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Rutan's RASCAL



 
 
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  #21  
Old November 9th 04, 10:26 PM
Pat Flannery
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Len wrote:


Yes, we considered the Sukhoi--but acquiring them
is complicated.


You can get a Chinese-made one at your local Wal-Mart. :-)


Pat

  #22  
Old November 9th 04, 11:36 PM
meiza
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In sci.space.history Peter Stickney wrote:
In article ,
Pat Flannery writes:


In times of crisis, the launch restrictions would be put aside, as long
as the booster stages came down over open ocean; it would be a lot
easier (and cheaper) to keep some of these things loaded and ready to go
than a fleet of Lockheed Tristars or B-52's, like Pegasus uses.


The same would hold true for Pegasus.
...


Well, Pegasus has a lot more unmanned explosive solid rocket mass
(19 tons). Considering the RASCAL is smaller and the manned first
stage gives a more significant portion of the energy, the whole
expendable should be about 3 tons, most of which is the
non-explosive hybrid stage. (Ok, still wouldn't want to be
hit by that.) And it's flying more predictably, outside the atmosphere
to start with.

The old Preston Carter pdf also says the release from the aircraft
stage is at about 60 km height. If there's some performance margin,
you can get a few tens of kilometers lateral distance from the
launch site too, doesn't that help enough to get over the ocean for
care-free release?

I understand that the NF-104 rocket-augmented Starfighter was very
hard to control when coming down from ~40 km (reason for SS1's
shuttlecock), how is RASCAL going to solve these problems, if it's
supposed to operate routinely?

The gating itemis getting the
proper payload selected, figuring out just what trajectory you want to
use, and getting the payload and the booster mated and ready to go.
That's a People Thing, and it's hard to reduce it.


Couldn't one design standard quick-to-configure spysat payloads, or is
75 kg so small that you have to have specialized ones because of
instrument tradeoffs? Computers can anyway determine the needed
trajectory (if/when it's possible with launch constraints) parameters
in seconds.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster



--
meiza:
tmaja at cc hut fi

  #23  
Old November 10th 04, 03:56 AM
Pat Flannery
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Peter Stickney wrote:

Story the Second:L When Tank Boy, my youngets brother, was going
through the Armor School at Ft. Knox, one of the Bright Young Recruits
during Gunnery Practice got his switchology mixed up, and was firing
Sabot (APFSDS - Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot) rounds
using the HEAT (High Explosive Anti-Tank) settings in the Fire Control
System. Now Sabot rounds move out at about a mile/second - they've
got, needless to say, a flat trajectory. (And it's kinda eerie to
observe a tank firing from 100 meters away, and seeing the round
impact onthe target before the noise of teh firing reaches you.)

I've seen lots of films of those being fired....they really do move out
at a hell of a high velocity.

HEAT desn't like to travel fast - a fast-moxing shell doesn't give the
penetrating jet of the shaped charge in teh shell time to form - so it
bloop out at a mere 2000 ft/sec or so.
The rounds weere scored as clean misses - especially when a Little Old
Lady outside of Louisvile called the post to see if the Army could
come and pick up the 5 Lawn Darts that showed up in here back yard.


I've got a 105mm APFSDSLRP practice round; the practice round uses a
front end made out of a low melting temperature alloy so that the front
of the dart melts off after a few seconds of travel due to air friction
heating it. The projectile is then aerodynamically unstable, and loses
its velocity via tumbling.

Careful there, Pat, them's Fightin' Words!

I get the laser-powered flying car! I get the laser-powered flying car!

The same would hold true for Pegasus. The gating itemis getting the
proper payload selected, figuring out just what trajectory you want to
use, and getting the payload and the booster mated and ready to go.
That's a People Thing, and it's hard to reduce it.Oh, and there was
plenty of paperwork on the B-2. You can't go ordering all that stuff
and not generate paperwork. (Unless you're ordering by Interocitor,
from Exeter Enterprises) If I were of a Nasty adn Suspicious Mind, I'd
say that the B-2 required more than the usual paperwork - it takes a
lot of overhead to build and maintain the necessary blinds, covers,
and cut-outs. (Not that I'd know anything about that)


It took a _spectacular_ amount of paperwork, especially due to its
classified nature. The GAO was ****ed off at the Lockheed Skunk Work's
approach to paperwork and documentation on the F-117 project...which was
basically to generate as little as possible, and burn it as soon as it
wasn't absolutely necessary to retain- the Soviets couldn't steal it if
it didn't exist.
At the end of the design process they had all the jigs and materials
needed to build the production aircraft, and almost no other surviving
paperwork as to the reasons why exactly it was designed the way it was.
The assembly line workers knew the tolerances they must meet... but not
why those tolerances were necessary.
And then came the B-2 ATB project...and a virtual army of Air Force
pencil pushers descended on Northrop to make sure all the government's
dollars were being well spent.
The F-117 team had a total of 240 people on it between Lockheed and the
Air Force personnel; over 2,000 Air Force personnel showed up at
Northrop's Palmdale plant to make sure that everything was on the
up-and-up with its design and costs... these 2,000 generated an average
of over _1,000,000_ pages of paperwork _per day_ while working on the
project, according to Ben Rich in his book "Skunk Works".
Someone suggested that _all_ the paperwork should be made declassified,
as no one was ever going to find the important stuff in that forest of
wood pulp. Stamping "classified" on something simply attracted attention
to it.
So....was the program's security compromised?
Well, that Sukhoi Su-25 Frogfoot looked a lot like the Northrop A-9; the
design that lost to the Fairchild A-10... and so this little Russian
aircraft design shouldn't come as much of a surprise, either.
Comrade! Behold mighty M-67 LK-M stealth aircraft:
http://www.ussr-airspace.com/catalog...8/12155757.jpg
http://www.ussr-airspace.com/catalog...8/12155808.jpg
http://www.ussr-airspace.com/catalog...8/12155821.jpg
Is triumph of Russian aerodynamic genius!

Is complete lie that is based on design found on page # 310,674,983 of
paperwork found stuffed in trash bin at Northrop Corporation! Page was
actually # 132,745,781- other page has design for aircraft's toilet
paper dispenser on it... is still being studied carefully, as is signed
off on by 347 people, and must therefore be very important to aircraft's
design!


Pat

  #24  
Old November 10th 04, 01:19 PM
Peter Stickney
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In article ,
meiza writes:
In sci.space.history Peter Stickney wrote:
In article ,
Pat Flannery writes:


In times of crisis, the launch restrictions would be put aside, as long
as the booster stages came down over open ocean; it would be a lot
easier (and cheaper) to keep some of these things loaded and ready to go
than a fleet of Lockheed Tristars or B-52's, like Pegasus uses.


The same would hold true for Pegasus.
...


Well, Pegasus has a lot more unmanned explosive solid rocket mass
(19 tons). Considering the RASCAL is smaller and the manned first
stage gives a more significant portion of the energy, the whole
expendable should be about 3 tons, most of which is the
non-explosive hybrid stage. (Ok, still wouldn't want to be
hit by that.) And it's flying more predictably, outside the atmosphere
to start with.


Yoou're still going to have to track it, and the lauanch airplane, on
the way up. What's really needed is an equally portable tracking and
monitoring system. I woudn't be sirpriosed if somebody could put
something together with an E-3 (AWACS) and a couple of hte EC-18
(ARIA) aircraft. It's a lot more feasible these days, since the
airplanes can actually tell where they are with some certainty.

The old Preston Carter pdf also says the release from the aircraft
stage is at about 60 km height. If there's some performance margin,
you can get a few tens of kilometers lateral distance from the
launch site too, doesn't that help enough to get over the ocean for
care-free release?


Not necessarily. The concern isn't so much failure on release, as the
rocket goes haring off on its own while under power. Ideally you'd
like it to hit something soft, cheap, adn which won't due.

I understand that the NF-104 rocket-augmented Starfighter was very
hard to control when coming down from ~40 km (reason for SS1's
shuttlecock), how is RASCAL going to solve these problems, if it's
supposed to operate routinely?


The F-104 configuration had some particulalry nasty high Angle of
Attack behavior. A large part of its mass was also taken up by the
spinning compressor/turbine rotor in the engine, which led to
gyroscopic precession of the aircraft. (That's always there, but
without any airflow over the aircraft to stabilize it, it becomes
significant) The problem was gatting keeping the airplane entering
nose first. With no air to stabilize it, it enters very nose high. I
suspect that in the case of Yeager's last NF-104 flight, it was high
enough to blank the tail. The precession will tend to make it enter
sideways, IIRC.

The stability reasons were one factor in Rutan developing the
"Feather" or "Shuttlecock" mode for SS1. The other main factor is
that he wanted as much drag early on as posssible, so that the
reenteriing aerospacecraft wouldn't accelerate to a high Mach Number,
and thus generate a lot of heat.


The gating itemis getting the
proper payload selected, figuring out just what trajectory you want to
use, and getting the payload and the booster mated and ready to go.
That's a People Thing, and it's hard to reduce it.


Couldn't one design standard quick-to-configure spysat payloads, or is
75 kg so small that you have to have specialized ones because of
instrument tradeoffs? Computers can anyway determine the needed
trajectory (if/when it's possible with launch constraints) parameters
in seconds.


As for payload size - it depends on what you want to do. I'd venture
to say that it is rather small for a high resolution imaging system or
an ELINT system, especially if you want to cover several bands of teh
EM spectrum. You'd need a lot of specialized payloads, and you'd need
to keep them around. One thing we've found is that long-term storage
of satellites, and transporting them all over, isnt a good idea.
The inital trajectory is easy enough to figure out, but factoring in
weather conditions & such - especially for a quick reaction
"one-pass-look" system like we are, at the moment, postulating, is a
much more complicated problem. It doesnt' do any good if you go
through a cras effort to launch you satellite, then have it not able
to see the target on the first pass, for whatever reason. A mussed
opportunity on the first shot couldn't be made up by the same
satellite for something like 18 hours. If you're cramming sensors
into a small, short-lived payload, you won't have much mass/volume
available for power.


--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster




--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster

  #25  
Old November 10th 04, 03:16 PM
Henry Spencer
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In article ,
Peter Stickney wrote:
...Considering the RASCAL is smaller and the manned first
stage gives a more significant portion of the energy, the whole
expendable should be about 3 tons, most of which is the
non-explosive hybrid stage. (Ok, still wouldn't want to be
hit by that.) And it's flying more predictably, outside the atmosphere
to start with.


Yoou're still going to have to track it, and the lauanch airplane, on
the way up.


That's a question of policy, not a law of nature. The US launch ranges
traditionally insist on having continuous tracking data, but not everyone
is so fussy, even in the big-launcher world. The H-II has only the most
limited ground tracking, with flight control after it goes over the
horizon relying mostly on relayed telemetry. Proton isn't tracked at all;
the flight-termination system is entirely autonomous and there is *no*
command uplink to the first three stages.

Policies can be changed.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

  #26  
Old November 10th 04, 10:05 PM
Pat Flannery
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Mike Flugennock wrote:

Wasn't one of the Wrights' first thoughts, after privately building and
flying their proof-of-concept vehicle, of what the Gummint might be able
to use it for, and how much they'd pay?


They tried to sew up every patent they could on heavier-than-air flight;
we can thank those patents for forcing Glen Curtiss to use ailerons
rather than wing warping on his aircraft (the Wrights fought that in
court also) which made planes a lot easier to build, especially when
metal construction came along. You can read up on the Wright/Curtiss
legal battle he
http://www.curtisswright.com/history/1909-1917.asp
The Wrights were in it for a buck.

Pat

  #28  
Old November 11th 04, 12:15 AM
Derek Lyons
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Pat Flannery wrote:
The F-117 team had a total of 240 people on it between Lockheed and the
Air Force personnel; over 2,000 Air Force personnel showed up at
Northrop's Palmdale plant to make sure that everything was on the
up-and-up with its design and costs... these 2,000 generated an average
of over _1,000,000_ pages of paperwork _per day_ while working on the
project, according to Ben Rich in his book "Skunk Works".


Ben Rich doesn't like supervision much, and tends to exaggerate. If
find it hard to credit that any individual could create 500 pages a
day.

Someone suggested that _all_ the paperwork should be made declassified,
as no one was ever going to find the important stuff in that forest of
wood pulp. Stamping "classified" on something simply attracted attention
to it.
So....was the program's security compromised?
Well, that Sukhoi Su-25 Frogfoot looked a lot like the Northrop A-9; the
design that lost to the Fairchild A-10... and so this little Russian
aircraft design shouldn't come as much of a surprise, either.
Comrade! Behold mighty M-67 LK-M stealth aircraft:
http://www.ussr-airspace.com/catalog...8/12155757.jpg
http://www.ussr-airspace.com/catalog...8/12155808.jpg
http://www.ussr-airspace.com/catalog...8/12155821.jpg
Is triumph of Russian aerodynamic genius!


Given the number of other design convergences, in aircraft as well as
other fields. One shouldn't be surprised.

Given that the site you cite is a drooling fanboy site which features
a repainted Orion
(http://www.ussr-airspace.com/catalog...ucts_id=18 56)
and a repainted U2
(http://www.ussr-airspace.com/catalog...ucts_id=15 10)

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

  #29  
Old November 11th 04, 01:04 PM
Pat Flannery
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Derek Lyons wrote:

Ben Rich doesn't like supervision much, and tends to exaggerate. If
find it hard to credit that any individual could create 500 pages a
day.


"A make sure that all these are filled out in triplicate..."





Given the number of other design convergences, in aircraft as well as
other fields. One shouldn't be surprised.


Except that the design is quite unlike anything that the Myasishchev
design bureau ever came up with before; and quite a bit like our
original single tail point variant of the B-2:
http://www.aerodesign.de/nurflugel/B-2_design.gif


Given that the site you cite is a drooling fanboy site


Uh, Derek....Alex Panchenko is the leading importer of Russian space and
aeronautic material into the United States; not a "drooling fanboy". He
knows a lot of cosmonauts and big wheels in the Russian aerospace field
on a first-name basis. Scott Lowther knew about this particular
Russian aircraft design; it's not made up.

which features
a repainted Orion
(http://www.ussr-airspace.com/catalog...ucts_id=18 56)


You do realize that was a serious Tupolev project for a Mach six bomber
to counter our suspected "Aurora"/Orient Express TAV, don't you? And
look, your favorite drug addict even has an article about it on
Encyclopedia Astronautica:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/tu2000.htm

and a repainted U2
(http://www.ussr-airspace.com/catalog...ucts_id=15 10)



Which is in Yefem Gordon's book on Soviet X-planes- the Beriev S-13
"U-2ski" U-2 clone; and gets discussed he
http://www.netwrx1.com/skunk-works/v09.n046

wrote:

writes:

Chris Pocock's new U-2 history is available from Schiffer Books and Barnes
and Noble online. (Probably will show up in Borders and Barnes and Noble
stores soon too.)

Although Joe has been a great research help on my new book, I didn't ask him
to promote it for me - honest!

Now that he has done so, however, I'll add a few points which may be of
particular interest to this readership:

1) for serial number buffs, we finally figured out the correct production
sequence and solved the mystery of Article 390

2) ten years ago, when I wrote DRAGON LADY, I really couldn't figure out
what the U-2B model really was. Solved that mystery too, this time, with the
help of Jeff Richelson.

3) Thanks to my good friend Yefim Gordon in Moscow, the book also has some
details on the REAL "U-2ski" eg the Beriev S-13.

4) Maximum range and altitude. Would you believe, the USAF still considers
this data sensitive for the early U-2 models, even though they were retired
from operational service over 20 years ago! I took that one to a FOIA appeal
and (predictably) lost (does anyone ever win one of those?). Fortunately, I
had some private informants...

Apart from those mentioned above, there are other readers of this list who
helped me in research. To them, my grateful thanks!

Regards Chris Pocock Information is Useless without Intelligence



You can say that again, Chris! And I hope your impoverished manhood becomes a
millionaire someday soon!
I'd like to thank Derek for being the perfect human equivalent of a Firebee target
drone in his last few postings.
As well as having fun writing replies to his criticisms of my very existence,
he unintentionally put me onto a website that has plenty of cool Tupolev aircraft
and missile designs that I had never seen befo
http://www.sergib.agava.ru/russia/tupolev/
Twas' a worthwhile day indeed. :-)

Pat

  #30  
Old November 11th 04, 08:08 PM
Derek Lyons
external usenet poster
 
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Default

Pat Flannery wrote:

snipped discussion of material that shows only *current* (I.E. post
1990's) aircraft designs... With no evidence that the designs were
contemporary.

Pat; Take anything claiming the Soviets had such-andsuch with a
massive grain a salt. It's a growing cottage industry to produce
massive glowing accounts of Great Soviet Terror Machines that were
never built... And sell them to a gullible and drooling public.

The same is true of many WWII era German designs. To read the
websites and the books one could be forgiven for believing the Germans
came within a few turns of a wrench on a WunderAircraft of winning
WWII. We both know that's not true, and why.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

 




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