Pre-Release | Of Course I Still Love You

The Space X drone ships are named after spacecraft from the Culture series of books. If you make any more coasters and want some more ship names for them, Wikipedia (of course) has a list of them all.

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So you’ve finally caught up with the rest of us here in offtopica? :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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I’ve always thought they should build a droneship big enough to land all three Falcon Heavy boosters at once, and name it So Much For Subtlety.

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So Much For Subtlely and Size Isn’t Everything are two that I’m hoping they use. There are so many good ship names in the Culture.

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Not my first visit there… :slight_smile:

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Elon is a fascinating guy.
He just offered the Australian Government the chance to have a 300MW battery system installed to help deal with power outages. If it is not built and successful in 100 days then it is free!

Fix Power Outages in 100 days

This is a real political hand-grenade for the ruling Liberal-National Party as they are trying to slow Renewable Energy as much as possible in favor of propping up the Coal Industry.
[BTW: In Australian Politics the Liberal Party are ‘economic Liberals’ but Social Conservatives]

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Nicely done!

I’m fascinated to see how they handle the offer… apparently a limited time to take it up!

Wow. That’s amazing.
The project itself is super cool, but your recovery was very well done. Thanks for sharing the insight! :smile:

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I’m waiting to see how this plays out too. I don’t have any more faith in your Politicians than I have in ours, which is to say none at all right now.

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If anybody is interested in the static fire test from the other night. The video isn’t great but you’ll get the idea.

F9 - EchoStar23 Static Fire Test

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I’m interested! Thanks for that.
So the static burn duration is like 5 seconds?

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It’s not even technically that long. They don’t want to over stress the engines, just prove they are working.

You’ll notice they learned their lesson about static fire with payload already integrated as they’d been doing to save 3-5 days of flow time. This is what changed their mind:

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Live and learn. In retrospect, 5 days is a smaller price than the satellite, the vehicle, the damage to the pad not to mention the reputation.

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Hello @karaelena - first off, amazing job!

I’m just curious on the use of magnets in the machine… I feel that somewhere in the manual it mentioned not to have magnets as it could mess up alignment (or something like that). Do you know if the ones you used are just low enough strength, or if the magnet problem is only if they are somewhere else?

It is such a great solution for holding things down!

Alex

Hello. The issue with magnets is that they can interfere with the air assist in the printing head which can trigger an error that aborts printing.

When this was posted, the software did not detect that or throw the error. That was added later.

Some of us do still use magnets for some hold-down. It’s best to keep them away from the area where you are cutting/scoring/engraving and/or use shielded magnets (like those from old computer hard drives). I personally haven’t had any trouble.

There have been several discussions about this here. You can likely find more detail by searching.

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Thanks for your quick and thorough response @evermorian! That is helpful.

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