May be comforting to hear while life as we know it loses all solidity 😄

If you were traveling with the wind there would probably be a ghastly breeze with a bit of a chill in the air.

"NASA to declare bankruptcy after catastrophic deployment failure."

Or, maybe they use the engines to shake it loose so they can finish deploying it?

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Imagine incredibly ear rupturing, sky tearing screaming. That should approximate the winds.

"Space program shuts down! 'We just couldn't deploy the dammed solar panels' says former Chief Space Person"

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In the meantime, if you don’t have some already, I highly recommend getting some binoculars! They’re a great and inexpensive way to explore the sky in greater detail (much better quality option here). They won’t show you Saturn’s rings, but even from a city they allow you to see Jupiter’s four brightest moons, craters on our moon, hundreds of stars & satellites invisible to the naked eye, Venus’ crescent phase, Uranus, Neptune, etc. From darker skies you can see even more of course, like the Andromeda galaxy, Orion Nebula, awesome star clusters like the Pleiades, comets (when applicable- like right now) etc. Plus, they're great for daytime views and they’ll still be incredibly useful if/when you have a telescope.

It’s like how a stiff breeze sounds to my cats coming through the letterbox. Absolutely terrifying

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But would not the heavier/denser elements sink to the core eventually ? It might be a molten core or some other, more exotic aggregation state, but still. Certainly not a gas.

You do not want thrusters at the front because you might have something similar to the Coanda effect, where the flow of gasses will tend to stick to the surface of the material due to superficial tension. This means the surface of the ship is going to be constantly battered.

If you wanted, I guess you could go for a 'Hammerhead' design, where the thrusters are at the front, but placed at a certain distance from the fuselage. This however increases the construction costs and the overall mass of the craft.

Such designs do however present the advantage of having the motor force at the front, which creates a bit more stability. But the much larger cross-section and mass might offset this advantage

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Equally interesting question is how would methane rivers and other large bodies of liquid would sound in satellites like Titan, accounting for their respective atmospheric circumstances?

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Yea, a trailing design would necessitate that the engines be slightly angled away so the payload wouldn’t be in the firing line, but I’ve heard arguments that it would be easier to make due to being tensile rather than rigid in nature and so having better resistance to g force. I’ve also heard the argument that you could just extend the tether to save mass on shielding by just increasing the distance between the modules and the engines

Also, wouldn’t the effectiveness of a solar sail decrease as you get further away from a star?

I don't wonder, I've heard it. Jupiter is a radio source, you can actually listen to it.

Science started when one human got another to eat a mushroom

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It probably sounds like the band Conan. Crushingly heavy.

There's three major advantages to having the engines in the back:

1. The Engine truss provides a convenient structural carrying element for stacking stages, since the engines need to a structural truss to attach too anyway.

2. Because acceleration from the engine causes the fuel to pool at the rear end of the tank, the fuel outlet has to be there. Engines in the back means both less head required for the turbopumps, since they are aided by the acceleration of the vehicle, rather than having to suck fuel against it. For the same reasom they'd also be much less prone to fuel cavitation. And lastly the engines being close to the fuel outlet obviously means significantly shorter feed lines.

3. Not blasting hot exhaust gases past/against your big tank of explosive fuels.

All 3 points are most crucial for chemical high thrust engines. For things like ion drives they are less relevant.

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