Comment by King-Aaron
2 days ago
I've seen a clip that shows under the skin.
It's compressed air RCS. The compressor, regulators and a ton of hardware take up the entire space from the seats back to literally the very last inch of the car. Hard pipes run along the door frame for the forward RCS, meaning only one person (driver) can sit in it and enter from the drivers side. Huge carbon RCS tanks fill every other space.
No idea how long it would take to recharge the tanks after venting them.
There's no room for 'car' stuff in it.
Interestingly there is a big... sleeve of wizard... that extends down under the car to assist the ground effect fan. Packaging that and the RCS stuff into it is a real engineering feat.
But it didn't look to have crash structures, or any other production ready hardware.
Link? Sounds interesting.
Found a link, I saw it on instagram initially but here's a screen recording on reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/s/efxEqCJxQR
SpaceX lost a Falcon 9 to one of these things rupturing. A car accident with these onboard sounds… unfun.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/03/13/nasa-releases-summary-...
So the GP describes compressed air, while Falcon 9 rockets use cryogenic helium, oxygen, and RP1 kerosene.
So I got no idea how you can even compare these two completely different systems and go from a launch failure to an explosive car accident?
They've had several COPV failures.
Including boring old nitrogen blowing up a Starship: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
> "Initial analysis indicates the potential failure of a pressurized tank known as a COPV, or composite overwrapped pressure vessel, containing gaseous nitrogen in Starship's nosecone area, but the full data review is ongoing," the company wrote in an update on Thursday (June 19).
If you SCUBA, your tanks need regular checks (https://dan.org/alert-diver/article/inspecting-and-testing-s...), because pressurized air can indeed kill (https://divemagazine.com/scuba-diving-news/diver-killed-in-s...) if the tank fails. The gas for these thrusters will happily accelerate you with the same force they're using to make a car fly given the chance.
At these pressures, it doesn't matter to the human body what is in the tank if it is at all compressible. If the tank fails, its gonna go badly.
Just for reference this is 50% more pressure than the pressure that crushed that submarine at the titanic.
If a tank of 10k PSI compressed air ruptures, you're going to know it.
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That tank is pressurized to over 700 bar, if a pressure vessel ruptures under that amount of pressure, it doesn’t matter what gas is inside of it, it’s not going to be pretty.