u/TheDentateGyrus

What are your goals with the change? I know you said weekend car, but what are you looking for in the change? How do you want the driving dynamics and experience to change versus the 718? Just curious because you said you aren't concerned about practicality but you're switching from a 718 to 911.

Appreciate your respectful response. I think you misunderstood part of my comment above. I never said anything about cutting safety margins, redundancy, etc.

If the goal is to return to the moon, there's no reason to make it a 4 person 42 day mission. That does not get you to the moon "more" than the Apollo architecture. If anything, it dramatically increases risk. You don't need as much radiation shielding if you don't spend that long there (unnecessarily).

If you're worried about safety margin, please explain how NRHO is safer than LLO. It's dramatically riskier. Have a problem on the surface? Okay hold your breath for 6 more days when we have a chance for rendezvous. Fuel cells go offline? Hope you can fix them or you're freezing for the next few days.

Making Orion isn't impossible and it would make the architecture better (and safer). It's not necessary at this point because we already have this insane architecture, so it's all academic. But spending $26 billion on a capsule for a moon mission that can't get into LLO is objectively stupid.

For starters, we already won the race. I don't get the idea that it's a race again. It'd be like someone declaring that next year they're going to race to be the first person to summit Everest.

Second, sorry but the Chinese actually have a lander, we don't. If they don't scrap SLS, we'll still probably lose. When BO's pad blew up, that was sadly when they really got a leg up.

Agreed that the ESM is part of the problem. But Orion is obscenely heavy for what it needs to do. The apollo CM was ~5 tons and Orion is 6.5 tons despite Apollo using 1950s technology. Apollo had almost 800kg of fuel cells, Orion's solar arrays weigh 1/3 of that. The weight savings from composites and electronics is astonishing . . . yet Orion is still heavier.

There's no reason to take a toilet to the moon, let alone 4 people to poop in said toilet near the moon. There was no reason to spend countless hours engineering a 3d printed titanium toilet to haul an extra 45kg to the moon. Or make a capsule with 5 square feet of room just for the toilet. Yes, I'm sure it's more comfortable to have a giant capsule, but that mass isn't worth ruining the rest of the architecture.

ESM can't be big enough to provide Apollo-level delta V because of SLS payload to TLI. The easy solution to that is to make Orion lighter. If you have funding for a crummy upper stage and a capsule, you have two choices. One, you can make the capsule you want but it won't be able to get to LLO and back. Two, you can make a capsule that can accomplish the mission with a smaller crew, more cramped, and less comfortable, but in a reasonable architecture without the absurdity of HLS.

Just to be clear, falcon heavy could theoretically launch an Apollo LEM to TLI from a mass perspective - it could certainly do a modern lander. Chop Orion in half, double your delta V with the same ESM, you're under payload max of SLS, you have a lander and capsule meeting up in LLO. No 15+ launches of heavy lift rockets with refueling and the associated development complexity, no docking with massive HLS in a NRHO, none of that. To my eye, that paints Orion as the problem. If it was anywhere near the weight it should be, the architecture works.

Orion is the problem, it can't even get into and back out of LLO. To make a very long story short, Congress made these decisions for NASA with expected results. The entire architecture is silly because of Orion - NRHO has a 7 day period and if anything happens, Orion doesn't have a ton of delta V to maneuver for a rescue.

Can't use just Starship / falcon heavy / etc because then we'd have no use for the insanely expensive SLS we developed without a mission in mind.

Yeah not for RCS (seems wasteful to use He for that) but to pressurize the fuel/oxidizer tanks as they empty, pretty sure you can't use autogenous pressurization with RP1.

This is the best answer if you really want to heel-toe in your 992.

This - take the panel off, find what’s rattling and pad it. I’ve heard countless stories of dealers not really wanting to deal with this and it’s really easy to fix yourself.

I fixed a squeak in the door card like this poster. You can also get a sound file to play online that will skip frequency to frequency so you can isolate the frequency of the rattle and recreate it - makes it easier to find.

Thanks for the response. Out of curiosity, do you know how they do this for OCPVs during re-use. I know Falcon 9 uses them for the helium tanks. It’s seems like flight has a lot of potential for damage.

F1 had an era with skirts for seal the floor. Short-term, if you hit a bump and the skirt loses seal, you lose all your amazing downforce which is why they were outlawed. From an endurance perspective, they had much bigger issues with things getting stuck in the skirts and making them unable to move freely as the ride height changed. They eventually covered the bottom of the skirts with ceramic tips to avoid excessive wear which would at least last a race distance, but I'm not sure how often they were changed between races.

There are so many issues with using this on track compared to just making a car drive upside down. For starters, they have to be extremely stiff or the skirts constantly bottom out, which makes them awful to drive on the street.

They take hours to fill and, as you said, such a high power requirement that it would have to be during charging to make any sense. But everything the engineers have said (not Elon) is that it’s refilled externally as of now.

IMO this is all academic as it’s 10kg of TNT which no one wants sit on. And to overcome onboard refueling would be more weight, compressor, cooling loops, fans, etc which would compromise performance. A fan system is plenty to achieve amazing downforce.

The current CEO spent 5 years working on the Cayenne. You need to do more reading and less assuming.

Yeah that’s a reasonable point to make. But it goes against much of the history of aerospace engineering. I think it would be more reasonable if Starship testing had gone perfectly and adding in life support structures would be the only change for that flight.

Starship HLS hasn’t completed critical design review with NASA yet. So it’s not even a final design yet, let alone in production, let alone started testing what would be multiple new systems. So saying they will do all that by 2026 is just not going to happen.

I don’t like that and I understand people don’t like hearing that but it’s just a fact. I wish we had two landers being tested in LEO this year, but that’s not physically possible.

It doesn’t have to be but what’s the point? It’s supposed to be like Apollo 9, no? You can fly the lander unmanned without a crew nearby, so why put humans nearby at all and waste SLS / ICPS / Orion?

I do appreciate his dedication. In that new documentary he said something like, "If building $hitty rockets means you win, then we will lose because I won't do that."

"How bad is it to pay $72,000 to drive a car for 2 years that has been appreciating for the past few years?"

Also, 63k miles on a turbo S is pretty uncommon. On Porsche's website there are 110 992.1 TTS for sale and the highest mileage one is 58k miles.

Who knows given how they're lying about the system filling itself and not. But I would imagine there are issues with water content in atmospheric air and rust in the valves / etc - especially in a car where you never use the tanks. Also an issue when you are repeatedly firing thrusters where they can foul with the ice compared to just a single actuation.

Interested to see if any engineers can chime in about chronically filling COPVs long-term. Given they're mostly composites I assume this isn't as much of an issue.

Zero.

There's not much point in spending an SLS and capsule to dock with a lander unless you transfer humans into it and fly it.

Starship is nowhere near ready for human flight - ignoring blowing up / etc, it doesn't have a pressurized crew cabin, docking port, the list is endless. HLS isn't really critical for Starship, deploying V3 Starlinks is a critical need - hence why it has deployed Starlinks but hasn't flown a pressurized compartment.

BO at least has plans for and has built an actual lander in some form. But the pad being destroyed is a huge delay. Who knows if they can rebuild and fly in time for next year, but that ignores that they have to deal with what caused the explosion, fly at least once before you dock a new craft with Orion (with humans on it), etc.

"I'm hearing" - just read the press release instead of listening to interpretations of it from 3rd parties.

No one said anything about the Ferrari model. They're going to work less on Macan volume and more on 911 profit. The real question is what the market will bear for something like the base 911. I think they've already maximized the price people will pay for a base 911 and I think they know that as well. Hence the notes that they're going to work on more special models, which people will pay a lot more for.

Especially one that Tesla themselves wouldn't put a driver in for the demo while saying "it's not optimized for safety". Willing to bet that ownership includes a waiver for basically any liability from having a bomb in the car.

Any time someone says "we're REALLY going to make it this time" should raise huge red flags.

That already exists in the GT3. If they made a halo car without a turbocharger, it would never have enough power to compete with other supercars / whatever you want to call them.

They were probably confused because Musk said that word for word during the presentation. Along with their casual timeline, having to say we’re “actually” going to manufacturer it last time, lack of price, lack of any precise data on range, I’m starting to think Musk might not be telling the truth.

Stupid question. Why is everyone talking about the thrusters? Everyone agrees they won’t be on street cars. Yes they’re cool but did we learn anything about the actual road-going car?

Seems to me it was all a flashy show about what a car like this could do without actually discussing anything concrete about the real car. If they’re serious about production, surely the design must be mature enough to give some details.

FWIW, one thing I haven’t seen mentioned yet is that this is never coming back. With hybrid PUs, to my knowledge, Porsche has consistently said you can’t run a manual transmission. I’m not saying the price is justified, but part of the calculus here is likely that a manual 911 turbo isn’t happening again - even as a limited run.

Personally? I have a turbo and would love a manual. But for this kind of money, I’d be going S/T.