>>12265018>A tanker with no cooling system to reduce boiloff would increase it's payload (fuel) capacity.Neither Tankers nor Starships will require active cooling, for the reasons I said. Elon has tweeted before about how they aren't doing active cooling if they can get away with it (this was back during the carbon fiber era), and since they're using steel with its good infrared reflectivity now instead of composites I'm inclined to think they are getting away with it.
>For the fuel depot the additional mass is a non-issue once it is in orbit anywayFor Starship even if it lost 500 kg of methalox per day due to boiloff it wouldn't matter because it would still be cheaper in the long run to eat the boiloff losses over a months-long refueling campaign than paying for the development, construction, and eventual replacement of a permanently orbiting depot with zero boiloff.
>This would also make launch schedules a little more flexible as you could launch 2 starships 24 h appart and fuel them at the depotThey will already be able to stretch fueling out across months of time easily, even if I'm wrong about them being confident in already getting close to zero boiloff by default. First of all, their Falcon 9 upper stages contain liquid oxygen and no active cooling and they don't get significant boiloff. Starship will be better, because it will have bare steel rather than just white paint. Starship is also bigger, meaning it has more volume per surface area and thus the same heat flux per unit area will cause proportionally less boiloff.
Having a permanent depot locks you into an inclination which wont' be ideal for Mars transfers from window to window because of the differences in how Mars and Earth orbit the Sun (solar inclination, orbital ellipses, phase angles).
