Absolutely but I was not talking about mass in terms of the rocket equation but in terms of classification. It was to give readers a ballpark sense of what kind of other rockets Neutron competed with.

Yes lots of things are different. And that is most of the topic of the story. But total mass of the rocket helps give the reader some kind of starting point when reading about these differences.

I don’t know… maybe I need to clarify this better somehow, but it seems standard to me if people would think about the rocket equation. It is a relevant question when all things else stay the same. If I make a rocket 12.5.% heavier without upgrading engines or changing staging, then I obviously have a big problem.

But we are not talking about taking some fixed starting point here and adding mass. We are comparing two widely different rockets and trying to get a sense of whether they are in the same category or not. Electron is in a different class from Falcon 9 e.g. while Neutron is in the same ballpark as Falcon 9. It is not hard to imagine that Neutron will over time grow to have similar mass and payload to orbit.