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Wow what an incredibly substantive comment. I remember pretty clearly he said that there would be a single seam weld. Maybe I’m remembering wrong. Or maybe they
by 35787 7y ago
Wow what an incredibly substantive comment. I remember pretty clearly he said that there would be a single seam weld. Maybe I’m remembering wrong. Or maybe they’ll seam weld multiple rolls into a really wide roll and the only weld required to turn the final roll into the shell is that final hotdog weld.
- paragraft 7y agoI think the idea's to go like a Pringles can, with a spiraling single seam.
- sixQuarks 7y agothis is the correct answer. They can simply use the 4 meter wide steel no problem.
- test6554 7y agoIf getting out of your yoga pants is like opening a can of biscuits, then making a starship is like putting your yoga pants back on...
- simonh 7y agoThey can't do that because they need to thickness to taper off up the sides of the vehicle.
- hwillis 7y agomaybe, but that's also pretty unlikely. For reference here's where musk talks about it: https://youtu.be/sOpMrVnjYeY?t=3156 https://youtu.be/sOpMrVnjYeY?t=3156 No real indication he means a spiral. There are a lot of problems with a spiral. Thin sheets of steel, even hot rolled, are very affected by the rolling process. There's also the weld line going up in a spiral. That will cause uneven heat diffusion and expansion, which is a recipe for disaster given that the skin will be cold enough to liquify helium on one side and boiling hot on the other. Then red hot during reentry. Straight lines don't have the same problems.
- chucksmash 7y agoI think when Elon said "there will be a single seam weld" (which I also remember), he meant this in comparison to the current welds. It's been 12 hours and I only skimmed the video, so I might be misremembering what he said. My understanding was this: Mk1 is welded from plates so at each layer of the stack you have n-1 welds holding the n plates together. My understanding of his comment was that the steel coils will wrap around the major axis of the rocket but instead of each layer containing n-1 welds to join n plates, there will just be one weld in each layer to join the beginning and end of that coil. That would still leave you with welds joining the different layers of coils but only one "seam" weld along the rocket's major axis.