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Petekill posted:* Did anyone else used to get those little info cards in the mail each month? They were like 2 page fold out things that profiled a jet or helicopter, and you got a stack of like 10 of them each month in the mail. I had huge honkin binders full of those things. I wish I could find them now, but they've probably been long-since garagesaled. I've got SEVEN god drat binders of those things, completely filled. And a little hardcover booklet that came with them which is just an index of all of them. And the hosed up thing is, if you go by the numbers, I'm pretty sure they never finished the entire collection. Some of the categories go up to 200 cards, but if you thumb through it skips numbers. Based on the fact that I got the index book, I'm pretty certain I've got all of them though. They're pretty handy for simple lookup poo poo like dimensions and weights (Aerospace Engineer over here) for aircraft that are no longer in production. My Jane's material only covers current production/current military service stuff. b0nes posted:Any of you guys remember a series of T-shirts in the 80's which featured all these different fighter jets on them in wireframe, with a black background? I REALLY want one of those. Nope, but my desktop background is actually a set of images like this which changes every hour. (I stole all the wireframes from the internet and just inverted the colors and moved the views around a bit for aesthetic reasons.) Also, not real planes, but stupid fun to watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fej9EWWLSsw More Edit: What the gently caress is it with youtube and firefox lately? Half the time I click a youtube link it's bringing up the "save link as" dialogue. This happens when I right click>Open in new tab, CTRL+Click, just click, or even type in "youtube.com" in the loving address bar. ApathyGifted fucked around with this message at 11:10 on Mar 8, 2010 |
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Mar 8, 2010 10:52
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You guys should all watch One Six Right. And then weep like little girls that aviation just ain't what it used to be.
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Mar 10, 2010 05:57
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VikingSkull posted:Well, the coatings and such can be analyzed, the electronics and such maybe pieced together. Look at the re-assembly of TWA Flight 800, it's not too hard to rebuild an annihilated airframe. It obviously won't ever fly again, but you can learn a poo poo ton of stuff. The difference between the Russians picking up pieces of a shot-down F-117 and TWA800 is that the people putting TWA800 back together new how the plane was supposed to go together in the first place.
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Mar 11, 2010 01:17
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I saw an MH-53 on static display at an airshow once that I could have sworn had 5 engines. It confused the poo poo out of me.
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Mar 16, 2010 09:20
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I present to you bitches, the LOUDEST loving PLANE ever made. What's that? You already know which plane it is? You think it's the Tu-95 Bear? gently caress that, it's the XF-84H Thunderscreech.  Click here for the full 1800x1230 image. This is an experimental plane, only one built, derived from the F-84 Thunderstreak. It was made to test the possibility of making a supersonic turboprop. Aside from having a propeller designed to go supersonic out front, it also had an afterburner. That's right, an afterburning turboprop. Even without using the afterburner, it is unofficially the fastest propeller aircraft ever built. The propeller spun at a constant 3,000 RPM, which combined with a 12 foot diameter meant that even at idle, the tips were going Mach 1.18. How loud is this motherfucker? Wikipedia has an entire section of its article devoted just to the sound of this thing, something that even the old Bear doesn't get. The feats it can accomplish just by yelling at you include: -Even at idle, the shock coming off the propeller could knock a man down. -Like a top fuel dragster, it can induce nausea and headaches in the people nearby. -One guy had a loving seizure because of it. -After the first few tests, Edwards AFB told the Republic engineers to gently caress off and tow it the hell away whenever they wanted to run the engine, because it was causing damage to components in the control tower. -On the ground, it can be heard 25 miles away. For those not in the know, a sound originating close to the ground can't travel nearly as far as one originating at altitude. That makes this thing on par with a gunpowder factory exploding. -One test pilot flew it one time, and then refused to fly it ever again. That's right. It scared a loving TEST PILOT into quitting. The bad: -Out of 12 flights, there were 10 forced landings -Since there was only one propeller, it torqued like a motherfucker -The engine was built by Allison, otherwise known as the engine people who almost made the P-51 a lovely plane. This is largely why it had an 83% forced landing rate.
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Mar 16, 2010 17:17
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OptimusMatrix posted:This is pretty metal if it's real. I'm a Rotorcraft CFII and you couldn't pay me enough money to fly this. Tip-jet powered rotorcraft are actually easier to fly than conventional helicopters - they don't need a tail rotor because it's not making mechanical torque (the rotor is free-wheeling), and they have a quicker response to control input There is one concept that is much more sustainable than jet engines and rockets in the tips - compressed air. Basically, the engine runs a powerful compressor, which pumps air down each blade where it exits out of a nozzle in the tip. Way more simple and much safer than pumping fuel through the rotor blades. Having actual jet engines on the tips make it easier to auto-rotate though - the higher moment of inertia gives the rotor way more momentum.
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Mar 18, 2010 09:48
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orange lime posted:Couldn't you just do the same thing with a compressed-air copter using a weight on the end of each rotor? You could maybe even have them mounted inboard normally on a catch, with an emergency system to release them and fling them outwards on rails to increase the inertia in case of engine failure. Things that make a helicopter easier to autorotate make it harder to fly normally, because of the higher moment of inertia. Half of the idea of the tip-jet is to be easier to fly (the other half being mechanically simpler). Your sliding weight thing is REALLY complicated from an engineering standpoint as well. Lots of stress involved that has to be accounted for, and got help you if one weight doesn't deploy correctly. It's a bad idea for an emergency system to easily create an even worse emergency. A simple compressed air tip-jet may be harder to autorotate, but it ain't exactly impossible, so it's not like it's a worrisome issue.
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Mar 18, 2010 15:59
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jandrese posted:Just looking at the controls on that thing makes my arm tired. The foot pedals are fine, but having to pull down on a bar to manage the cyclic sounds like a unfun way to fly. Would it have really been that difficult to make it a lever like every other helicopter? Requiring your pilot to hold his arm out in front of him for a long time is not good ergonomics. Er..... Cuz we don't do that all the time in cars? Or in planes that use a yoke.
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Mar 18, 2010 16:36
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Sterndotstern posted:Yeah, again, Davis-Monthan is pretty rad for this kind of stuff. I took a long lunch down at the driving range this past Friday and, in the course of a little more than an hour, I saw: That's because there was an airshow at Davis-Monthan this weekend. (I live nowhere near Tuscon, but all this sounded like airshow stuff, so I Googled it.)
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Mar 21, 2010 13:13
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Puddin posted:I'd love to see them try and land it. They did.
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Mar 23, 2010 03:10
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dangerz posted:I was in our plant in Marietta last year where we build the C5s. After getting to toy around in the cockpit (of which you are 4 stories up), I was taken to an elevator behind the plane. We went up 6 floors, stepped out and were at the tail. It still had a good 10 feet above us. Know any open positions? I'm an entry-level Aerospace Engineer, but from what I've heard Lockheed's online application system is pretty much useless to people looking for a job.
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Mar 29, 2010 15:51
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Somehow I get the impression that the airbrake is deployed so the pilot can just cruise along 3 feet off the ground bitchslapping people.jandrese posted:You know, even though I've seen the pictures, if I'm ever in a 787 that has wing loading like that, I think I'm going to freak out. The 787 would never reach wing loading of that magnitude unless it's already crashed - the wing would stall way before pulling the kind of G's needed to do that. To reach that point you'd pretty much have to suspend the plane by its wingtips and then park 6 more 787's on top of it. Edit: And if that happens to you, take a screenshot because you're obviously playing Just Cause 2 ApathyGifted fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Apr 1, 2010 |
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Apr 1, 2010 01:52
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Nerobro posted:The chase cars are there because the pilot has no real view of the ground, so the people in the chase cars talk them down. The pilot has just as much view of the ground as other limited-visibility planes that don't require chase cars. The chase cars are there because the plane just doesn't want to loving descend once it's in ground effect. There's a lot of phenomena going on, each of which can trick a pilot into nosing the aircraft right into the runway. So the chase cars follow behind and tell the pilot exactly how far off the ground he is. One thing I never got is why the plane even has flaps. It's got a 400 foot flap-less takeoff roll for gently caress's sake, it doesn't need any extra lift on landing.
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Apr 2, 2010 21:08
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Godholio posted:This happens on a daily basis. It made my day when we had KC-10s in the air, just because of cases like this. There's another reason for tankers refueling tankers: Oceans. If you have some sort of operation where large planes with a limited range are trying to get halfway across the world, they're gonna need to refuel in mid-air. But we don't have KC-10's and KC-135's parked on every island along the way there. So instead they have a sort of refueling pyramid. You may only need 1 KC-10 to refuel a flight of 4 F-16's, but that KC-10 needs enough fuel to get to the F-16's, refuel them, and get back to base. So it may get refueled by another KC-10 on the way to the F-16's, and refuel again on the way back. And the KC-10 that's refueling it may need to do the same. I actually had a diagram at some point showing the refueling plan of some really big operation on a map, and it was basically 90% KC-10's and 10% warplanes.
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Apr 6, 2010 00:46
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Dr JonboyG posted:You should see one of the charts that shows how the RAF pulled off the Black Buck raids. I had a sneaking suspicion that this is exactly what it was, and started thumbing through those old "Aircraft of the World" notebooks I have. I have a shitload of them. 7 full binders, and an index book. Yeah, the chart was in one of the Vulcan's cards (it's got 2 in the collection: 1 for the plane, and 1 specifically for Black Buck.
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Apr 7, 2010 02:19
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Mobius1B7R posted:Wow a double post, I am an idiot. Well lets make something fun out of this, what is the best engine noise to your ears? I personally love the howl of the RBs on the 757. The F-15 in full afterburner on takeoff. Which makes me insanely jealous of that rear end in a top hat a few posts up.
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Apr 9, 2010 05:05
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jandrese posted:~9g is right on the edge of what the human body can take with a g-suit. 13g is defiantly pushing it, although if the maneuver is short enough you can probably get away with it. Pretty much this. Human beings (and any animal our size and smaller) can take shitloads of G for short periods of time. You've got that colonel who rode that rocket sled way back then who was pulling in the neighborhood of 40 g's for periods shorter than a second. And my old-rear end copy of Guinness says that the world record for survived G's was 231 by a race car driver hitting a wall, sustained for just a few thousandths of a second. As for the plane itself, yeah, it's pretty much a matter of wing loading, which is just a product of size and weight. For instance, the Extra EA-300 is stressed for +-10G with one person on board, and only +-8G with two people. That's because if you assume an average weight of ~150 pounds per person (which is lowballing quite a bit for the average man, I think.), you're adding 10% more weight compared to the empty aircraft. There's also the whole square/cube problem going on. The amount of G's you can pull is aerodynamically limited by how much lift you can get out of the wing and how much mass the aircraft has. Lift is dominated by the wing area, which increases with the square of a reference dimension as you increase the size of the aircraft. The general rule of thumb is that weight increases in proportion to the cube of the reference dimension. Of course, there are other factors going on (materials used being the biggest), but it's enough for guesswork. You can take it to an even greater extreme by looking at unmanned aircraft. If you took the pilot out of an F-16 and flew it with a computer, it would still be limited to about 9G's. But the AIM-9X it fires can pull something like 60 G's. And it has no wings, just little control vanes. (And vectored thrust) That square/cube thing is also why ants can lift 100 times there own weight and elephants can die just dropping a few inches- mass increases by the third power as an animal gets bigger, but strength is determined by the cross sectional area of the muscle, which only increases by the square.
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Apr 9, 2010 19:27
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Ola posted:Discussion about G-forces tend to include some misunderstandings and some facts taken as absolutes, here's a little low-down: For the record, I only brought up that aerodynamic limit thing because I wanted to talk about the square-cube law. It still applies to the structural mechanics you were discussing, but I sort of went off on a tangent and never got back.
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Apr 9, 2010 23:32
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orange lime posted:Might not even need one. At the plane's marked top speed, the engines have transitioned almost entirely to ramjets (I believe only 20% of the air goes through the compressor), which can work just fine up to Mach 5. Higher speed just means more air rammed into the engine. This isn't necessarily true. You can design a ramjet that works up to Mach 5, but not every ramjet will work at that speed. A ramjet relies on being able to slow the airflow down to under Mach 1 (and drat near to zero compared to the intake velocity) so that the ignitors can actually get the fuel-air mix burning. If you can't slow it down enough, it'll just blow out like a match in the wind. And that's a bit difficult unless you have systems that allow the ramjet to change shape. Mach 5 is the "limit" because around there the area ratios between intake and choking point start to get impractical. On top of that, your stagnation (ram) pressure is getting high enough that the drat flow just re-accelerates after the choking point instead of slowing down further. That's where SCRamjets come in. The SC stands for supersonic combustion, as in being able to set the fuel-air mix on fire while the flow is still supersonic past the ignitors.
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Apr 20, 2010 22:21
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Sterndotstern posted:I saw a slide rule one once. They appear to be a weird relic from some ancient alien civilization, covered with cryptic writing and ratios. I quickly shielded my eyes with my TI-83 and continued playing Dope Wars. I'm one-upping the other guy a few posts up and using this as that thing Facebook likes to put just under your profile picture.
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Apr 22, 2010 00:41
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KELLER! posted:My dad's a former fighter pilot, so he has some awesome stories. Recently (as a result of this thread) we were talking about the SR-71 and I mentioned 85,000 ft. He said all of the published specs and limits were low, and they actually flew quite a bit higher than that. That's because there's a difference between maximum performance and cruising. The SR-71 cruises at 85,000 feet and Mach ~3, but anywhere you look has much higher numbers for the maximum performance (Those old Aircraft of the World cards just told me 101,000 feet and Mach 3.5 for maximums.)
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Apr 25, 2010 06:43
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What's more clever is doing away with the windshield entirely and using cameras instead. Saves you a couple tons of machinery that is probably harder to maintain and less reliable than the cameras hooked to LCD screens. Someone will undoubtedly say "well what do you do if the cameras fail?" To which I respond: What do you do if the nose-lowering machinery fails? You still can't see dick because of a giant nose and heat shield in front of you.
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May 6, 2010 00:35
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Entone posted:Its much easier to trouble shoot those type of mechanical problems than electrical problems midflight. You would be surprised at how many passenger jet aircraft that have an emergency crank or pins accessible by the crew to manually lower the gear/nose/whatever. But this is countered by how much easier it is to add redundancy to an electronic system. Don't even bother troubleshooting, just switch to one of 3 independent backups.
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May 6, 2010 01:21
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The human brain does fine with depth perception on a screen. Otherwise all those full motion simulators used for training would be completely useless. At the distance stuff happens in aviation our normal depth perception breaks down anyway (because there's not enough parallax between the eyes). We stop registering depth as the difference in perspective between two eyes and start registering it by relative motion to your point of view. And really, pretty much every current concept for SST has cameras and screens. Here's an NY Times article from 10 years ago about NASA's work in just that area. You can google "eXternal Visibility System" for more info, although it was phased out in 1999 along with the High Speed Civil Transport project.
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May 6, 2010 04:45
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...The article I linked was about using a camera system on the High Speed Civil Transport. Going cameras on a military aircraft is bad (unless it was some insane high altitude waveriding bomber, which at that point you've got unmanned ICBM's, so who cares?) since you need to have as much visibility as possible what with missiles and other planes and all the other poo poo trying to kill you from every direction.
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May 6, 2010 05:27
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Entone posted:General aviation is like that. Substitute missles with flocks of birds, aircraft trying to kill you with meandering aircraft not on your tower's frequency trying to kill you, and you still haven't addressed how to look 180 degrees in front the plane. Let alone the times I had to lean forward, put my head to the side glass and look back. The computer games/simulations do it because its a simulation, and you can use a joystick to move the pilots head. Not applicable in real life. We're talking about replacing the droop nose of aircraft like the Concorde and Tu-144 with cameras and TV screens, not the Cessna down at your local airstrip. If your Cessna has a droop nose I want pictures. And the guy I was quoting in the post you're replying to said Commercial aviation, not General.
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May 6, 2010 07:32
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Entone posted:IFR is IFR. Regardless if its an American Airlines 737 from DFW or a Learjet out of a municipal. The same rules still apply. You still didn't address a single concern I had about the cameras, besides triple redundancy Your concerns: (This is literally from reading your posts on the subject just now.) Visibility, Field of View, a hypothetical total loss of electrical systems, and a snide remark about how much a drooping nose weighs compared to a quadruple redundant electrical system. I've addressed all three of them already, but here's a conveniently sectioned list: Visibility:Better with cameras. That's right. BETTER. I already covered how depth perception is already shot why flying because of the lack of parallax involved. Meanwhile, a camera can zoom in, the visual data can be used in conjunction with radar/GPS/traffic control to automatically highlight traffic around you (hell the F-35 already does this in the helmet mounted display so you can see enemies directly below you, through the floor). And that's just the day time. Switch over to night and all your eyes are good for is finding strobes out there, unless you're over a city in which case your night vision will be shot. But as pilot in the article I posted before point out, cameras aren't limited to the visual spectrum. It's much, much easier to find a plane out there in the night sky if you can see in the infrared. Not that you'll need that, what with the traffic highlighting I pointed out in the last paragraph. And if this all sounds fanciful to you, keep in mind that this technology is already in use in aircraft around the world, just not all of it in ONE aircraft. Except possibly the F-35. Field of view: Ties back into visibility, but you can use multiple cameras. They're aren't heavy and they're ridiculously small, you can put them pretty much anywhere you want. Hell, there are consumer 1080P cameras that are smaller than the palm of your hand for just over $1,000. I've personally worked with data-collection cameras that were smaller, about the size of a Duplo Block, although they were 720P. And of course, you can always have a zoom function. Compare this theoretically unlimited field of view to that in a Skyhawk. Anything to the left or right above the horizontal is obscured by the wing. Anything more than 10 degrees down in every direction but about a 45 degree window to your left is obscured by the fuselage. Anything from 60 degrees up from the 12 o'clock down to no more than 30 degrees above the horizontal at your 6 o'clock is obscured by the roof. drat near 2/3's of the sky is covered up by your own aicraft. Moving around like putting your head against the glass reduces this to somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 depending on your height and flexibility. If you're in a turn, the down wing obscures every altitude in a 30 degree field, conveniently in the direction you're turning towards. Commercial airliners are arguably worse. Haven't been into the cockpit of an airliner in flight, but crunching the geometry I'd guess you can see a greater angle downward, roughly the same angle upward when it comes to the forward views. You trade off the wings-in-the-way problem of the Skyhawk for the MASSIVE blind spot behind you that covers at least 1/3 of the sky no matter how hard you press against the glass. And of course you'll be relying on a co-pilot to press his head against the glass on the right side. An SST would be even WORSE. Concorde already is worse on the visibility front, even with the drooping nose. Hypothetical total power outage: Already addressed this with redundancy, which you scoffed at by saying you don't have quadruple redundancy in aviation. Funny thing is, when it comes to electronics in aviation, you often have MORE than quadruple redundancy. When taking overlapping redundancies in the system into account you can have upwards of a dozen redundancies dependings on the failure. I got a kick out of you mentioning all the batteries and magnetos failing as well. While you keep putting everything into the reference frame of General Aviation, the mere fact that I'm advocating this on SST's puts it in a whole different ballpark. In another city. On the other side of the country. Let's throw out an example of the ground in between the two: Commercial Jet Aviation. In some models you already have 3-4 redundant systems on power generation alone. Normally the electrical systems are powered by one engine. The backups can include any/all of the following: The other engine, (twin engine aircraft), the two other engines (four engine aircraft), the APU, a deployable wind turbine (already in place, and already put to use once on an Airbus A330), and a bank of backup batteries. Weight of droop nose compared to many-redundant eletronic system: I avoided using a number before because I couldn't find one I could cite for the Concorde's nose system, but I vaguely recall reading that the system added nearly 7,000 pounds of weight to the Concorde. Throw in the fact that it was as far forward as you could possible add weight, and as a pilot you should know the merry hell that played with the CG. Meanwhile, you could plaster the whole cockpit withe LCD's all over the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the back of the pilots' chairs and even put one in the yoke to show the in flight movie, plus a hundred 1080P cameras around the aircraft at the size I mentioned earlier and you still wouldn't even be close to that weight. Hell, I was only advocating the use of a no-windows camera system in an SST to remove the needless complexity and weight of a retractable heat shield (since that is what everyone who is still working on an SST concept is doing anyway). The more I read up on it in an attempt to cite myself, the more I want a camera system on EVERY plane (albeit in conjunction with windows on anything subsonic). The increase to situational awareness is just staggering. Although I don't know why the hell I'm still trying to say how you could fix these essentially non-existant problems when NASA already built the drat system and tested it.
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May 6, 2010 09:46
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, regardless of airframe.
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Nam Taf posted:They've certainly been proven, but the issue is that they need to be accelerated to such high speeds that there's no real practical use for them yet. Furthermore, heating is a horror to deal with. The recently canceled DARPA-funded Blackswift project was actually building on the X-43 and a few other SCRamjet concepts to create a hybrid turbine/Ram/SCramjet to enable travel from 0 to FAST without a booster rocket.
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May 8, 2010 23:53
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Boomerjinks posted:Wait, what now? Tell me more, now please! The USAF has Surface to Air Missiles too! And those little jets (Bede BD-5's) are actually used as manned drones for target practice, simulating stuff like cruise missiles. History Channel aired an episode of Modern Marvels that had them just a few days ago. It was also used by James Bond in Octopussy.
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May 11, 2010 06:49
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MrChips posted:Put simply, an auto engine isn't designed to run for hundreds or thousands of hours on end at high power settings. High power settings? A Cessna Skyhawk will cruise all day at 105 knots and the Lycoming up front only makes 160 horsepower. Meanwhile the new 5.0 Mustang engine can put out 400 horsepower, and part of the testing cycle is subjecting the engine to exactly what you said it isn't designed to do: hundreds of hours under load at near-redline. Edit: It is a high power setting for the aircraft engine, but that's because the Lycoming design is 55 years old. The idea that car engines are unsuitable for aviation use is just an outdated line of thinking from the days when it was difficult to squeeze 200 horsepower out of a small engine. Today that's so stupidly easy that there really is no issue with reliability.
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May 12, 2010 06:08
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Wait. He modified a Nissan VG30. As in the 3.0L, <300 hp VG30? To get 1,000 horsepower? ..... I know it's Burt Rutan and all, but that's just loving retarded. You wouldn't expect an aircraft to make 333% of the power it was designed for and then expect it to run reliably either. Idiots trying less than that are why people who still have Merlins don't sell them to guys who race at Reno.
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May 12, 2010 06:47
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2ndclasscitizen posted:But going by the specs being posted about aero engines, an auto engine in the same application would be running around 50% load and rpm for the same output, which would drastically decrease wear on them. Less than 50% rpm actually. Actually slightly less than highway cruising RPM for many cars. And Mr Chips, my argument has only been about reliability. I maintain that modern car engines can reliably put out the power needed in most GA aircraft pretty easily. Going back to my example of the Cessna 172: 160hp. It's not using 160 hp the whole time, that's just the max output of the Lycoming O320. In reality, by the calculations I ran for a cruising weight of 2200 pounds (about 200 pounds below max takeoff) and speed of 105 knots, you're only using 80-90 horsepower. And that was assuming a stupidly inefficient wing (e=0.5) Thanks to propeller efficiency the engine itself is putting out about 100 horsepower. Power requirements scale with the cube of velocity, so despite the engine being able to output 60% more power, the top speed is still only 122 knots. Honestly, 80-100 horsepower at 1,300 RPM? That's pretty slow for a car engine, granted, but just choosing a better match for the propeller would allow you to bump it up to 1,800-2,000 RPM and then you're right in the power-and-speed sweet spot for highway cruising. And how often does a car engine need an overhaul when doing nothing but highway cruising? How often are aircraft engines supposed to have an overhaul? Back to the Lycoming, that's an overhaul about every 2,000 hours. That's the equivalent of about 140,000 miles for a car engine at 70 mph. Yeah, that's pushing it for a car engine, but quite a few make it that far with nothing but the prescribed fluid (and belt) changes. Considering how babied aircraft engines are just from the normal prescribed maintenance, I really, really doubt that reliability is an issue for car engines on airplanes. Now, you make the weight argument, that's perfectly valid. I'm not disputing that, although the weight is so close in your example that in the end you can throw out a passenger, luggage, or some fuel to sacrifice range (in the right places not to upset the CG of course) But reliability? Like I said, that idea is a holdover from the days when car engines were struggling to make aircraft levels of power and your dad had to tinker with it every weekend to keep it running under normal road conditions.
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May 13, 2010 04:11
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Mobius1B7R posted:How slow you think the 787 had to fly to stay with the Model 40 and a Bonanza? The Model 40's top speed is only 111 knots. I really doubt the 787 was actually flying formation with it. More likely they staged a flyby and snapped the picture at the right moment.
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May 20, 2010 10:14
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What weapons have a G-limit lower than the aircraft's? Surely not the missiles, seeing as they're supposed to be able to out-turn another plane (The Sidewinder's safety doesn't even arm the warhead until after 5 seconds of 20G acceleration, and the AIM-9X has vectored thrust that makes it capable of something like 60G turns). That basically leaves bombs, though I don't really see a reason for them to have such a low G-limit. When it comes to weapons I'd be more concerned about the extra stress of a weapon hanging on at 9G causing damage to the wing than I would about the weapon itself.
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May 31, 2010 21:25
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Minto Took posted:This is what I've wondered. I know a B-52 served as an engine test bed for the 747-100's engines, but I've heard is nearly impossible to re-work the B-52 fleet to move from 8 to 4 engines. Are the plumbing/electrical/mechanical connections so complex that the Air Force can't swap out the current layout for four engines with better economy and higher thrust? They could do it, but there's so many spare TF33's lying around that it's still just cheaper to use them instead.
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Jun 1, 2010 23:00
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I'm fairly certain that due to the B-52's drooping wings that the GE90 wouldn't even fit under them anyway. The GE90 is almost bigger around than the fuselage of a 737, after all. Even it it did manage to fit under there you'd be making GBS threads yourself over FOD. Hell, here's a picture of a GE90 fitted to a 747 for testing. That one engine was able to keep the entire 747 flying, by itself. 
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Jun 2, 2010 21:17
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If I had any photoshops skills there'd be a picture in this post of a B-52 with the entire top and bottom of both wings packed with GE90's. And I'd fly that bitch to the MOON. Edit: And on the horizontal AND vertical stabilizers. And on the sides of the fuselage like on an MD80. And one in the tail like a DC-10. And gently caress it, one on each wingtip. ApathyGifted fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Jun 3, 2010 |
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Jun 3, 2010 02:06
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Yeah, and because of that and the fact that the pilot was on a training mission, and dead-sticked a U-2 on an uncharted runway in the middle of the night with no ground team guiding him in, it's safe to say that pilot was god damned AWESOME.
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Jun 6, 2010 19:42
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Nebakenezzer posted:Sometimes, I look at the B-36 and think it was an enormous waste, in a military sense. The work on the B-52 started in 1945, and surely the Korean war proved that prop planes could no longer be on the frontline. Yet, even knowing that it was doomed to be obsolete shortly, they spent a king's ransom building and maintaining a fleet of them. Well, we could have had the B-60 instead of the B-52. The YB-60 was a derivative of the Peacemaker which basically had the same wing design as the B-52: high, swept, and with 8 jet engines underneath. It shared about 70% of it's fuselage with the B-36 to save money. However from the outset the B-60 was just a backup to the B-52 in case Boeing failed to come through.
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Jun 11, 2010 15:57
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 02:47 |
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Godholio posted:A new F-15 costs $100 million nowadays Is this a matter of inflation or new technologies getting thrown in?
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Jun 19, 2010 21:40
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