>>11714712The propellant load on Starship has a mass of ~1,300,000 kg. The total mass of Venture Star would have been 1,000,000 kg. All together, Starship is about 1.5 times the mass of the on-paper Venture Star.
>>11714693Of course, that doesn't mean it could be built though. Here, I'll design a reusable SSTO that uses Raptor engines right now.
9 Raptors, developing ~18,000 kN of thrust, to a single stage vehicle with a mass of ~1500 tons, for a TWR of ~1.22. We'll say the Raptors provide and average of 348 Isp when you look at the entire ascent profile (330 at sea level, 355 in vacuum, and being a bit pessimistic considering the majority of the time would be spent in vacuum). So far so good.
Now, in order to get the minimum >9km/s required to achieve orbit, our vehicle's burnout mass needs to be 100 tons or less. That's fine, we'll do exactly what Venture Star's designers did and imagine ultralight meme materials for the design. Say we want 20,000 kg of payload, that leaves 80,000 kg for the structural mass and engines and TPS. Again, don't worry about it, we'll just develop the materials necessary to pull that off and there won't be any unforeseen problems with manufacturing or toughness of those materials.
