I totally understand why they've gone for that design but the welded together steel plates really make me think of the sort of thing Wallace and Gromit would build.
I am so used to seeing space stuff done in clean rooms, and things taking years and years to come to fruition (e.g. hearing about and seeing NASA or ESA probes etc getting made) that to see what is essentially a bunch of guys in a field just welding something together blows my mind.
I mean, is it just the outside that looks like that and inside it is ultra-exotic materials and tanks? Of course the engines are sophisticated machinery, but what about the insides? Are we just seeing the outer shell and it's all unobtanium nano-tube composite on the inside?
Once the temperatures get reasonable, it might be aluminum or or carbon fiber. The passenger/cargo/avionics section are probably the only areas where this would be true, so a bulk of the rocket will be steel.
When Canondale hit the big time, they had one model year where they made the dropouts out of solid aluminum and in the next model year the derailleur hanger was bolted on. It's the easiest part to bend and there's no repairing it. Bad enough for road bikes, spectacularly dumb for mountain bikes.
Nope, it's just steel. Outside shell is the tank.
I think the military was looking at a similar material to replace depleted uranium with something non-radioactive (depleted uranium still experiences alpha particle decay, which is fine if you don't aspirate or ingest it, but a shell can pulverize on impact with a target. Also it's still a heavy metal even if you don't take rads from it).
I thought the point of depleted uranium projectiles was simply the density of uranium, giving them large impact energy for a given volume. If that's the case, titanium (4.5 g/cm^3) will not even be as good as steel (8 g/cm^3), let alone uranium (19 g/cm^3).
Or the F-86 Sabre: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/F86F_Sab...
The most beautiful thing in the world is success.
Both characteristics combine to give a lighter rocket than one built out of Al / carbon fiber.
The price is just the cherry on top.
The number of rings is roughly 35 for Starship, with about ten vertical seams each.
For easier thinking, line the vertical seams up and you see that this gives 50m length per vertical seam from bottom to top of Starship. So there are a total of 500m for that.
35 rings with ~28m circumference add up to about 1km of seams between them.
Now if they can use rolls twice as wide and only a single vertical weld each, then that's 500m between the rings and 50m for a single vertical seam. 550m of welds there instead of 1.5m before. This should speed things up quite a lot and reduce the cost of labour.
Raptor production is the real bottleneck, though.
They are shooting for one per day, no? Based on the differences identified in the three hanging under the Boca Chica vehicle now, it’s still in development.
No, they'll do a helical weld, exactly like large pipes (like this: http://www.xysteelpipe.com/upload/201512118145340710.jpg)
You basically need to do that as the steel rolls off the press, though, which is why they didn't do that for Mk I. They'll need to cold roll the steel onsite.
Composite tanks on few rockets being flown with them are made in one of a kind, purpose built autoclaves