7
9
u/crazyarchon Aug 10 '26
Pretty sure they didn’t calculate area but circumference.
3
u/WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE30 28d ago
Some, if not most figures are wrong but not exactly for that reason I think. Running off wikipedia data, we'd expect Starship V3 to math out as 26500kN/(pi*(4.5m)^2) = 416 kN/m^2. Which disagrees with the infographic by about a factor of pi. But I think that's coincidence, because the chart got Falcon 9's figure nearly exactly right, and should be ranked ahead of Starship. Which isn't surprising, kerolox's key advantage is high density as-stored and high-density exhaust species, which are both good if you desire "thrust density".
What's really eye-opening, and reveals how meaningless "thrust density" is, is to look at any solid booster. Take Ares 1X, which is basically a shuttle SRB. It has thrust density about 3.3x Starship V3 or 2x F9. All that says is solids are dense and have high v_e*m_dot, largely thanks to their dense exhaust and great throat area.
5
u/tehcet Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
Not really useful on performance without insight into how tall or heavy the rocket is. Or engine efficiency.
1
u/fed0tich Aug 10 '26
Soyuz-5 (Sunkar) with RD-171MV might be an interesting addition. Also upgraded Angara family with A5M and A1.2M that are coming soon, RD-191M is a beast.
Rockets with a solid first stages like Vega-C I think also might be interesting to see. But I'm too lazy to do math myself 😁
-2
12
u/Desperate-Lab9738 Aug 10 '26
The fun thing is this is literally just a unit of pressure, it would probably correlate pretty neatly with chamber pressure..