What if we attached a bunch of rockets to each other in a straight

>>8794393
Anon just invented staged rockets.

>>8794393
That's pretty much already what rockets do.

Look up the rocket equation.

Yes but there is a theoretical limit for a given amount of fuel in which there are infinite stages and the assumption that stage separators have no weight.

>>8794393

Yes but to get the same acceleration from each rocket, and the same burn time, each rocket you add needs to be much bigger.

Thus, IRL rockets use at least two stages to get into space, the first stage is huge and has massive engines to lift itself, the second stage is much smaller and needs correspondingly less thrust and can reach orbital speeds. The Saturn V needed to go to the Moon once it got to orbit, so it actually needed three stages, and the size of the third stage meant that the second stage had to be big and the first stage had to be the biggest rocket stage ever built.

The size of the final stage of the rocket depends on how much payload you want to deliver wherever you're sending it. How many stages you need depends on how fast you want to go/how far you want to go. The size of every preceding stage you need, once you know how many you need, cascades from how big your final stage and payload are.

>>8794393
That's literally how rockets work, except the rockets they jettison are the tiny bits of fuel they eject each second

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>>8794649
>The Saturn V needed to go to the Moon once it got to orbit, so it actually needed three stages, and the size of the third stage meant that the second stage had to be big and the first stage had to be the biggest rocket stage ever built.

True enough, as far as it goes, but THEN the Apollo stack also had the 4th CSM stage, for getting into lunar orbit and then back home.

Not sure how to count the two stages of the LM...

>>8794661

The service module and the LEM count as the payload rather than part of the Saturn V itself, at least that's what makes sense in my mind.

Rather than straight up jettison 3rd stage and away we go, the capsule and service module had to stage off, perform a flip maneuver, and re-dock with the LEM. Then, after docking, the LEM would stage off of the third Saturn V stage and the two joined spacecraft maneuvered away from the spent stage.

The Saturn V could have launched an entirely different payload atop the third stage, for example Von Braun's large self-landing rover concept. Any payload atop the third stage would have had its own maneuvering system anyway, as all space payloads generally do (unless they're cubesats or nanosats).

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Idea has been around for a while, pic from a 1956 soviet book. Some of the stages were planned to be atomic powered. No environmentalists back then, to stand in the way of progress.

>>8795489
>environmentalists stand in the way of progress
gtfo corporate shill