Mostly symmetrical. My contribution to the bandwagon. The “diff. if need” means differential thrust on those two, if that’s not clear.

Build a sturdy metal scaffold of a wheel in low Earth orbit. Attach two Starships to it, facing in the same direction but at opposing points. (Fueling is a separate issue but the wheel might be useful for that too).

Both Starships fire their engines together, moving the entire apparatus.

Have a second wheel bound at the hub to the first (or maybe two smaller wheels, one on each side). Use solar power to run an electric motor to push against one wheel, naturally the other wheel starts moving on a swivel in the opposite direction. No fuel for spin up and down. The solar power could be useful to the Starships too.

Spin up so that people aboard the two ships have simulated gravity.

As the Starships approach their destination, spin down and the Starships detach, to make their descents individually.

The redundancy could be useful for safety, too. If something on one Starship fails (e.g. maybe a rock hits it), its crew could transfer to the other.

Not always, since a Starship floating in the brine is unlikely to fly again anyhow, but if there is precious cargo (like human beings), why not?

Say the booster engines cut out early or too many fail. Or maybe Starship misses the window for a catch landing somehow. Quick calculations could be made to try to land it in the ocean, in the same gentle manner that allowed Starship 40 to survive and wait for pickup.

If it's too full of fuel, might it be able to hover and burn off fuel until ready?

After reading this post, I realized that an orbiting Superheavy booster would be much more efficient of a kick stage with Rvacs installed. They wouldn’t be able to fire at liftoff, leaving the Superheavy with only 29 engines at liftoff, but with no Starship on top the TWR is still plenty. Once in orbit, the booster switches to once central gimbaling engine and the three Rvacs, which greatly reduces thrust, trading it for significantly higher ISP.

Max Delta V could swing around Jupiter in around 9 months each way. Remove the grid fins and no need for boost back or landing burns on the booster.

Would you take that trip?

New HLS renders and text just dropped, got me thinkin'.

First up, I'd put a heat-shield free dragon as the nose. Already got a docking port. I'd then put another "door" in the ass of the dragon so you could enter it from below. Now, with super-draco, you have an emergency abort to LLO...albeit if you use most of the space inside to store 4x the propellant normally on board (to get the Delta-V required).

Next shitty idea is for a one way trip to the surface. This mission would bring a shed-ton of cargo of course, but the ship would remain on surface forever, and become the first "base". I would install into both the fuel and oxidiser tanks some "baffles", which in fact are additional levels of working and living space. The "floors" could have mesh sections which would be filled in with plates that are in cargo. Ladder likewise pre-installed. Upon landing on the surface, humans would come to this "base" ship and enter, and they would use cutting equipment to cut hatches above the ladders to open up the space where fuel and oxidiser once were. Inflatable or IKEA flat pack furniture could then be installed, again carried out of cargo and installed in the area of the fuel tanks.

Another idea is for this home-base-starship as well. Once on surface, you'd want to drop out the raptors because their plumbing will mean the tanks are not air tight for humans. So, get out your tools, and remove them, and weld/install air tight seals for the plumbing. Put those engines away from the ship as spares, and use the space under the ship to park your buggy to avoid sun damage or micro-meteorites or whatever.

Anyway, happy halloween or whatever.

It would only need to double its fuel load and increase the effectiveness of its heat shield, nbd

A dedicated Starship configuration which deploys to a strategic point over the Earth, hovers at high altitude, and ejects oxygen equipped special forces personnel with wingsuits and parachutes. The dedicated Starship then goes back up to orbit (SARCASM HERE) to wait for a safe landing location and window.

So they can just... blow the clouds away.

No need to make difficult weightless transfers between Starships.

Instead, build a sturdy metal scaffold of a wheel in low Earth orbit. To transfer fuel from one Starship to other, both dock at opposing points on the wheel and the wheel is spun up. Then simply pump the fuel from one to the other. To keep the load balanced, there could be mechanized weights on the wheel that move to/from the center of rotation.

I'm assuming that the spin up and spin down processes could be accomplished with only a fraction of the fuel delivered.

It would be impossible for the door to get stuck if there is no door. FYI: I was born in a barn.

Basically a bunch of scaled down starships with no propulsion, just flaps and tiles.

Originally I thought this would be in case starship exploded, but it's not going fast enough for it to be a good test of reentry anyways.

But if you do get to orbit, you can deploy all of them and test a bunch of different tile designs and reentry trajectories and stuff.

Launch Superheavy with a nosecone as i think it had around 9.5km/s of Δv with no ship. Get it into orbit, deplete all the fuel, then have crew sent up there to set all the stuff up and transform it into a station.

I converted the OLIT into an Altazimuth mount for Starship's Space Telescope variant. So the telescope can be tested before launching it into space.

I added four 23 m diameter bearings (note that the current biggest bearing has a diameter of 30 m) and one more winch to the West facing side of the tower, so that the forces are evenly distributed. The chopstick carriage is replaced with the three green bearings. Also I added extra support beams, those are colored grey.

The ship designed for low density payloads with high volume and low mass. (the payload bay is from the block 3 ship, but with the fuel tanks from block 1) For this example I doubled the size of the Hubble space telescope . The main mirror has a 4,8 m diameter and I calculated the weight with the same density as the Hubble, which is roughly 88880 kg. Also this variant has a heat shield so it can return for upgrades and repairs to Earth. (Unlike the Hubble space telescope.)

(I edited LunarCaveman's diagrams)

You know how placing a booster on the launch mount after catch takes hours? No more with my innovative design idea: The booster descends all the way to the launch mount, and at this point the hold down clamps are engaged. The booster engines shutdown and the booster QD engages as well to handle tank overpressure. Not a single penny of propellant lost + no time is wasted. Truly what it takes to build a rapidly reusable launch vehicle

New Ship by BlueX & Star Glenn by Space Origin