phil1008

I think these comments reveal that the reasoning that Starship is applying when he casts delete votes. He says "[the] question still fails to answer the question, even if it gets closer" and then later states that in his opinion the answer does not even attempt to answer the question. I wanted to bring this thread in particular to your attention - in case you're not following along.

I was hoping to bring your attention to a comment thread starting with: space.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3140/…

Hi Rory,

The high-level point is good. I feel like the question breaks on the last assumption, "Since what matters is overall production cost, why not just look at that instead...?". What matters is "the mission's value proposition to its stakeholders". So, for a science mission, the stakeholders might be the taxpayers, but for a commercial enterprise it could be about how well a decision supports the overall business model. Does this really boil down to "production cost"? I think it's defined by a far more complex set of trades. So, could production cost just be a lesser oversimplification?

@RoryAlsop Do you feel that my post now answers the question after the edits that I made?

@XanderHenderson Thanks for taking the time to review and weigh in. I think it's extremely helpful to have an uninvested third party chime in with their perspective.

...and I perceive the statement "he had various warnings and suspensions for failing to follow site guidelines" to be an attack on my character. Do you think it's appropriate for a mod to try to win an argument by publicly discrediting the person who made the counter argument with data that's only available to mods?

... ref, ref). There are couple of others where I was able to get the deletion reversed - but it took a while.

@XanderHenderson RoryAlsop has done this to me several times. Trust me when I when I say that my post is "being threatened" or at least harassed. (ref, ...

@galerita is it true that you wrote rude or aggressive comments that had to be deleted?

So, I see @RoryAlsop is claiming that @galerita wrote rude or aggressive comments that had to be deleted. And now @RoryAlsop appears to be attacking my character and threatening one of my new posts. I'm inferring that the reason for this is that I chose to support @galerita's position and held @erinanne to a higher standard as a trusted user?

I also don't understand why you insinuated that @Galerita was rude or aggressive. Unless he (or a mod) deleted such comments, I haven't not seen evidence of this. Is that what happened here?

As a new user on the path to learning what it takes to make a post that complies with the sites rules, I've had all discussion terminated by "trusted users" or mods who summarily deleted the post ending discussion. I've been on the site a while now and I truly believe that this is an area where we should strive for major reform.

@RoryAlsop The comment that started this, "I cannot think of a more textbook 'likely to be answered by opinions rather than facts' question", comes off sounding more gleeful about having found a violation of the sites rules than being constructive. In the past I've seen more constructive comments written to support new users.

Yes, I agree with you on this point. I also have observed apparently schadenfreude motivated use of the vote to close/delete privilege on occasion - not good. I think we just have to all pitch in to defend or support imperfect posts and hope that in average the community is welcoming.

@Galerita Some people just enjoy enforcing rules. Without the "opinions" rule, people would probably post more low quality, poorly researched, answers. To make your question generate better answers, try asking, "Are the milestones that China came up with to go to the moon comparable to those created by the Russians and US space programs during the moon race 50+ years ago? If they are similar, is China reaching their milestones and a similar rate or are they progressing faster or more slowly?"

Well, Rory just half-retracted his statement designed to discredit me. I guess I was never suspended after all.

BTW, just in case you were thinking of doing some serial upvoting or downvoting, that will get detected and reversed by a bot if you're not careful.

Or maybe they were downvoted because the author didn't get to the point quickly enough. That's why I called the script "TL;DR".

I care about posts that were decent and yet for some reason received downvotes. Sometimes I feel that this happens because the post challenges some kind of conventional wisdom. When a post speaks the truth and downvotes are cast because people didn't like what it had to say, that bothers me.

There is a different set of rules for closing questions. Did you read this article? I liked what it had to say.

I created this script. It helps you find long answers that were downvoted so that you can review them.

Of course, I can't be sure that it's Erin who's always casting vote-to-delete, I just suspect.

What bothers me the most is that Erin isn't following this rule: "When should I vote to delete an answer? You may vote to delete answers in the following cases: The answer is extremely low quality: There is little to no scope for improvement The answer doesn't attempt to answer the question; it may be a comment or a separate question altogether."

Part of the challenge is that moderators who stick around are valuable and new users are a dime a dozen. Plus there are lots of terrible posts that probably bore mods to tears. So, we kind of have to work with the moderators we have, even if they aren't perfect.

Anyone who is curious I think. Plus anyone can search all conversations for key words.

(Although who am I to judge what's fair :)

Well, one long-time user helped me out a whole lot when I first became active on this site. I really appreciated that.

Yeah, I'm working on trying to figure out how to see my own "list of warnings and suspensions". I've learned that mods can see such a list. I think I may have been unfairly "sent to the penalty box" one time.

I think it would be better if you stuck around to support other new users who are also not receiving the best treatment. And you're right that people sometimes can't see their own flaws - at least it takes a long time for them to figure out how to change.

Well, I've learned not to spend too much effort on trying to guess what people's motives are. I think that sometimes is just that something written in a post triggers an emotional reaction of some kind.

It is possible to create a new conversation by clicking on someone's user name, but I don't think that the conversation will be private. But I did want to say that if you were rude, then you should probably apologize. If you were just "aggressive" I think it would be ok to share with me here what you said. If your comment was deleted and was neither rude nor aggressive then I think we ought to be asking why it was deleted.

I've cited several reputable sources of information. Do you have a source to back up your $100 per-kg for Falcon 9 number? Allow me to help: esquire.com/news-politics/a5077/elon-musk-1008

There's a preponderance of hard evidence that supports the cost of ISS resupply, both crewed and uncrewed. See space.stackexchange.com/questions/10350/…. There is a lot of hype about SpaceX lowering launch costs, and lots of circular reporting, but I have yet to see any hard data that supports that assertion. Just do some quality research on that.

So are you saying Starship will be cheaper because it will never be tasked to do a mission that resembles delivering crew and cargo to the ISS?

The statement "Even if Starship just matches the operating cost per launch of Falcon 9 (despite not expending any hardware and having much simpler recovery logistics), that still works out to launch costs of \$100/kg." is inaccurate. Falcon 9 plus Crew Dragon is the configuration that is most similar to Starship because a major cargo-carrying component (Crew Dragon) deorbits and is recovered. Cost-per-kg of Falcon 9 plus Crew Dragon is ~\$80,000 per kg. See nasa.gov/humans-in-space/… and 3,307 kg payload on Crew Dragon 2 wiki

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

@sphennings Did another pass. Which paragraphs (1-7) do you feel are extraneous and not really helping the question?

@sphennings I reviewed the rules here: worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask and edited the question. Could you reread the question now and let me know if it now meets the site's criteria?

@sphennings So can you help me out a bit with the nuances on "Questions with many valid answers aren't permitted on this site."? Other questions seem to have many valid answers such as: worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12348/… and worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/253369/…

Ok, I think the AI threat is more relevant, I'll go with that.

@PearsonArtPhoto So I went to delete my post (space.stackexchange.com/questions/52310/…) and discovered that you beat me to it. I was just curious as to what your reasons were.

The $37B footbridge point was interesting. But high-speed double track on new stone rail road stone bed ($1,650,000/km, compassinternational.net/…) would be $6.2 billion for 3750 km. So, my napkin-math estimate of 15 billion for the launcher in the paper estimated that it would cost as much per km as about 5 tracks of high-speed rail.

@erinanne I also don't want to get into an internet fight. In fact, you are actually the kind of person (having good critical thinking skills) that I'd like to get to know better.

Sigh, I just spent the evening writing up a long new answer and when I hit submit the site said "Sorry, we are no longer accepting answers from your account because most of your answers need improvement or do not sufficiently answer the question. See the Help Center to learn more."

These are good points. I will comply.

(BTW, I already removed the link for one of them before it was deleted.)

But you make a good point about the YouTube video potentially going away. I'll happily delete the video links and replace them with images if my answers are ever undeleted. Maybe I'll try your suggestions and see if my answer fairs better.

So I shared info about the new twin-screw technology that I recently presented at Ascend. Is talking about subjects that you're knowledgeable on "spamming".

@erinanne I'm just answering questions about what I know. One question was about whether you could launch from Olypmus Mons. I've studied launching from mountaintops on Earth, so I used that knowledge to explain that it should be possible. Another was on challenges for high-altitude rail guns. I have developed a parametric model of exactly this and recently published and presented work on this. The last was on alternatives to rail guns for the moon.