Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Unveils World's Biggest Plane (seattletimes.com)
Frosty Piss quotes a report from The Seattle Times: The huge Stratolaunch finally rolled out of its hangar in Mojave, Calif., Wednesday for the first time. Built by Paul Allen's Scaled Composites, the twin hulled monster will go through months of ground tests before a first flight. Jean Floyd, chief executive at Stratolaunch Systems, said in a statement that the empty airplane, powered by six used 747 engines, weighs approximately 500,000 pounds. The jet will have a three-person crew: pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer in the flight deck of the starboard fuselage, while the port fuselage cockpit is empty and unpressurized. Stratolaunch is intended to carry a rocket slung beneath the central part of the wing, between the two fuselages, and release it at 35,000 feet. The concept is that the rocket will then launch into space and deliver satellites into orbit.
TFA doesn't load at all if you don't permit Javascript, because it is not a web page. Wired is offering an actual web page on the same subject, which is more suitable for linking to a site for nerds like Slashdot, where noscript is common.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Is it made of spruce?
The tradition has always been using wood to make large planes for billionaires in california.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yeah, I don't understand the purpose of this project. Yes, you can launch Pegasus rockets from anywhere you choose, as long as you can find a runway long enough for this monster, and hopefully your launch facility has enough LOX and RP-1 for you to use. Probably best if your launch point is over water or unpopulated areas since most people don't appreciate having rocket stages dropped on their heads. But these sort of restrictions are no match for a man with vision!
I imagine Elon sent them a nice card congratulating them on having a reusable first stage. The Stratolaunch team has been trying to reassure people that this is not a billionaire's vanity project. We'll see what the score is when they figure out what their cost-per-kg to LEO is, but really I think that this situation could have been avoided by buying Paul a copy of KSP and having him play that until he figures out why this is a bad idea.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Yeh because nobody could posdibly calculate the stresses, and bulid an appropriate spar. Even for a shit poster, you are a dumb cunt.
Exactly. That thing will snap in half the moment it leaves the ground. If it does survive being airborne, it will never survive a landing.
Why? Justify your comment with an explaination. And before you do so remember the following:
1. Vertical forces pull a wing up. All wings bend in service. Twin-fuselage planes simply have an additional weight on the wing as seen from each fuselage, what this means in practice is that the the wing joining the two fuselages will see *less* stress than those on the outside or those of typical planes.
2. When landing all force is centred on the wheels which are directly under the heaviest parts of the plane. Again the joining wing will see the least stress of any parts.
3. Twin-fuselage is a thing and there have been over 30 designs of such planes built for various purposes including military, cargo, and most recently launching of a secondary vehicle.
4. Not only will it not snap, but due to the little stress involved you would quite comfortably carry another aircraft in the middle, a design that has been successfully used by White Knight 2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - there's a picture of it flying.