Garo5

Garo5 t1_iy4ydz4 wrote

Can you explain what makes the problem chaotic in nature? I'm a software developer and I understand that a physics simulation might not be deterministic due to floating point math etc, but I also know that if I take a bit of special care I can program fully deterministic physics simulation in a sense that it will repeatedly give me same results.

So I can't wrap my head around why a 2-body problem is not chaotic and will always run the same thing at, but 3-body is not? What am I missing?

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Garo5 t1_it8ltbd wrote

In space the theoretic best performance would with a nozzle of an infinite size/length, so the real size comes from a tradeoff between performance and mass.

In atmosphere the size is heavily limited by the atmosphere itself as pressure differences between inside and outside of the nozzle would destroy the nozzle structure.

For example the planned Starship upper stage by SpaceX will have two kinds of engines and nozzles.

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