You try to sound like you know what you are talking about, but you obviously don't. Flying wings can be every bit as stable as a conventional aircraft.
BTW: CL stands for Coeficient of Lift, what you meant was CP, Center of Pressure.
And WTF is pendulum instability? I've never heard the term by anyone in the aviation industry.
You should follow your own advice and " do some research of your own" You will find that these scientist are 100% correct and not "somewhere in the middle"
Horten 229 all the way! 2 were flown before the end of WWII. 2nd pick is the ME-163, 15,000 ft/min climb! HE-162 is cool, but just a "filler" plane, between technological jumps.
http://www.warbirdsresourcegroup.org/LRG/ho229.h tm l
Even the tutorial which usually bugs the hell outta me was convenient. I actually like the raw images better, gives it more of an "exploratory" feel:) Fun fun fun.
Your post made me think of something. Does this law ban Gameboys and such from the front seats of the car? They certainly seem to fit the description of "able to display a video signal of entertainment applications"
I had a yahoo account from years back. I had SBC DSL from years back. One day SBC asked me to upgrade to Yahoo DSL, and game me some perks to do so. So I did. It asked if I'd like to merge my old yahoo acount with the new SBC/Yahoo DSL account? Sure I said. 6 months later I switch to another DSL provider. My Yahoo account is no longer available, they want $9.99/month to access my yahoo account, they will not relase it. Funny, I can create a new account for free, but I cannot use my old account unless I pay, almost like extrortion, yes?
While cool, this actually isn't all that amazing, hobbiests have been making micro R/C helicopters for years, and I've seen a few almost that small. Check out EZONE MICRO HELI BOARD for all your micro heli enjoyment. I also have one of these VECTRON FLYING SAUCER Cheap, easy to fly, programmable messages, great for parties! A butload of fun, really!
ACR Data Recovery Media Tools Professional 2003. Really! I got one of those terrible deskstar drives, and recently it started going whiirr-click. When I tried booting Win2k it decided it needed to check for integrity and after about a 1/2 hour of "fixing" rendered my hard drive unbootable and fdisk showing no partitions! I tried 4 or 5 of the "big" software solutions to no avail. Media Tools was the 1st one that actually worked. I was able to rewrite the partition and fat information and "gasp" mount my hardrive! Much of the information was corrupted but at least I got some/most of it. The only thing that really sucked was Media Tools 25 drive licence, I used 5 of my licences just to get my data back from 1 drive. I am now using a highpoint 404 controller to mirror my new drives. Less than $200 for a drive mirroring solution. I learned my lesson!
Swear to god, this was just a strange coincidence.
More than you ever wanted to know about battery tech. Keep an eye on the emerging Lithium Polymer batteries @ roughly 3X the current NiCd and NiMh power/weight and power/size batteries. I use them in my micro R/C helicopter instead of the oringal NiMh and get 3X the run (was 5 now 15 minutes) with less than 1/2 the original battery weight (1.75oz vs 3.75oz). These are gonna be cost effective in the next 10 years or so, making a 100 mile range EV very easy and cheap. This is what they are using in the current solar racers. Environmentally friendly as well! Oh the original question? 2000mah NiMh all the way.
were to write some software that would generate every possible iteration of 4 different notes and copyright them all, I could completely kill the music industry and/or become very, very rich? Same thing applies to say, printed media, what if I printed every possible combination of pixels on a piece of paper and copyrighted them all, I would own all the artwork possible?
Don't laugh... with increasing computer power this stuff is actually becoming possible.
Alien Vs. Predator was without a doubt the scariest game I ever played. Walking around in these dark tunnels with the scanner going, beep.... beep... beep.. beep. AAHHH as an alien drops from the ceiling and bites your head off.
The 747 based anti-missle laser system uses pre-packaged, single shot, um... bullets, shells, whatever you wanna call em. http://www.airbornelaser.com/
Check out 1.5/768 DSL for $50/month! I got it and had full 1.5/768 speed 14,000 feet from the CO! But it turned out to be a little flaky so I had to go down to 768/384. Still good enough for smallish game servers. If you are closer to the CO you can get the full speed connection. It's like 1/2 a T1 for $50/month. Their customer support was slammed when I ordered and it was a hassle, but I think things have calmed down now.
I swear I don't work for 'em or anything!http://www.cyberonic.net/int-for-home.sht ml
Sorry, re-read the initial post. Ram-Air type parachutes can achieve decent L/D's and provide for precesion, pinpoint landings. Your statement "Soyuz generates about 8-9 G of acceleration during descent. The Shuttle only generates a comfortable 3-4 G" makes no sence whatsoever, while this "may" be true of these specific re-entry profiles, there is no reason that a winged vehicle would inherently generate less G's during re-entry. I say screw wings, go with an aerodynamicaly stable shape (think teardrop) you can drop items from space on a ballistic trajectory pretty accurately, within a couple hundred miles, and a nice ram-air chute will take you the rest of the way. I agree with the intial post, winged spacecraft are for Buck Roger not real life.
The Martian Chronicles (February 2000, experience not real: Simulated in X-Plane only)
NASA has very exact data on the atmospheric pressure, density, and temperature on Mars. NASA has very exact data on the gravity of Mars. NASA has rough topographic maps for the entire planet of Mars, and very detailed data for some areas. The laws of physics, which are programmed into X-Plane, are the exactly the same on Earth as on Mars. X-Plane needs atmospheric pressure, density, temperature, gravity, and topographic maps to deliver an engineering-accurate flight simulation. Enter a new level of flight simulation. X-Plane can simulate Mars.
The following is an email sent by Austin Meyer, author of X-Plane, to the X-Plane community, at 4:35 AM, February 24, 2000:
I DID POSSIBLY THE MOST EXCITING THING I HAVE EVER DONE TONIGHT. (OK, technically I finished it THIS MORNING). As some of you may know, I have been gathering data on Martian atmosphere, gravity, surface "texture", and topography for X-Plane from various NASA sites (http://ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/tharsis/mola.html, for example)
I do NOT yet have the TOPOGRAPHY for Mars, but I DO have everything else, and I have gotten it all entered into X-Plane and designed two planes to fly on Mars as well, and have been experimenting with deign and flight on Mars for the last 6 hours or so. (Could I be the first human to fly a real-time flight simulaton of Mars? I have seen many "movies" of "flying" over Mars terrain, but NONE have been hooked to an actual realistic FLIGHT MODEL... has NASA done a REAL-TIME simulation of Mars flight in a PILOTED aircraft? Has ANYONE?) Well, I have for the last 6 hours, AND IT IS FRIGGIN FASCINATING.
First of all, the atmosphere is ONE PERCENT as thick on Mars as it is on earth... INDICATED airspeed is proportional the the square root of the air density, so the INDICATED airspeed is ONE TENTH the true airspeed.
The result? If you take off with 60 knots on the airspeed indicator, your REAL speed is SIX HUNDRED KNOTS! (about Mach 1) Take it from me, Mach-1 takeoffs are quite a thing to behold, when the plane will barely leave the runway at that speed.
While there is almost no AIR for you, you do have the (sort of) advantage of only about ONE THIRD the GRAVITY, so it is three time easier to get airborne!
Result? A take-off in a well-designed airplane can occurr at a "mere" 400 knots or so, indicating all of 40 knots on the airspeed indicator!
Sound easy? IT ISN'T, BECAUSE WHILE YOUR GRAVITY (WEIGHT) IS ONLY ONE-THIRD OF EARTH'S, YOUR ==>INERTIAPARACHUTE? NOPE!!!! 400 mph is only 40 mph worth of drag due to the thin air. You will run off the end of the runway going 100 mph with the chute only "seeing" 10 mph: USELESS for slowing down
->BRAKES? NOPE!!! You only have one-third gravity, so only 1/3 of your weight on the wheels. NO TRACTION!
->Reverse thrust? NOPE!!!! With only 1% atmosphere, jet or prop engines can put out basically no thrust... just barely enough to keep the airplane in flight at mach-0.85.. the jet plane needs a JATO to take off!
So how do you stop? I finally went with ARRESTING GEAR. I know of no other way to avoid blasting off the end of the runway at 200 knots with the chute uselessy deployed and brakes uselessly locked.
Speaking of which, CRASHES are interesting. No air drag to slow the tumbling planes down, and little gravity to drag them to a stop against the ground! Crashes look like "the Agony of Defeat" from the Olympics where the guy on the downhill ski-jump bites it near the top of the ramp and tumbles on and on and on, powerless to stop an accident that started hundreds of yards earlier! (though on mars, at 400 mph, your plane will tumble across the plains for MILES!)
CRUISING ALONG OVER MARS is SPECTACULAR, with the scary red-orange Martian sky, new Martian rocky-red terrain textures, VISIBLY thinner air(!) (due to modified lighting in OpenGL, modified fog in OpenGL, and visibility of stars).. you really can tell you are halfway between air and space! Returning to Earth, you feel like you are flying in soupy water! Yuk!
So what sort of planes can fly on Mars? Not anything from Earth, that's for sure. Not enough lift or thrust. A Cessna or Boeing will just sit there on the ground without even moving. Put them in the air and they drop like beveled bricks with no wings. Both of my Mars-plane concepts are much like the U-2 Spyplane (designed to operate at around 100,000 ft, in simlar density air) one with a HUGE high-bypass jet engine built AROUND THE FUSELAGE, and another with a smaller rocket engine in the tail, like the X-15. The rocket plane has a lower-thrust engine, with plenty of fuel, for about 30 minutes of flight or so... the JET plane can fly for hours!
My designs are realistic (again, based on the U-2, with reduced weight for the lower structural needs (lower gravity) and modern (composite) materials). The rocket-plane is pretty much gauranteed feasible (known technology across the board) but the jet-powered one I am not sure about since Mars has so little OXYGEN in the atmosphere it may be impossible to keep a turbofan engine running.(My Mars jet-plane has twice the average fuel-consumption, though, to simulate injection of liquid oxygen or nitrous oxide). Bottom line, I now know it IS possible to build and fly a piloted plane on Mars and I now know what it would be like. (though I used a 10,000 ft runway with arresting wires... none of those on Mars now I admit).
Check out X-Plane (http://www.x-plane.com). The most realistic physics based flight-sim on the market. There is a mars terrain and many "mars planes" to fly, as well as being able to design your own. Point being... it is, at least theoretically, possible to fly on mars.
Slashdot Mirror
You try to sound like you know what you are talking about, but you obviously don't. Flying wings can be every bit as stable as a conventional aircraft.
BTW: CL stands for Coeficient of Lift, what you meant was CP, Center of Pressure.
And WTF is pendulum instability? I've never heard the term by anyone in the aviation industry.
And yes I DO design aircraft for a living.
You should follow your own advice and " do some research of your own" You will find that these scientist are 100% correct and not "somewhere in the middle"
Horten 229 all the way! 2 were flown before the end of WWII. 2nd pick is the ME-163, 15,000 ft/min climb! HE-162 is cool, but just a "filler" plane, between technological jumps.
h tm l
http://www.warbirdsresourcegroup.org/LRG/ho229.
Can I sue for damages as all companies in Santa Cruz now have a negative image associated with them?
could it be used on politicians?
Even the tutorial which usually bugs the hell outta me was convenient. I actually like the raw images better, gives it more of an "exploratory" feel :) Fun fun fun.
riiiiight. I mean altruism has it's place, but no-one on this planet can resist that kind of cash.
Your post made me think of something. Does this law ban Gameboys and such from the front seats of the car? They certainly seem to fit the description of "able to display a video signal of entertainment applications"
Now you can see the REAL MS space screen saver!
I had a yahoo account from years back. I had SBC DSL from years back. One day SBC asked me to upgrade to Yahoo DSL, and game me some perks to do so. So I did. It asked if I'd like to merge my old yahoo acount with the new SBC/Yahoo DSL account? Sure I said. 6 months later I switch to another DSL provider. My Yahoo account is no longer available, they want $9.99/month to access my yahoo account, they will not relase it. Funny, I can create a new account for free, but I cannot use my old account unless I pay, almost like extrortion, yes?
While cool, this actually isn't all that amazing, hobbiests have been making micro R/C helicopters for years, and I've seen a few almost that small. Check out EZONE MICRO HELI BOARD for all your micro heli enjoyment. I also have one of these VECTRON FLYING SAUCER Cheap, easy to fly, programmable messages, great for parties! A butload of fun, really!
ACR Data Recovery Media Tools Professional 2003. Really! I got one of those terrible deskstar drives, and recently it started going whiirr-click. When I tried booting Win2k it decided it needed to check for integrity and after about a 1/2 hour of "fixing" rendered my hard drive unbootable and fdisk showing no partitions! I tried 4 or 5 of the "big" software solutions to no avail. Media Tools was the 1st one that actually worked. I was able to rewrite the partition and fat information and "gasp" mount my hardrive! Much of the information was corrupted but at least I got some/most of it. The only thing that really sucked was Media Tools 25 drive licence, I used 5 of my licences just to get my data back from 1 drive. I am now using a highpoint 404 controller to mirror my new drives. Less than $200 for a drive mirroring solution. I learned my lesson!
Swear to god, this was just a strange coincidence.
Forgot the link!
More than you ever wanted to know about battery tech. Keep an eye on the emerging Lithium Polymer batteries @ roughly 3X the current NiCd and NiMh power/weight and power/size batteries. I use them in my micro R/C helicopter instead of the oringal NiMh and get 3X the run (was 5 now 15 minutes) with less than 1/2 the original battery weight (1.75oz vs 3.75oz). These are gonna be cost effective in the next 10 years or so, making a 100 mile range EV very easy and cheap. This is what they are using in the current solar racers. Environmentally friendly as well! Oh the original question? 2000mah NiMh all the way.
were to write some software that would generate every possible iteration of 4 different notes and copyright them all, I could completely kill the music industry and/or become very, very rich? Same thing applies to say, printed media, what if I printed every possible combination of pixels on a piece of paper and copyrighted them all, I would own all the artwork possible?
Don't laugh... with increasing computer power this stuff is actually becoming possible.
Alien Vs. Predator was without a doubt the scariest game I ever played. Walking around in these dark tunnels with the scanner going, beep.... beep... beep.. beep. AAHHH as an alien drops from the ceiling and bites your head off.
The 747 based anti-missle laser system uses pre-packaged, single shot, um... bullets, shells, whatever you wanna call em. http://www.airbornelaser.com/
http://www.austinev.org/evalbum/362.html
Check out 1.5/768 DSL for $50/month! I got it and had full 1.5/768 speed 14,000 feet from the CO! But it turned out to be a little flaky so I had to go down to 768/384. Still good enough for smallish game servers. If you are closer to the CO you can get the full speed connection. It's like 1/2 a T1 for $50/month. Their customer support was slammed when I ordered and it was a hassle, but I think things have calmed down now.
t ml
I swear I don't work for 'em or anything!http://www.cyberonic.net/int-for-home.sh
In similar news... this in my hometown.
2 1/ local/stories/01local.htm
http://www.santa-cruz.com/archive/2003/January/
Sorry, re-read the initial post. Ram-Air type parachutes can achieve decent L/D's and provide for precesion, pinpoint landings. Your statement "Soyuz generates about 8-9 G of acceleration during descent. The Shuttle only generates a comfortable 3-4 G" makes no sence whatsoever, while this "may" be true of these specific re-entry profiles, there is no reason that a winged vehicle would inherently generate less G's during re-entry. I say screw wings, go with an aerodynamicaly stable shape (think teardrop) you can drop items from space on a ballistic trajectory pretty accurately, within a couple hundred miles, and a nice ram-air chute will take you the rest of the way. I agree with the intial post, winged spacecraft are for Buck Roger not real life.
The Martian Chronicles (February 2000, experience not real: Simulated in X-Plane only)
NASA has very exact data on the atmospheric pressure, density, and temperature on Mars.
NASA has very exact data on the gravity of Mars.
NASA has rough topographic maps for the entire planet of Mars, and very detailed data for some areas.
The laws of physics, which are programmed into X-Plane, are the exactly the same on Earth as on Mars.
X-Plane needs atmospheric pressure, density, temperature, gravity, and topographic maps to deliver an engineering-accurate flight simulation.
Enter a new level of flight simulation. X-Plane can simulate Mars.
The following is an email sent by Austin Meyer, author of X-Plane, to the X-Plane community, at 4:35 AM, February 24, 2000:
I DID POSSIBLY THE MOST EXCITING THING I HAVE EVER DONE TONIGHT. (OK, technically I finished it THIS MORNING). As some of you may know, I have been gathering data on Martian atmosphere, gravity, surface "texture", and topography for X-Plane from various NASA sites (http://ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/tharsis/mola.html, for example)
I do NOT yet have the TOPOGRAPHY for Mars, but I DO have everything else, and I have gotten it all entered into X-Plane and designed two planes to fly on Mars as well, and have been experimenting with deign and flight on Mars for the last 6 hours or so. (Could I be the first human to fly a real-time flight simulaton of Mars? I have seen many "movies" of "flying" over Mars terrain, but NONE have been hooked to an actual realistic FLIGHT MODEL... has NASA done a REAL-TIME simulation of Mars flight in a PILOTED aircraft? Has ANYONE?) Well, I have for the last 6 hours, AND IT IS FRIGGIN FASCINATING.
First of all, the atmosphere is ONE PERCENT as thick on Mars as it is on earth... INDICATED airspeed is proportional the the square root of the air density, so the INDICATED airspeed is ONE TENTH the true airspeed.
The result? If you take off with 60 knots on the airspeed indicator, your REAL speed is SIX HUNDRED KNOTS! (about Mach 1) Take it from me, Mach-1 takeoffs are quite a thing to behold, when the plane will barely leave the runway at that speed.
While there is almost no AIR for you, you do have the (sort of) advantage of only about ONE THIRD the GRAVITY, so it is three time easier to get airborne!
Result? A take-off in a well-designed airplane can occurr at a "mere" 400 knots or so, indicating all of 40 knots on the airspeed indicator!
Sound easy? IT ISN'T, BECAUSE WHILE YOUR GRAVITY (WEIGHT) IS ONLY ONE-THIRD OF EARTH'S, YOUR ==>INERTIAPARACHUTE? NOPE!!!! 400 mph is only 40 mph worth of drag due to the thin air. You will run off the end of the runway going 100 mph with the chute only "seeing" 10 mph: USELESS for slowing down
->BRAKES? NOPE!!! You only have one-third gravity, so only 1/3 of your weight on the wheels. NO TRACTION!
->Reverse thrust? NOPE!!!! With only 1% atmosphere, jet or prop engines can put out basically no thrust... just barely enough to keep the airplane in flight at mach-0.85.. the jet plane needs a JATO to take off!
So how do you stop? I finally went with ARRESTING GEAR. I know of no other way to avoid blasting off the end of the runway at 200 knots with the chute uselessy deployed and brakes uselessly locked.
Speaking of which, CRASHES are interesting. No air drag to slow the tumbling planes down, and little gravity to drag them to a stop against the ground! Crashes look like "the Agony of Defeat" from the Olympics where the guy on the downhill ski-jump bites it near the top of the ramp and tumbles on and on and on, powerless to stop an accident that started hundreds of yards earlier! (though on mars, at 400 mph, your plane will tumble across the plains for MILES!)
CRUISING ALONG OVER MARS is SPECTACULAR, with the scary red-orange Martian sky, new Martian rocky-red terrain textures, VISIBLY thinner air(!) (due to modified lighting in OpenGL, modified fog in OpenGL, and visibility of stars).. you really can tell you are halfway between air and space! Returning to Earth, you feel like you are flying in soupy water! Yuk!
So what sort of planes can fly on Mars? Not anything from Earth, that's for sure. Not enough lift or thrust. A Cessna or Boeing will just sit there on the ground without even moving. Put them in the air and they drop like beveled bricks with no wings. Both of my Mars-plane concepts are much like the U-2 Spyplane (designed to operate at around 100,000 ft, in simlar density air) one with a HUGE high-bypass jet engine built AROUND THE FUSELAGE, and another with a smaller rocket engine in the tail, like the X-15. The rocket plane has a lower-thrust engine, with plenty of fuel, for about 30 minutes of flight or so... the JET plane can fly for hours!
My designs are realistic (again, based on the U-2, with reduced weight for the lower structural needs (lower gravity) and modern (composite) materials). The rocket-plane is pretty much gauranteed feasible (known technology across the board) but the jet-powered one I am not sure about since Mars has so little OXYGEN in the atmosphere it may be impossible to keep a turbofan engine running.(My Mars jet-plane has twice the average fuel-consumption, though, to simulate injection of liquid oxygen or nitrous oxide). Bottom line, I now know it IS possible to build and fly a piloted plane on Mars and I now know what it would be like. (though I used a 10,000 ft runway with arresting wires... none of those on Mars now I admit).
Check out X-Plane (http://www.x-plane.com). The most realistic physics based flight-sim on the market. There is a mars terrain and many "mars planes" to fly, as well as being able to design your own. Point being... it is, at least theoretically, possible to fly on mars.
Sweet, now I can cool down my plasma bean burritos straight out of the microwave!
It was in full 3D and you could have full 3D maneuvering during your battles! I love the ships design and weapons.