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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

You can get a 500 mile range by towing a second, fully charged Cybertruck and switching them at mile 250.

Wouldn't the first truck's range be significantly reduced by the additional weight? The second truck will have to tow a third fully charged truck to get us to 500 miles.

Right, but remember you can also subtract the combined length of all these cybertrucks from the 500 mile target. So there's a sweet spot in there somewhere around the 400 car mark.

also, if you make the tires out of Menger Sponge, then range is infinite.

That's the kind of math you use Tsiolkovsky rocket equation for.

Best would be to do the EV equivalent of asparagus staging - you have all trucks providing acceleration, but trucks 1 and 2 are also being recharged by truck 3. You then jettison it once its battery runs dry, leaving you with trucks 1 and 2, the latter also charging the former. Again, drop truck 2 as it runs out of juice. This lets you get rid of excess mass as early as possible, maximizing the benefit of extra batteries and thrust.

Serious question: do any rocket launch schemes actually use asparagus staging?

I vaguely remember hearing it adds too much complexity for a real world launch. Great in KSP though.

Technically the Space Shuttle, if you really stretch the definition.

I'm not aware of any others. The crossfeed is just too much of a failure risk.

Falcon Heavy was supposed to, in early designs, but they abandoned this idea due to the complexity involved - fuel would need to be pumped, which means complex flow dynamics + extra hardware that could fail (and catastrophically so).

Outside of KSP and some rocketry books, I haven't seen it.

This is the kind of quality shitposting I come to HN for.

“It beats rail!”

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