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Air Force Sets Date To Fly Mach-6 Scramjet
coondoggie writes "The US Air Force said it was looking to launch its 14-foot long X-51A Waverider on its first hypersonic flight test attempt May 25. The unmanned X-51A is expected to fly autonomously for five minutes, after being released from a B-52 Stratofortress off the southern coast of California. The Waverider is powered by a supersonic combustion scramjet engine, and will accelerate to about Mach 6 as it climbs to nearly 70,000 feet. Once flying, the X-51 will transmit vast amounts of data to ground stations about the flight, then splash down into the Pacific. There are no plans to recover the flight test vehicle, one of four built, the Air Force stated."
The next generation in civilian transportation.
There are no plans to recover the flight test vehicle
NY to Paris in 30 minutes! However, only one way tickets are allowed.
..accept it, is to go and get this baby. It should fetch a good price on ebay. I can only imagine the difficulties of finding this craft in the Pacific Ocean, but if you could... Legend status is yours.
Waiting for the other shoe to...
a mach 6 submarine sitting under the ocean ready for the picking!
thats a seriously fast plane, hope it goes well.
liqbase
whoosh?
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
This sounds sick. I wonder if its going to be visible? Too bad its a one way trip.
I would suspect that there is some secret stuff in this plane....so unless it plans on breaking up into a huge fireball right before it hits the ocean.....wouldn't it be foolish to drop something like that and not retrieve it?
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
In this case, it's splash!
How long we have been waiting for this? 10, 20 years? It looks that designing, simulating and building was harder than it was initially projected.
And this is still prototype.
The concept is not new but it is very difficult to turn it into practice. These guys at University of Queensland and others have been working on this for several years and have trialled severa prototypes before. http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.html?article=20718 Not bad without military budgets - beat them to the punch!
Yeah so now every time a plane overshoots a runway we have a radiation leak...
Nuclear energy is great for things like space travel and for generating electricity. It isn't so great for earth-bound transportation where it could easily leak. Not to mention the restrictions on a plane. Who cares if it can go from New York to Paris in an hour if it won't be able to be landed in Paris due to the fact it has nuclear material...
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
quick! Nobody tell the Navy they've been using numerous nuclear powered aircraft carriers for earth bound travel for almost 50 years without incident!
moox. for a new generation.
"We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. " -- Dwight D Eisenhower, 1961
Putting aside this strawman example, the idea of push-button assassination is terrifying. "Comrade, you will sell me your oil. Remember what happened to your predecessor?"
I know where my towel is!
Aren't you forgetting about nuclear subs? Quite a few incidents.
And airplanes not only are more prone to those, they also don't enjoy the comfort of generous weight budgets and being essentially buried after any accident.
All of this is beside the point though - experiments with nuclear aircraft propulsion were performed by both the US and Soviet Union (the latter apparently actually had it propelling an aircraft, at least partially). If there's one thing they have shown, it is that even with the small crew and lack of comfort of a bomber, radiation shielding is a major concern. You simply don't have enough weight budget for it.
One that hath name thou can not otter
If you want the jet to scram, send it into the ocean at Mach 6. Just hope it doesn't land on a ship.
I don't see much of a military need for this tech, however, when we've had military launch capability that could reach any location on earth well within a day, including the time it takes for authorization, for close to half a century.
Well within a day?
Because of the global war on terror, people in Bush's Administration proposed putting
conventional munitions on fucking SLBMs so we can have a worldwide response time in minutes.
IIRC, Congress repeatedly shot down the idea.
I'm not sure where the funding came from, but Obama/Gates have picked up the idea and run with it.
I'd much rather see the military "waste" money on scramjets than repurposing SLBMs/ICBMs.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Prophetic indeed.
Those hundreds of electronic computers really beefed up government authority and took power out of the hands of individuals didn't they?
And the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop/garage, hasn't been able to come up with anything since 1961 right? That's why big government-contract-supported corporations like IBM have prospered while small start-ups have only failed.
Damn this military/government industrial-complex owned world, with all its electronic computers!!
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Does anyone else think it is odd that the fastest plane in the world is still the SR-71, which came into service in 1964.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I do believe that used to exist. For over thirty years the Concorde jet flew passengers at Mach 2 over the Atlantic. FYI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde
6.40 times the speed of sound should be fast enough for anyone. ... it only needs to go a little faster now ...
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
We need to find a way to fit nuclear powered engines onto planes if we are to make a leap into next chapter of aviation.
That will happen about the same time as Duke Nukem Forever hits the shelves
But then again, we are probably on the verge of global resource wars amongst nations that have not.
What a sad state our greed and short sightedness has brought us to. Our capabilities as a species have changed enormously in the last century or so, but our insight into ourselves has not.
BTW, US seems to put itself in a, well, curious situation. With population so used to overconsumption relying on foreign resources (while largely preserving "domestic" caches of...the same resources), it's bound to end in confrontation sooner or later. Not saying that it will be very disastrous for the US, oh no - with the amount of resources wasted on "defense" (nice newspeak btw) industry, it should do reasonably fine; but it still might be nasty, also locally (and certainly when looking at humanity...); not a nice place to live.
Nasty enough so that, perhaps, it is better to live in a place which now can't get rid of its resources quickly enough (while using the income for sustainable growth); one which will be largely "worthless" in any possible resource wars of the future.
But is there such a place?
One that hath name thou can not otter
You're presuming that it's solely for weapons delivery. The first application that came to my mind was reconnaisance. It's all well and good to be able to deliver a warhead to "any location on earth well within a day", but intel as near-real time as you can get it is just as critical to the military, and the ability to get sensors over an area of concern as quickly as possible is immeasurably valuable. That's the reason the SR-71 Blackbird was built, and it performed it's mission admirably for decades.
At that altitude, it should be moving just a little faster than 1 mile/sec. Hopefully, it will go where directed to - like North Korea...
Insightful? That's the US Navy, not a public or private corporation. Your sarcastic remark would seem to indicate that we could trust corporations to use nuclear technology to create transportation solutions for us.
Well if air travel is any indication, and the massive screw ups there with security theater, maintenance irregularities, cheap greedy bastards that would not outfit their planes with technology that could of prevented PanAm Flight 103, I doubt the airlines have the competency or the interest in our safety and security to pull off nuclear travel.
Sorry, if they can't afford to give me more than 6 fucking Styrofoam peanuts on a flight, I am not going to trust them to give me a nuclear plane flight either.
Of course, that is just the airlines. Car manufacturers could come in save us being paragons of humanitarian virtues and competence right? Hmmmm, maybe not. Well then we could trust the rail road system to.... Uh... Amtrack.... Huh.... Well maybe let's give a company not involved in transportation a shot at this.... Microsoft?
The reason why we don't have nuclear based transportation outside of a few dozen (at most) instances of military transports is that as a people and society we lack the responsibility, attention to detail, and competency to deal with something as dangerous as nuclear based power at that large of a scale.
Not that I am against nuclear power. Let's just be careful and limit it to reactors providing us the electricity where it would be a more manageable endeavor.
Personally, I am very inspired by Aluminum-Galium based power sources for travel that is extremely safe compared to the alternatives, and nuclear power is very appropriate to allow us an easy way to provide such an infrastructure to deliver refurbished AG power sources that can deliver on-demand hydrogen to transport vehicles.
However, it was cancelled because the subsidies paid by the governments were getting rediculous. Yes, it flew passengers, but it NEVER was economical and when the time came to put in some serious maintenance costs they dumped the program.
Priceless?
Oh no this indeed does have a pricetag, many of them in fact and they are big. The US pays a lot of money for its armed forces, too much in my opinion. If we can criticize and cut into education for fiscal responsibility the military should be fair game too.
While true government investment in research is vital for our growth and continued economic performance it is not solely responsible for it. The government did start the first internet, but it was business investment that also largely pushed the further development and refinement of the microcomputer.
The solitary inventor is largely pushed out of state of the art engineering. Like it or not much of science and cutting-edge research is a large, time-consuming and labor intensive practice that requires more work than a single man or woman can provide these days. Though it is still possible for a single person to "invent" something truly revolutionary it is exceedingly difficult and far more revolutions will come from organized large-scale efforts.
There also is the myth of the "Great Inventor" just coming up with an idea that revolutionizes the world and without whom that revolution would never have come. If you look at history, this is rarely the case as often many scientists are working on similar lines and the credited inventor is just the first to succeed. If they hadn't someone else would have; it might have taken longer and been slightly different but it would have come.
Well then we could trust the rail road system to....
Supertrain!
If there was a plane faster than an SR-71, there's no guarantee that it would be public knowledge.
That said, a fast plane isn't as necessary for spying as it was in the 60's. Who knows what kind of crazy tech is out there doing the hard spy work now, the geek in me hopes that there's something more interesting than satellites...
"There are no plans to recover the flight test vehicle"
Really? You want to just let a potential security threat sit around in the ocean for someone to salvage and copy?
Goddamn, let me call China right quick and let them know where they might want to start looking. If you're just going to leave it out there I might as well get paid to clean up your damned mess!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Yeah, all several hundred billion pieces of it, after it smacks into the ocean. If the plane retains even a small fraction of the velocity it picks up in the test flight before impact, it's a goner.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I agree, I guess sarcasm really doesn't carry well in text.
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(But also as I mentioned above Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc, etc, were all start-up companies that became huge without any government support; R&D does need huge teams these days but opportunities for the little guy are greater than ever.)
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1. My point was that the private sector and the garage inventor have thrived without any government/military help.
That couldn't be further from saying that Facebook on phones couldn't have happened without the military casualties over the last half-century.
2. If only those deaths were for the sake of technological development since the 60s; that would be much better than the grim reality that (for the most part) they were just a terrible waste.
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You have no clue... A mach 6 fighter/bomber would very much be useful in the armament. At that speed it can outrun most missiles used to shoot it down. Very few weapons platforms can track and engage an aircraft flying faster than mach 4 at the moment, let alone something flying mach 6. There are only a handful of missiles (surface-to-air or air-to-air) which can even travel mach 6 or faster, which means you can only attach from a forward vector and once it passes your position or is flying away from you, your missiles will not be able to catch the plane. This assumes that your radar system can even detect a plane that fast and can instruct the missile how to intercept the target.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Depending on how you define a "Nuclear" train, you could have a single, central, fixed location Nuclear power plant, and an electrified rail system (or wires, or a pair of superconducting rails, etc) to power the trains, so there's no reactor on the trains themselves - just electric motors, or maybe a mag-lev propulsion system, etc.
We need to find a way to fit nuclear powered engines onto planes if we are to make a leap into next chapter of aviation.
Currently the only things we really know how to do with nuclear energy is heat stuff up (eg turn water to steam to make electricity) and blow stuff up (eg a bomb). Neither of those two things really work well in an airplane... the first is too heavy and the second is bad for business.
Its not so clear that this has much military application. Its unlikely to be stealthy at that speed - aerodynamic heating will make it very obvious in IR. I suspect the efficiency isn't very good, and it needs a rocket for initial launch. I'm sure there are some cases where it would be preferable to a spy satellite, but I think the us has stopped using SR-71s because those cases are pretty rare.
I'd love to have scramjet technology for launch vehicles, but so far they seem to be single Mach number designs, so the don't work for that either.
My feeling is that there is a sort of technological no-mans-land between ~Mach 3 and sub-orbital trajectories.
I'm happy to see the research continue (I also love fast planes), but it really isn't clear how it would be used.
The linked photo is of a prop plane used for the movie "Stealth". Sadly not a real aircraft, it does look like it'd be fast though!
Seriously? Please tell me you're kidding. That's the F/A-37 Talon from the movie, "Stealth." I know it was a lousy movie, but, come on.
That plane is from the movie STEALTH:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ASW_Fake_FA37_1.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_(film)
Get back to me when the military becomes unionized.
Heh, Nuclear powered Zeppelin.
Hypersonic technology isn't just blow-stuff-up research- this is closer to just plain science. It is extremely difficult to maintain stable flight over mach 5 or so, not to mention the feats in engine and materials technology required to reach such speeds. This is interesting science and engineering, so I think it is a good thing there is military interest to fund this- it is too expensive to very easily get funding otherwise.
My webcomic
They have had this in France for years. France is largely nuclear powered and sells electricity to it's neighbors. The train is a very sensible tech platform - uses existing rail lines for up to 140mph, and can go up to 200mph on specially graded track. I took the TGV from Paris to Marseille - a few hours for what would have been a six or seven hour drive and at least 3 or 4 hours through an airport.
Most Americans have no idea how convenient rail travel is. I bought my ticket 10 minutes before the train left, and a few minutes after boarding I was enjoying a cup of coffee while I sat in the equivalent of first class on an airplane for about $50. I had a table, a full size restroom nearby, and dining car at my disposal. If you've really got the dough or don't have the time, you can walk on without a ticket and pay the conductor the highest rate.
Planes are still the way to go for cross-continental travel, but a regional electric train system is a no brainer. Well, if you have a society that wants reality based solutions instead of empty rhetoric like "Drill, baby, drill."
No, never saw the movie, I guess that explains why I was modded a troll. Thanks for letting me know though.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It's an article about a stunningly awesome bit of engineering and technology... and I see the last line of the summary, and can only think "Hey! Free jet!"
The kids at the Air Force never got over it. Now their toys are bigger and much more expensive - but they're still fun to shoot off in a blaze of glory - never to be recovered. I love this country - and how our tax dollars get used.
Couldn't we just give the air force guys one model rocket apiece and tell them to be satisfied?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Priceless?
Oh no this indeed does have a pricetag, many of them in fact and they are big.
I think you need to employ a dictionary.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Fortunately that was without a major market upset. You can guess what happens to that trash when funding is removed. Or you can just have a look at the countries of the old USSR to have a very visible example. People are *horrible* at preventing incidents over a long time scale.
no but the internet wouldn't exist without the military. so no facebook. Eventually civilian tech would have made something similiar though it would be like surfing the internet with aol 24-7.
Civilian internet -- AOL
Military Internet converted and expanded by businesses and civilians. -- is the one we got.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
IIRC, the idea wasn't to put conventional explosives on them, but rather just load them with lead or something else cheap, heavy, and inert and use them as a mass impact weapon. A Trident II missile MIRV comes in at about 6,000m/s. a W88 nuclear warhead supposedly weights about 800lbs. Replace that with 800lbs of lead and when it hits, you'll get as much energy as about a ton and a half of TNT and a Trident can carry up to 12 such loads.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
If I were from China and avid to gain such a prototype, I would do nearly everything to get my fingers on this ..
Hey and it's in the pacfic so it's nearly in China's backyard!
Or is it a fake mission ?
If I were from US I would do everything to get my bitter rival to analyse a piece of pure ol' rocket powered crap.
The lock on their face ? hillariously, priceless.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. " -- Dwight D Eisenhower, 1961
Too bad that's totally untrue. Instead, we became the captive of an economic elite, which tells the scientists what to do. A scientific-technological elite might actually make things better.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, it's
WHOOSH! splash! :p
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
powered by a supersonic combustion scramjet engine
guess what the S and C at the beginning of scramjet mean?
But then again, we routinely enter our PIN number into an ATM machine and Microsoft released an operating system based on NT technology....
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
If DARPA never funded Internet we would use probably other set of protocols (like BITNET) but a global computer network would still exists.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
Well without Faraday we would never have discovered the laws of electricity, so really we should thank Faraday for Facebook.
(Though I am willing to accept that AOL would exist even without Faraday.)
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Theres a difference between the most protected boats on the planet and things made of papper thin metal that can be brought down by a bird
I grew up when and where the U.S. Navy and Air Force tested and flew supersonic on a daily basis. I was a navy brat. On many days there were a number of sonic booms, sometimes as many as 5 or 6 a day.
My father, a range director, once told me that the purpose of some of the tests were to see if changes in aircraft design could result in smaller sonic footprints. They were never successful.
Now, imagine a somewhat regular commercial aircraft route going supersonic. The public wouldn't put up with regular booms.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
"Your sarcastic remark would seem to indicate that we could trust corporations to use nuclear technology to create transportation solutions for us."
We trusted them with oil rig safety. What could possibly do wrong?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"The kids at the Air Force never got over it. Now their toys are bigger and much more expensive - but they're still fun to shoot off in a blaze of glory - never to be recovered. I love this country - and how our tax dollars get used."
What special knowledge makes you sure recovery is cost-effective, and that simply smashing it into the water doesn't cost far less?
For a research vehicle, one can dispense with heavy landing gear and the structures needed to support it. The machine can be designed to be fast, unencumbered by durability and recovery considerations of conventional aircraft design. (Landing is bouncy and slammy.)
The purpose of the missions is research, not saving a static display. I have 26 years maintaining combat aircraft, and note that ALL aircraft are disposable. Some are worn beyoned economical repair, some go obsolete, some crash, some are kept for the memories they evoke, but they were built to accomplish a mission. So is a missile, and one doesn't usually retrieve those either.
Have some historic scrapping:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZgDNYwLWrU
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The Air Force describes the X-51 as virtually wingless, designed to ride its own shockwave.
Fucking righteous!
Nothing currently in service, no. If we deploy an aircraft that can travel at those speeds - and it has the range to be useful - then someone will deploy a system capable of shooting it down.
Anyway, I was referring to sub-orbital craft. We can already deliver reconnaissance systems and warheads anywhere we need to quickly.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I'm still waiting for Stealth 2 after that little scene they put in at the end of the credits where the North Koreans find the still working AI unit!
Did you miss the two points? We would be on an aol style network. Second it was the military funding of the backbone that enabled the connections.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The early nuclear experiments with aircraft were just that. The technology has advanced quite a bit. If nothing else, using an Alpha or Beta emitter would instantly solve the shielding problem.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It was a bomb in the cargo area of the plane that punched a hole in the side. This caused the rapid disintegration of the plane. This particular incident occurred in December 1988.
Prior to this, the technology did exist to line the fuselage of the plane, and cargo containers with so-called bombproof linings. They were demonstrated to be particularly effective. In the case of PanAm Flight 103 it would have without question saved the plane, because the explosive force would not have been allowed to punch a hole in the side of the plane.
The reason for not putting the technology in the plane, was solely so those hell bound cocksuckers that ran the Airlines back in the late 80's could make a few more bucks and afford more hookers and blow. I know that is harsh, but I lost somebody on that plane and experienced first hand the frustration.
So what if the plane could carry 10 less passengers or so? The airlines should have been forced by the government to do so. It's 22 years later and we still don't have bombproof lining on the planes and now we only get 6 peanuts when we fly and they are trying to charge for every little nicety on the plane. Just when you think we can get them to go bankrupt and have other companies step in, Congress bails them out with our tax dollars yet again.
The airlines don't deserve to be in business. They don't care about your safety and security and getting them to do anything that would make sense, be ethical, and just plain decent is like pulling finger nails.
I hope all the executives burn in the hottest levels of hell.
We trusted them with oil rig safety. What could possibly do wrong?
And we should dismantle the Navy because the military recently flew an live, armed nuclear bomb from Georgia to Tennessee, right?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Oh, and to the other point, no we didn't. We told them to go ahead and take stupid risks by capping their liability.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
And do you have an example of very energetic and practical to do nuclear reaction which emits just this kind of radiation?
One that hath name thou can not otter
We need to find a way to fit nuclear powered engines onto planes if we are to make a leap into next chapter of aviation.
Yeah - sure, because its very likely that many pilots want to sit behind a windshield made of 6-inch–thick acrylic glass, while sitting inside a massive 11 ton structure lined with lead, and rubber; as did the pilots in the NB-36H.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
You are probably thinking of something like a Radioisotope thermoelectric generator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator
I don't know if the watts/kg are high enough to power high speed planes. (The new horizon one was about 55 kg and had 300 watts electrical output (from 4400 watts thermal output))
"It's just the end of daaaaays..."
Emotions! In your brain!
Of course the treaty didn't say anything about unmanned flights and this is where the SR-91 comes into it. This *might* be a picture of a SR-91. The cockpit makes me wonder what I'm looking at, if it can be piloted/unpiloted. I don't know for sure. Kudos to Yankee engineering though, it looks fast.
No "might be" about it. Those are *definately not* pictures of Aurora. They're pictures of a prop from the (VERY, VERY BAD) movie Stealth. It's even mentioned in the Aurora article you linked.
End of line..
My example, BITNET, was not an AOL style network but a "network of networks" like the internet. TCP/IP is a better protocol due a lot of issue but if DARPA didn't fund it, other options would have come it - like BITNET did.
BITNET connections were funded by each operator like a provider buying upstream instead of peering.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
Indeed - a few people have pointed that out and that seems to be the focus despite me saying "it *might* be" as I never seen the pictures before. As I didn't see the apparently crappy movie I didn't make the connection, thanks for pointing out the entry on the wiki though.
I know now why I made a rule about never posting when I have a flu and while I think that much of my reasoning was valid one little error gets you roasted here. I feel my rule has been reinforced quite adequately now and next time I'll stick to moderating.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Are you seriously thinking something which is useful for providing power via decay can be anywhere near sufficient for an airplane? Heck, an RC model even?
One that hath name thou can not otter
It's not enough to power a basic general aviation airplane, or even not really an RC model.
One that hath name thou can not otter