Sometimes you watching SpaceX catching f$king rockets and you consider the costs of planes having to stow their own landing gear. They have to fly wheels around. A plane. Of what % of their constituency only matters when they are not a plane.
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I think the opposite point is being made. Assuming they fix the whole "it keeps exploding" bug, most of the time, a Starship launch will go fine, and an external catcher will be more efficient.
Same way as you land. The cart gets you up to speed. However, putting them on track and launching them like the military does with the example below would be more fun. Every takeoff is a rollercoaster.
Birds can't grow as big as pteranodons could because birds take off by jumping so they have to carry mostly-useless leg muscles. This is also I think why there are so many flightless or poor-flying birds: birds are quite good on the ground and it significantly compromises their flight.
There’s a “Ground Call” horn in the nose gear well, for the purpose of getting the ground crew to get on headset and make interphone contact with the crew. It’s a good idea in principle, but very seldom actually used.
Jericho trumpets on Stuka fighters were to frighten and demoralize the enemy (on the ground).
Modern-day civilian jet airliners have an electric horn that's basically an extra-loud phone ringer, used to signal ground crew they have an incoming call from the cockpit, while the plane is still parked.
Most aircraft spend their time on the ground. Daniel Raymer's aircraft design guide starts with the landing gear because, trivially, the landed plane is the static solution to the design problem
Fun fact: the U-2 has extra wheels on its wingtips that fall off as it takes off, for landing they just try and keep it as flat as possible and have some skid plates on the wingtips.
The Space Shuttle had a really good example of this. Two huge, heavy wings and a tail, which were liabilities until its last half hour or so of flight. The orbiter took that form to keep the USAF interested, with a mission profile that was never ultimately flown. Tons of unneeded mass up and down.
The shuttle was designed for a flight profile where it would launch south from a military base in California (they completed a pad and never used it) deploy a spy satellite in orbit and return to land in California before completing a full orbit. It never did this.
There were orbiters with vastly smaller wings on the drawing board, but they didn't have the lift to allow for the USAF's notional mission of a single-orbit flight, taking off from Vandenberg, deploying (or stealing) a satellite, and landing back at Vandenberg one orbit later.
Because the earth rotates quite a lot in the ~90 minutes it takes for a single orbit, Vandenberg would be quite a bit East of where the orbiter re-entered after a single polar orbit. The huge wings gave it the "cross range" to glide that far off its orbital path during re-entry.
The USAF interest (and $) got the Space Shuttle as we knew it through to completion. Vandenberg was almost ready to fly its first mission when Challenger was lost in '86. The re-alignment of US space launch in the wake saw the USAF abandon its plans for flights from Vandenberg.
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But then one time in 30,000...
Modern-day civilian jet airliners have an electric horn that's basically an extra-loud phone ringer, used to signal ground crew they have an incoming call from the cockpit, while the plane is still parked.
Kinda blows my mind that there's just footage of it on YouTube but I'm glad its there, its pretty rad
https://youtu.be/vuX3LkOTQiQ?t=245 The Elevator Cars!