4dpuzzle

There was a time when ministers used to resign after taking responsibility for accidents, scams or overall failures. People have forgotten that time. They seem to think that India was like a sub Saharan nation before 2014 and now it’s like Europe. This government has made people comfortable with the stance that ministers are not answerable or even responsible for their piss poor performance.

Vande Bharat isn’t a luxury. It’s a much required evolution of the railways. EMU passenger trainsets are common all over the world. There’s no point in sticking with locomotive driven separateable coaches other than for freight.

The main mistake here is how the railways is neglecting passenger requirements and safety. IR already has an indigenous solution for train accidents - Kavach, a cost effective implementation of the Train Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) requirement. Yet we find that in every single accident in recent history, the trains were not fitted with Kavach.

Another issue is about cheap general coaches and sleepers. The government cut their numbers, despite high demand. That’s just pure dick move. This one could in fact be due to the government trying to make it more profitable before selling it off to their crony friends.

The thing here is that VB and general coaches are not mutually exclusive. You could have VB trainsets with general coaches. Even Sudhanshu Mani said that the reduction of general coaches is a bad idea.

I don’t think that you can exercise such fine motor skills while you are shooting up a school or other mass gatherings - which was the whole point of the ban in the first place.

I don’t understand the kind of sociopathy required (by the judges in question) to seek an excuse to pedantically redefine a device whose whole original purpose is killing people en-masse.

MP is the new UP, I guess. Can’t let this country be devoid of at least one state where the clock runs backwards.

Barely noticed among the mountains of improprieties of the BJP government - the Gujarat model of development is all about the PM misusing his official position to cajole and bribe foreign investors to abandon other states and choose his home state for setting up industries. These charlatans are no better than the British raj by treating the rest of India as a colony to plunder.

Choosing a country that depends primarily on oil for income, to head a climate change conference indicates everything that’s wrong with the current world order.

Fight against climate change headed by oil companies, anti-war groups headed by weapons manufacturers, human rights council headed by regressive kingdoms that still uphold slavery, women’s rights groups headed by countries where women are not allowed to vote or even go outside on their own - the entire setup is designed to pull a massive wedgie over honest hardworking regular people.

Take the lesson people - you are like amusing, but expendable guinea pigs to these rich and evil beasts.

I know I’m going to be bludgeoned for this. But I’m mystified by this ‘iterative’ approach to development. I wonder if they got this from the IT industry. Charles Bolden once remarked that the congress would have shut down the Apollo program if they lost vehicles at the rate spacex does now. These failures also often feel like the result of lack of foresight and critical thinking, rather than the consequence of complex chains of events that are hard to predict.

Consider the first flight. They decided to launch it without a flame deflector or a deluge system. They thought that it would be OK based on a hot test of the superheavy at half thrust. I don’t think any other rocket company would have made the same decision. Even if the concrete slabs didn’t shatter into a thousand pieces, the reflected shock wave would have been damaging enough to the engine compartment. They predictably lifted off with several failed and failing engines.

Another problem was the stage separation maneuver. They had planned on a full 360 degree cart wheel to separate the upper stage with centrifugal force. Not only was it going to cause enormous lateral and bending loads on the two stages, I’m still confused about how they would separate at all when the airflow is pushing the top stage (whichever happens to be on the top) against the bottom one. Perhaps the sideways loads might snap the joint. But the two stages are still in danger of collision due to airflow. This concern was proven to be valid when that flight cartwheeled several times without separating and then buckled. I don’t know if that’s the reason why they abandoned the maneuver, but something was definitely wrong with it. And it was bad enough to switch to hot staging.

I don’t have many comments about the second flight. Both stages failed in flight. The first stage failed due to problems with filters. I’m willing to give them a pass here.

As for the third flight, the superheavy exploded 400m above the seas. It was clear that it didn’t decelerate enough due to engine failures. More engine problems. But a pass here too, since engines are generally hard and the raptor is particularly nasty at that.

The real problem in that flight was the starship. It was tumbling pretty badly even in space. The video didn’t give any clue about how they could arrest the tumbling. I was looking for the operation of attitude/RCS thrusters and I couldn’t find any solid evidence of any of it. It was more like the starship had no attitude control at all, rather than one failing. Perhaps I’m completely wrong and it had attitude thrusters. But it was clearly deficient at least. The commentators of flight 4 said that they added more thrusters for attitude control. That would mean that either they didn’t consider tumbling as a problem or they completely underestimated it for flight 3. Why? Attitude control isn’t the hardest problem in rocketry. Very good simulation and analysis techniques exist for it. Anyway, a sideways reentry is bad enough. Even worse is an unarrested attitude rate at reentry. The atmosphere predictably incinerated the ship’s engines and exposed steel skin.

If this afterthought feels like a conspiracy theory, remember the time when Musk made a change to starship after Tim Dodd (earlyastronaut) asked him a question on the same? Or the time when someone on Twitter asked Musk why they didn’t start two raptor engines and then shutoff the underperforming one during Starship’s flip maneuver at landing? They do this now. Afterthoughts are evidently not a rare thing at SpaceX.

And finally flight 4. I’m not taking any credit away from them. They seem to have just made it till the landing. Superheavy worked all the way for the first time. But my concern is about the place where the starship’s fin burned through - exactly at the hinge. I would have expected them to focus more on that region as a weak spot and to have given it a better thermal protection. That would be the last region I would expect a burn through. Instead, it would have been in some spot where they didn’t expect any problem and missed something very subtle.

All these give me the impression that they are trying things and seeing what sticks. That’s not how traditional rocketry works. There’s a s**t load of analyses, simulations and small scale tests that precede the production stage. The result is that when such rockets fail, they fail in a spectacularly complex, unpredictable and mind bending sequence of cascading failures (unlike what I see on starship). They also tend to succeed with minimum test flights and work reliably over decades. Apollo is a great example. The first test flight achieved everything that starship achieved in 4 flights.

The only other industry that I’ve seen behaving like this is the IT industry. “Deploy whatever you have and we’ll debug in production”. Coincidentally, Tesla does the same with their cars - the only car company to do so. So perhaps there is a Musk factor here. The SpaceX engineering team is incredibly talented, skilled and capable. The only reason I can think of for them to behave like this is an enormous pressure on them to deliver results at high rates. That’s the only reason I can think of for them to proceed without satisfying themselves.

Now you may want to argue that SpaceX’s approach is better than what everyone else does. After all, they make bigger things, faster. They advanced the industry like no one else did or could. Perhaps you’re right. Only time will tell, since this approach is so novel that we haven’t had enough opportunity to assess the results. But my instincts worry me about one thing - technical debt. Mechanical engineering is not like software engineering. In software, a problem once solved is gone forever. In mechanical engineering, any problem you work around is a disaster waiting to happen in the future. The right approach here is to design things properly and meticulously so that the final product has minimum work around. I fear that the software style of design is leaving unknown flaws or technical debts that may compound together into a cascading failure on some flight in the future.

To those who are planning to reply:

What I wrote is not a criticism of the SpaceX employees or Starship programme. I’m genuinely fascinated by the interplay of technical design, development styles, management styles and human factors. I’m extremely curious about how the situation is evolving.

Please don’t attack me or question my abilities if you feel that I’m being unfair about this (that’s definitely not my intention). I may be just a kid in this arena, but it’s never wrong to ask, is it? I’m extremely interested in hearing your insightful opinion on this topic, based on your experience or your logic. If you think I’m wrong on any of these, please share your perspective and reasons here - I (and possibly others) may learn something new.

The US police force is full of sociopaths. But I like to believe that there are at least a few sincere officers in there. They are the ones who are really going to pay for such acts. The Capitol Hill insurrection is a good example.

Eh? Isn’t that the point of putting pressure in the first place?

I support India taking the entirety of J&K. The Pakistanis would naturally make the same claim. However, what’s really worrying is that these morons are talking nonchalantly about starting an all out nuclear war. Even the Pakistani leadership is more sensible than that. Indian citizens should at some point think about the best interests of the nation than about an overinflated nationalistic pride.

On the other hand, it’s not economically sustainable for the railways to cater to basic sleeper and seater tickets as those are heavily subsidized.

Some activities like public transport and food supply are not run for the purpose of making profits. They are essential services for the common man and for the rest of the economy. Due to this, their economic values cannot be estimated simply by looking at the profits they generate. Without them, we stand to lose a lot more.

Lack of such concern and vision is why the government makes such ridiculous decisions.

Exactly what we need! More pods! SMH!

Even then, you’ll be opted into sharing your information with Microsoft and their 942 business partners.

I wish they undid a lot of their stupid redesigns instead of doubling down on it.

The fact any board of directors considers this man employable at all is mind boggling to me.

All recent events indicate that the board of directors are seriously manipulated by the chief executive and are not good at taking sane decisions. Musk companies, OpenAI and Theranos are good examples.

As I recall, there was a board meeting of Theranos where they summoned Elizabeth Holmes to fire her for misleading them about the state of development of the project. But she managed to get them to reverse that decision and then take action against the person that reported her.

Honestly it’s not as bad as I expected.

Based on what you know.

I’m shocked that the human trail was authorized at all, considering the fate of the monkeys that were subject to the same. I’m not confident that this man or any future subjects will be truly safe. We won’t know even if something goes wrong.

You have seen what he has done to twitter/X. For all his talks about freedom, free speech and survival of mankind, he is fundamentally a conservative billionaire oligarch who has no qualms about exploiting others to death to add to his wealth.

Now just imagine if a brain implant goes the same way. Forget his delusions about backing up the human brain and telepathic nonsense. Even simple implants meant to help paraplegics are going to be dangerous under the control of people like him. Just the way the brain moves our limbs can be used against us.

This is why it’s important to report on matters like this. So that people understand the danger and avoid it, instead of falling for the propaganda that he is some sort of tech messiah.

The difference between Indian railways during the British Raj and post-independance is that the former was meant to transport goods and wealth away from India, while the latter was meant to be the poor man’s transport. Looks like BJP is hell bent on taking IR back to its roots, perhaps all the way back to Rama rajya.

I just wish that the corporate psychopaths who caused this in their greedy pursuit of insane wealth, were held accountable. Make them pay real money for every life lost, every ecosystem destroyed, each crop failed and each natural disaster caused by global warming. And then throw them into these disaster areas to fend for themselves and survive the harsh climate without the support of instruments they bought to ensure their own survival.