An analysis of the Lego City deep space rocket

201 点作者 wh313大约 5 年前

24 条评论

gorgoiler大约 5 年前

My intuition, as a rocket scientist[1].Once the boosters have come off, it feels like the drag from the nose is going to flip the rocket around. Those control surfaces on the nose are at the exact wrong end of the rocket.They don’t even need to be dynamic — a set of static stabilizers at the rear of the liquid stage is should be added to provide stabilizing drag after the boosters have been detached.This might not be a problem if the rocket has reached an altitude where it is subsonic or the drag from air is small enough to be countered by the torque provided by thrust vectoring.Those engines have a gimbal, right?[1] I’ve worked at KSC[2] since almost the very beginning[3] of the programme.[2] Kerbal Space Center.[3] 0.18....written with apologies to those who are actually qualified in this area.

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simonh大约 5 年前

Clearly this line of reasoning is the wrong way round. Surely the correct approach is to calculate the gravity and size of the LEGO planet and it's moon from the characteristics of the rocket.

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zoomablemind大约 5 年前

This assessment completely omits an important source of impulse -- the kid driven by imagination. This has to be scaled up too!I've been locating some of our Lego models at home in places that defy traditional notions of gravity, can only guess what was the intended target of our little Commander at launch.So the base assumption should be that the tanks are filled with Magic, and the main stage houses a warp-core. The destination is indeed Deep Space! (Picard to the Bridge)

anemic大约 5 年前

It could be decoy program to hide development of an intercontinental ballistic missile?I haven't seen any LEGO centrifuges in stores. Those could have been hoarded by someone to encrich LEGO uranium?

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kevin_thibedeau大约 5 年前

It's all a massive jobs program that doesn't need to accomplish anything to achieve it's true goals. Very realistic.

bootloop大约 5 年前

I believe the flaw is in assuming a Lego figure is not in 1:1 scale. So instead of upscaling the Lego figure we should just down-scale "earth" (in reality now Lego-earth) and re-run these numbers with Lego-earth gravity.

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Ygg2大约 5 年前

Solution is simple. LEGOTimespace functions based on consensus of observers and rule of imagination.Thus, they need big rockets to merely get out of sight. Once they are unobservable, they only need enough "fuel" to convince the two astronauts aboard they are doing fine.

lfnoise大约 5 年前

Choosing the Orion capsule as a reference seems unnecessarily large. The Gemini capsule had crew 2, and was 3,851 kg.

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karatestomp大约 5 年前

Without reading TFA: no. Probably could reach space. Maybe—maybe—orbit, but barely and I'd lean toward no on that, too.Source: Kerbal Space Program intuition (hey, served me well when I took one look at that SpaceX starship design and went "oh that's not going past Earth orbit without an orbital re-fuel and nearly-dry top stage tanks at launch" and, sure enough, that was the plan)

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londons_explore大约 5 年前

Lego city isn't on earth... So requiring earth amounts of delta-v doesn't make sense...

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layoutIfNeeded大约 5 年前

> A minifigure, 3 blocks high, is repesentative of an average American adultUmmm... why? Lego is from Denmark.

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mikl大约 5 年前

Well, obviously, the brilliant scientists of LEGO City have invented better rocket fuel.Some sort of direct matter-to-energy converter to power the engines, and then fill the tanks with something really dense, osmium or whatever.

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beckingz大约 5 年前

This is great. Would love to see this for the original space shuttle lego sets.

xwdv大约 5 年前

I hate when people criticize and don’t offer a solution. The obvious follow up would be to calculate exactly how big of a rocket must be built to reach the moon, or even deep space.

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mcv大约 5 年前

Considering the fuel capacity of earlier Lego spaceships, I think the assumptions about the energy density of lego fuel are off by a couple of orders of magnitude.

djsumdog大约 5 年前

Similar video explanation:<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VfdwjEJO7A" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VfdwjEJO7A</a>

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dathinab大约 5 年前

> Why does the set include a rover and a grappling arm, if it will never reach the moon? What’s the satallite used for if it doesn’t have the delta-v to reach even low-earth orbit? LEGO, we need answers!It's because the small hook like think on the nose is a anti-gravity hook, which "magically" fixes all problems ;)

cosmodisk大约 5 年前

I don't think he took into consideration LEGO gravity,which isn't the same as the gravity we are used to.

D13Fd大约 5 年前

Idea for next article: How to build an appropriate third stage using existing spare pieces to enable GEO, LLO, reaching Mars...

trackofalljades大约 5 年前

better link? <a href="http://h313.info/blog/aerospace/lego/2020/05/09/an-analysis-of-the-lego-city-deep-space-rocket.html" rel="nofollow">http://h313.info/blog/aerospace/lego/2020/05/09/an-analysis-...</a>

RedShift1大约 5 年前

Link is dead? Getting a 404 here...

chris_wot大约 5 年前

This is a scandal.

turowicz大约 5 年前

Those are some serious accusations!

yaur大约 5 年前

I think this is the first time it’s ever felt appropriate to me to post an xkcd on hacker news... <a href="https://xkcd.com/356/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/356/</a>