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Comment by boznz | Hacker News Reader

maybe they should build moon landers this shape :-)

That is indeed the example they mention in the paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19244.

They could do that, but a regular gomboc would be totally fine. There are no rules for spaceships that their corners cannot be rounded.

Maybe exoskeletons for turtles could be more useful. Turtles with their short legs, require the bottom of their shell to be totally flat, and a gomboc has no flat surface. Vehicles that drive on slopes could benefit from that as well.

Note that a turtle's shell already approximate a Gömböc shape (the curved self-righting shape discovered by the same mathematician in the linked article)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6mb%C3%B6c#Relation_to_a...

But yeah a specially designed exoskeleton could perform better, kinda like the prosthetics of Oscar Pistorious

Gábor Domokos (mentioned in the article) talked about this on one QI episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggUHo1BgTak

> There are no rules for spaceships that their corners cannot be rounded

If the inside is pressurized, its even beneficial for it to be a rounded shape, since the sharp corners are more likely to fail

>There are no rules for spaceships that their corners cannot be rounded.

Someone should write to UNOOSA and get this fixed up.

Per the article that's what they're working on, but it probably won't be based on tetrahedrons considering the density distribution. Might have curved surfaces.

Just need to apply this to a drone, and we would be one step closer to skynet. The props could retract into the body when it detects a collision or a fall.

They will only need to ensure that the pointy end does not penetrate the soft surface too much on decent, becoming an eternal pole.

Or aeroplanes. Not sure where you put the wings.

Why restrict yourself to the Moon?

Recent moonlanders have been having trouble landing on the moon. Some are just crashing, but tipping over after landing is a real problem too. Hence the joke above :)

Mars landers have also had a chequered history. I remember one NASA jobbie that had a US to metric units conversion issue and poor old Beagle 2 that got there, landed safely and then failed to deploy properly.

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