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fun with expendable SSTOs (was The 100/10/1 Rule.)
"Henry Spencer" wrote in message
... ... Very light tanks, probably pressure-stiffened like the old Atlas. Does this choice place too many burdens & costs on ground handling and checkout facilities/personnel? From my readings it appears the classic Atlas folks had to throw plenty of $ at the problems to solve them (granted they had completely different requirements, what with the operational USAF silo basing, for the missles). Von Braun's folks reportedly hated the pressure-stabilized approach, apparently judging it just couldn't fit with their culture of protracted stacked checkout. It seems the latest Ariane model requires pressure stabilization in the cyrogenic stage's LH2 tank even during handling, which I thought was pretty interesting. Would you chose steel, like Atlas, or Aluminum alloy? ... Boost pumps at the bottom of the tanks, or possibly the bottom of the feed lines... How are such pumps driven? Do they have their own turbines or can the engine pumps drive them via shafts/gearboxes? ... One interesting option is to make the boost pumps jet pumps, recirculating a bit of the output from the main pumps to the jets in the boost pumps. (That too has been done.) ... By "jet pump" do you mean something like a water-driven eductor pump? I've used those for dewatering bilges and compartments on naval vessels and it's pretty cool how fast such a simple rig can pump water. Is it bad to have yet more high-velocity/high-pressure fluid piping running between pairs of pumps? Seems like asking for trouble, what with all the vibration and flow you're already having to cope with... Finally, for engines, I'm partial to the idea of an aerospike with a ring of small individual chambers. The small chambers help keep the scale of most engine-development facilities down. The aerospike provides altitude compensation and also permits a light, compact nozzle with a very high expansion ratio in vacuum. Henry, do aerospike engines have to be carefully integrated with the particular airframe? If so, is that a problem? Would such an engine use differential throttling to control pitch and yaw? How about roll control during boost? Wouldn't your engine layout lend itself to a tripropellant arrangement? That is, set up some chambers to burn LOX/LH2, start them at the appropriate time (ground?) and draw from an LH2 tank up on top of the stack (sorry to stretch out your nice high-bending resistance airframe and weigh it down w/vacumn-jacketed LH2 lines...). The propane tank would be smaller, but the LOX tank might have to get bigger. Shut down the LOX/Prop chambers when the Propane's gone and press on to orbit. I know you don't like that fluffy LH2 but I couldn't resist ... :-D J |
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