But, somebody had to say "Hey! Let's make sure the fans don't see anything they like!" What motivated this? I mean, if it sucks, but it sucked like BG used to, at least I'd be able to get a nostalgia jag. But, if it a) sucks and b) doesn't let me relive my childhood, you get Phantom Menace. Where's the percentage in making bad stuff? I mean, i understand that George was on an ego trip, but some flunky writing for BG wouldn't.
Now, re: the aerodynamics, your big drag issues happen as you go from.9 to 1.2 Mach, and none of the mothership scenarios I've seen talk about a supersonic launch (which would be pretty dangerous anyhow), so I'm not sure I am totally convinced that air flow issues are going to be a great issue.
Certainly, you're right, that the mass ratio of the rocket improves if you can decrease the distance traveled, but you still (at least for orbital flight) have to get going silly fast, and there's really no way around it.
Anyhow, I appreciate the data. I'm going to go play with it for a while.
I'm going to have to see if I can figure out what the fuel savings for a rocket look like vs. launch altitude. I might be able to make Excel do my homework for me.
Apparently, Burt Rutan thinks it's a great idea, and he's way smarter than I am. I've just never understood, from a potential energy perspective, how getting a measly 70,000 feet up is going to save you a lot of gas.
My off-the-cuff conclusion is that for a sub-orbital shot, the savings are large, but for an orbital insertion, not so much, simply because for an orbital insertion you need huge huge huge amounts of kinetic energy. (and mv^2 is a bitch)
Fuel is cheap. Maintenance costs the world, and the Concorde is the most expensive-to-operate airliner in the world. So far as I know, it has NEVER shown a profit, so I take your contention with a large grain of salt.
I'd love to see a citation if you happen to have one. I'd like to be proven wrong! I think it's a great aircraft.
See the technology development of the gas turbine engine for many useful parallels.
Scramjets are about the most absurdly complicated things you can imagine, from a fluid dynamics standpoint. Much more data is required to refine their operation. Such data comes from programs like this one.
Now, it may be that NASA and your firm are not being as frugal as they should be, but this is useful and important research, if you think that high-speed air breathing flight is important.
(Me, I say use ballistic rockets, but what do I know?)
The Apollo 1 fire was as traumatic as an accident could be, yet the program pulled itself up by its bootstraps and proceeded to hit their milestone.
I certainly wouldn't argue that NASA, as it is curently chartered, would survive a Mars mission disaster, but frankly I don't think they'll ever have a chance to do so. NASA is impotent.
Yep. And none of the artists are very interested in your opinion, fortunately for those of us who happen to enjoy the diversity of voices on the Internet.
What, do you think somebody's going to come to your door and MAKE you read their blog?
"every crap artist with angsty poems can easily put up a site" They sure can. And good for them.
Yeah, because, um, battery technology has changed a lot in, uh, six months. Not.
The battery life on your iPaq sucked when you bought it. It sucked long before you bought it, it will suck long after you bought it, and you still bought it.
Wow. You mean that battery life on wince devices sucks? No way.
You think you're being funny, but those would in fact be covered under the constitutional right to bear arms.
Where's the logical distinction between a state-of-the-art 1790's-era shoulder fired rifle and an armed, armored vehicle?
They differ only in degree, not in type. The Constitution is predicated on the assumption that the American people are trustworthy. Fortunately, in the overwhelming majority of the cases, they are. It's that vanishing minority, of course, that comprises your evening news.
If you can reliably hit 747s with your missile, sell it to the Army for theatre high-altitude air defense.
If you can't, (and I bet you can't), simply remember that the sky is really, really, really, really, really, big. It would be trivial to locate a launch facility in a place where even going through commercial air-lanes would be nearly impossible.
This problem simply need not exist. It exists only to fund bureaucracies. Which is basically what you said. : )
Sure they do. Any time somebody talks about actually enforcing trade regulations, all the corpocrats start screaming about how cool "free markets" are, even though they would be totally incapable of competing in a true free market.
I am not certain that a true free market is a virtue or not. It would certainly be very hard on the people at the bottom end of the economic food chain when we eliminated the minimum wage. Lots of those people are already depending on a government stipend to put food in front of their kids.
Don't know quite how to fix it, but I'm pretty sure the solution doesn't include protectionist legislation for the richest companies on the planet.
Than Dom Perignon? Not hard. Hell, I'd rather drink Miller Lite.
Dom Perignon is a marketing joke. Everybody in Europe knows it sucks. The only place the French can sell that piss is in the US and in Japan. Everybody else seems to realize it tastes like sweat socks.
Me, I'll take a nice asti spumante. I can get a case or two for the price of a bottle of Dom, and I don't feel like I have to wash my mouth out afterwards.
I only take exception with one thing in your post.
Lexmark printers have NOTHING in common with LEGO. The only toy I've never been able to break, in my LIFE, are LEGO bricks. They're made of some kind of unobtainium stuff. Now, I've killed several models I've built from LEGO, but the bricks are tougher than anything.
I'm convinced that there's a layer of LEGO in the Chobham armor on M1 tanks.
If you just want a ballistic shot, it doesn't matter where you launch from. The trick with orbit is not so much altitude, but speed. Getting to LEO altitude isn't terribly difficult from a fuel consumption perspective. It's that pesky 25000 miles/hr part that's hard. Achieving that speed (think of it in terms of angular velocity with respect to the center of the earth) is what drives the enormous fuel costs of launching satellites. If you launch near the equator, where your angular velocity is at a maximum, you get a free bonus of about 25% additional throw weight for a given fuel load.
You can crunch the numbers differently an launch the same payload with less fuel. Basically, you just need less gas per pound o' stuff you want to launch.
Now, once you spend about three minutes thinking about the cost to carry a pound of stuff into orbit, you have to wonder what all these people want to do rocket-powered Flash Gordon landings. Seems like an awfully stupid idea to me, assuming you're going to land somewhere with an atmosphere.
They're SECRET, which means that nobody except authorized persons have access to those recipes. If they were out in the open, they would be unprotected (and unprotectable).
Contrariness is not a virtue. Not liking something because everybody else likes it is just as stupid and short-sighted as liking something because everybody else likes it.
I simply don't care about social norms. If I happen to be congruent with them today, fine. If I don't, OK. I just don't care.
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I thought Apples were supposed to be more expensive than similarly-capable PCs.
Quick, get Jobs on the phone and have him raise the price!
Uh, it didn't usually take half an hour to wind a watch.
How would you get power from your skin, exactly? There's no potential difference between your wrist and, uh, a different place on your wrist.
Self-winding mechanisms are much more effective. Don't think it'd generate enough power to run a computer for any length of time.
But, somebody had to say "Hey! Let's make sure the fans don't see anything they like!" What motivated this? I mean, if it sucks, but it sucked like BG used to, at least I'd be able to get a nostalgia jag. But, if it a) sucks and b) doesn't let me relive my childhood, you get Phantom Menace. Where's the percentage in making bad stuff? I mean, i understand that George was on an ego trip, but some flunky writing for BG wouldn't.
I just don't get it.
That is excellent data. Thanks for the link. : )
.9 to 1.2 Mach, and none of the mothership scenarios I've seen talk about a supersonic launch (which would be pretty dangerous anyhow), so I'm not sure I am totally convinced that air flow issues are going to be a great issue.
Now, re: the aerodynamics, your big drag issues happen as you go from
Certainly, you're right, that the mass ratio of the rocket improves if you can decrease the distance traveled, but you still (at least for orbital flight) have to get going silly fast, and there's really no way around it.
Anyhow, I appreciate the data. I'm going to go play with it for a while.
I'm going to have to see if I can figure out what the fuel savings for a rocket look like vs. launch altitude. I might be able to make Excel do my homework for me.
Apparently, Burt Rutan thinks it's a great idea, and he's way smarter than I am. I've just never understood, from a potential energy perspective, how getting a measly 70,000 feet up is going to save you a lot of gas.
My off-the-cuff conclusion is that for a sub-orbital shot, the savings are large, but for an orbital insertion, not so much, simply because for an orbital insertion you need huge huge huge amounts of kinetic energy. (and mv^2 is a bitch)
Fuel is cheap. Maintenance costs the world, and the Concorde is the most expensive-to-operate airliner in the world. So far as I know, it has NEVER shown a profit, so I take your contention with a large grain of salt.
I'd love to see a citation if you happen to have one. I'd like to be proven wrong! I think it's a great aircraft.
Uh, good idea. I'll get right on it.
For what it's worth, I believe that the people, and the technology, are there.
It's the politics and the bureaucracy that are destroying them. Unfortunate.
Because getting an airplane to fly at hypersonic speeds is not absurdly difficult.
Figuring out how to light a fire that stays lit in a high-speed air flow...THAT is hard. Zippos are not windproof at 4000 mph.
The purpose of this vehicle was to test hypersonic COMBUSTION, not hypersonic flight.
See the technology development of the gas turbine engine for many useful parallels.
Scramjets are about the most absurdly complicated things you can imagine, from a fluid dynamics standpoint. Much more data is required to refine their operation. Such data comes from programs like this one.
Now, it may be that NASA and your firm are not being as frugal as they should be, but this is useful and important research, if you think that high-speed air breathing flight is important.
(Me, I say use ballistic rockets, but what do I know?)
I disagree.
The Apollo 1 fire was as traumatic as an accident could be, yet the program pulled itself up by its bootstraps and proceeded to hit their milestone.
I certainly wouldn't argue that NASA, as it is curently chartered, would survive a Mars mission disaster, but frankly I don't think they'll ever have a chance to do so. NASA is impotent.
Yep. And none of the artists are very interested in your opinion, fortunately for those of us who happen to enjoy the diversity of voices on the Internet.
What, do you think somebody's going to come to your door and MAKE you read their blog?
"every crap artist with angsty poems can easily put up a site" They sure can. And good for them.
Yeah, because, um, battery technology has changed a lot in, uh, six months. Not.
The battery life on your iPaq sucked when you bought it. It sucked long before you bought it, it will suck long after you bought it, and you still bought it.
Wow. You mean that battery life on wince devices sucks? No way.
You think you're being funny, but those would in fact be covered under the constitutional right to bear arms.
Where's the logical distinction between a state-of-the-art 1790's-era shoulder fired rifle and an armed, armored vehicle?
They differ only in degree, not in type. The Constitution is predicated on the assumption that the American people are trustworthy. Fortunately, in the overwhelming majority of the cases, they are. It's that vanishing minority, of course, that comprises your evening news.
Yay media.
If you can reliably hit 747s with your missile, sell it to the Army for theatre high-altitude air defense.
If you can't, (and I bet you can't), simply remember that the sky is really, really, really, really, really, big. It would be trivial to locate a launch facility in a place where even going through commercial air-lanes would be nearly impossible.
This problem simply need not exist. It exists only to fund bureaucracies. Which is basically what you said. : )
Sure they do. Any time somebody talks about actually enforcing trade regulations, all the corpocrats start screaming about how cool "free markets" are, even though they would be totally incapable of competing in a true free market.
I am not certain that a true free market is a virtue or not. It would certainly be very hard on the people at the bottom end of the economic food chain when we eliminated the minimum wage. Lots of those people are already depending on a government stipend to put food in front of their kids.
Don't know quite how to fix it, but I'm pretty sure the solution doesn't include protectionist legislation for the richest companies on the planet.
Than Dom Perignon? Not hard. Hell, I'd rather drink Miller Lite.
Dom Perignon is a marketing joke. Everybody in Europe knows it sucks. The only place the French can sell that piss is in the US and in Japan. Everybody else seems to realize it tastes like sweat socks.
Me, I'll take a nice asti spumante. I can get a case or two for the price of a bottle of Dom, and I don't feel like I have to wash my mouth out afterwards.
I only take exception with one thing in your post.
Lexmark printers have NOTHING in common with LEGO. The only toy I've never been able to break, in my LIFE, are LEGO bricks. They're made of some kind of unobtainium stuff. Now, I've killed several models I've built from LEGO, but the bricks are tougher than anything.
I'm convinced that there's a layer of LEGO in the Chobham armor on M1 tanks.
If the capitalists believed in laissez-faire, they would not have gone shopping in Washington for the DMCA.
As long as corporations are given preferential tax and liability treatment, they should be subject to oversight and scrutiny. This is just and right.
I just wish it happened sometimes.
If you just want a ballistic shot, it doesn't matter where you launch from. The trick with orbit is not so much altitude, but speed. Getting to LEO altitude isn't terribly difficult from a fuel consumption perspective. It's that pesky 25000 miles/hr part that's hard. Achieving that speed (think of it in terms of angular velocity with respect to the center of the earth) is what drives the enormous fuel costs of launching satellites. If you launch near the equator, where your angular velocity is at a maximum, you get a free bonus of about 25% additional throw weight for a given fuel load.
You can crunch the numbers differently an launch the same payload with less fuel. Basically, you just need less gas per pound o' stuff you want to launch.
Now, once you spend about three minutes thinking about the cost to carry a pound of stuff into orbit, you have to wonder what all these people want to do rocket-powered Flash Gordon landings. Seems like an awfully stupid idea to me, assuming you're going to land somewhere with an atmosphere.
It's called an idiom, dumbass.
You know, when a mobster says that somebody's "sleeping with the fishes", they're not really sleeping.
Trade secret!=copyright.
They're SECRET, which means that nobody except authorized persons have access to those recipes. If they were out in the open, they would be unprotected (and unprotectable).
Contrariness is not a virtue. Not liking something because everybody else likes it is just as stupid and short-sighted as liking something because everybody else likes it.
I simply don't care about social norms. If I happen to be congruent with them today, fine. If I don't, OK. I just don't care.
Bully for them. Extra if they can get hotties to wear them.
Why is this bad?
Yeah, we better put a stop to that freedom of expression thing. It's really annoying.
So, should I ask YOU before I update my blog? Can I have your home phone number please?