Once, when I was about 8 or 9 years old, my sister and I had to stay a few days with grandparents. I was studying measurements like gallons, quarts, etc. for school and my Papaw, who was raised on a farm in rural Arkansas, decided to quiz me: “How many gallons in a hog’s head?”. My sister and I howled with laughter! Papaw was miffed and growled “…they don’t teach these kids nothin’ anymore!”.
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I guess that’s better than measuring distance in “farsees” and “possum tosses”
How much is in a rasher of bacon? Apparently it is indeterminate. You’d think that there would be precision for something as important as bacon.
This is faulty thinking. A rasher is the amount that calms the current craving, so if not exactly indeterminate, it is subjective.
Ot at least some minimum standard. Nothing is worse than ordering bacon at the diner and out comes some shriveled up little piece of floppy, paper-thin, half-cooked fat. I asked for bacon, dammit!
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You guys have baited and baited me, so I’m finally going to re-post this:
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I blame all of this mess on the French.
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And Quebec.
In wine, a hogshead barrel is 300L (or not quite 80 gal.). The name isn’t used as much, but the barrels are pretty popular because they have less of an oak impact.
I guarantee you Papaw didn’t never use no damn liter!
Goddamn right.
Credit where credit’s due: SpaceX successfully launched Starship and retuned both it and the booster safely to Earth including catching the booster in a giant tuning fork.
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Thaaaaaaaat’s fucking cool.
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Seeing the plume change as the engines rotated was pretty sweet.
Did they decide this was cheaper and/or more reliable than putting landing gear on the booster?
Yes. The plan is that they will turnaround the booster and relaunch it from the same gantry.
My suspicion is that landing gear of sufficient sturdiness would have weighed so much that it would have thrown the fuel budget off. Those costs spiral because the extra fuel weighs something, so you need more fuel to lift that, too. Lather, rinse, repeat. If you can keep all that heavy gear on the ground, it’s s big win. If you can hit the target.
No doubt it saves fuel and reduces the engineering complexity of the booster itself. It’s a pretty novel idea, although I’m sure it will lead to some viral videos.
Repeated clamping action on a thin-walled metal tube. What could possibly go wrong?
I’m sure they figure something else will go wrong before metal fatigue gets them.