now, they've had no need to be efficient because they've had little competitive, so they've been able to charge high prices. But now SpaceX has arrived, and with rockets that are 1/3 the prices of United Launch Alliance rockets, United Launch Alliance has a problem. They've become complacent, and they've not ready for competition.

_________________________________________________ _______________________________________________

Now, the most interesting reason SpaceX is in the news is that they're trying to reuse rockets.
Rockets that want to go into space have stages, this is because rockets are heavy, so if you get rid of parts of the rocket, you can reduce the mass, and make it easier to get into space. You have the first stage, which is used to get off the ground, and usually take you into space, but not orbit. Getting to space is easy, just fly up, getting into orbit is hard, you need to go something like 22000mph to get into orbit.
So the first stage gets your into space, the next few stages, depending on the rocket, get you into orbit.

example of stages

Now, once a stage has been used, that's it, you just leave it. It will either burn up in the atmosphere, or just crash back to Earth, never to be used again. That's a waste, but we've never had a way to recover stages which are travelling several thousand miles per hour in space, so you've just had to make new rockets each time.

Now what SpaceX is trying to do is reuse the first stage, and that's fucking difficult, hence why no one has done it before.
And they reuse it by landing the stage back on Earth. But how?

I'm not going to go into specifics on how they bring it back to Earth, but essentially when the first stage is discarded, it isn't travelling too fast when it is discarded, so if you save some fuel in the first stage, you can use that fuel to essentially turn the rocket around, fire the engines, and put it on a trajectory that takes it back to the launch site, then use the remaining bit of fuel to land the rocket.

Now that's difficult as you're essentiall trying to take a brick, that's in space, that's travelling at 5000mph, and bring it back to Earth in one piece, with the precision of a helicopter landing. SpaceX hasn't actually landed a stage yet, but holy fuck have they come close.
Here is a video of their first attempt at an actual landing on a barge, which is out in the ocean.

barge landing attempt
YouTube

Yes it blew up, but they got that rocket to that barge, which is something like 300x100m from fucking space. The fact that they hit the barge first time is utterly amazing, and the data they got from that attempt will one day, hopefully soon, help them successfully land a rocket.

Nobody else had come even close to replicating what SpaceX is doing right now.

TL;DR
SpaceX is a new competitor in a market that has essentially been a monoply for a while now. They make efficient and cheap rockets. And they're attempting to land, and reuse rockets, which has never been done before, which would further reduce cost.

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