Originally Posted by
atakacs
I muss confess that I am someone baffled by this whole Starship thing... Obviously mishaps can occur but you usually test discrete components and and you are reasonably convinced they will work reliably you assemble the whole thing for an actual test launch. What's the point of blowing 4 full rockets without even getting off the ground ? Seems a very weird way of operating.
You can't test everything in isolation and be done. At some point you need to test the launch configuration to find out what sort of interactions you might experience. Without knowing anything this particular incident, it's quite possible they did in fact discover an unknown (and undesirable) interaction when all four engines are combined.