Primary booster objective will be demonstrating a unique landing burn engine configuration planned to be used on the next generation Super Heavy.
Super Heavy will ignite 13 engines at the start of the landing burn and then transition to a new configuration with five engines running for the divert phase. Previously done with three engines, the planned baseline for V3 Super Heavy will use five engines during the section of the burn responsible for fine-tuning the booster’s path, adding additional redundancy for spontaneous engine shutdowns. The booster will then transition to its three center engines for the end of the landing burn, entering a full hover while still above the ocean surface, followed by shutdown and dropping into the Gulf.
Ship will deploy 8 Starlink simulators and perform an in-space Raptor relight.
For reentry, tiles have been removed from Starship to intentionally stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle. Several of the missing tiles are in areas where tiles are bonded to the vehicle and do not have a backup ablative layer.
To mimic the path a ship will take on future flights returning to Starbase, the final phase of Starship’s trajectory on Flight 11 includes a dynamic banking maneuver and will test subsonic guidance algorithms prior to a landing burn and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

Link to Starship Dev thread

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[–] few@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

How will the transition from 5 to 3 engines on the Booster landing burn add additional redundancy? How is that different from going straight to 3 engines?

Previously the 3 engine landing burn was for about 16 seconds. If there was a 5 second burn with 5 engines then that would be followed by a 7 or 8 second burn with 3 engines, giving a total elapsed burn time of 13 seconds.

Is there a gap between the 5 engine burn and the 3 engine burn or will they just switch off two engines after 5 seconds. Does that mean that they can then choose which two to turn off and avoid the need to allow for the 0.2 seconds engine startup time that would be needed if there was a failure of one of the 3 engines. Is that the only benefit of a 5-3 landing burn?

[–] threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 months ago

Does that mean that they can then choose which two to turn off

That would be my guess. Start up slightly more engines than you need, and then pick the "healthiest" engines to finish the landing.