Yea I started watching the MKBHD video on it and turned it off at the part where he was kinda justifying how sophisticated the metal pressing process had to be because it has some elasticity or something and was hard to get consistent … the upshot of which was, as MKBHD admitted, that the panels were inconsistent and you were going to get random gaps in the plating. He kinda showed some examples, and to me, even over YouTube, it just felt cheap and I no longer understood how someone could feel ok spending the money.
Because Elon is a god king genius emerald boy who can do no wrong and you’d be a fool to ever doubt his perfection. It would be an honor to go into crippling debt to support him.
The original idea, as I understand it, was that it would be made of the same stainless alloy that SpaceX was developing for Starship. This steel was too hard to form using stamping, as the tools used would wear down much faster. So, they had to limit themselves to bending the sheet metal with a press brake, which really can’t do compound curves, hence the need for straight lines. Whether any of this was ever the real reason I have no idea, but one tidbit is that for Starship, they were using 304L (same mixture as some of my pans) and may never have switched to their own alloy. So, the design may at one point have been necessary for practical considerations, but that may have been mooted without bothering to change the design.
It’s a special alloy and it turns out it doesn’t like to make big flat parts, or something like that.
Yea I started watching the MKBHD video on it and turned it off at the part where he was kinda justifying how sophisticated the metal pressing process had to be because it has some elasticity or something and was hard to get consistent … the upshot of which was, as MKBHD admitted, that the panels were inconsistent and you were going to get random gaps in the plating. He kinda showed some examples, and to me, even over YouTube, it just felt cheap and I no longer understood how someone could feel ok spending the money.
Because Elon is a god king genius emerald boy who can do no wrong and you’d be a fool to ever doubt his perfection. It would be an honor to go into crippling debt to support him.
The original idea, as I understand it, was that it would be made of the same stainless alloy that SpaceX was developing for Starship. This steel was too hard to form using stamping, as the tools used would wear down much faster. So, they had to limit themselves to bending the sheet metal with a press brake, which really can’t do compound curves, hence the need for straight lines. Whether any of this was ever the real reason I have no idea, but one tidbit is that for Starship, they were using 304L (same mixture as some of my pans) and may never have switched to their own alloy. So, the design may at one point have been necessary for practical considerations, but that may have been mooted without bothering to change the design.