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Air Force Builds Quiet Mach 6 Wind Tunnel
An anonymous reader writes "To help design 'scramjets' -- vehicles that'll travel thousands of miles per hour as they leave the atmosphere and zip around the globe -- the U.S. Air Force has just funded a wind tunnel that operates quietly at Mach 6. To get a quiet flow, the throat of the Mach 6 nozzle must be polished to a near-perfect mirror finish, eliminating roughness that would trip the flow."
they'll use a model, just like the used to before computers. Duh. a model is still "real" unless you take real to mean 1:1 scale with the final production model, or a "real" working aircraft. And they are not going to put all the work and money into building a fullsize or working one without having proven that the basic design is sound. and that can be done with a model.