>>12806477Inflatables are more expensive and complex.
You don't need isogrid anyway, wtf. Just weld it out of steel like you're making a submarine.
>8-8.5 m to 24 mNo, inflatables at most get about a 2x increase in diameter once inflated, and for larger inflatables the increase is actually proportionally smaller. It's not worth the effort unless you are greatly limited by both fairing volume and launch capacity. Starship solves both of these issues and makes inflatables moot. They would have been great if we were building a station using Falcon 9, or Atlas 5, or Delta IV. Not Starship, though.
As for retiring Starships as stations, eeeeh. I prefer the idea of retiring Starships as expendable delta V slam vehicles for pushing massive probes towards the outer solar system objects at high velocity. If a Starship is getting too old to fly it's because it's getting structural fatigue anyway, and we don't want to be adding pre-aged modules to any living spaces, unless we want to continue the ISS tradition of spending 80% of everyone's time just patching holes and fixing shit. If a Starship is "getting old" because its engines are burning out they'd swap the engines, same for any other piece of hardware other than the superstructure itself. Once the superstructure is showing signs of needing retirement, it makes sense to strip off any dead mass, remove all the good engines and maybe throw on a few end-of-life vacuum raptors, fill with propellant and cargo, and fire the thing off to Saturn or wherever.
