mz, I disagree with your analogy. I appreciate you trying to dumb it down for me,
but I don't need that. I am not the local rotary club who needs an analogy with
common things to make sense of a complex topic.
I intend to work on this stuff some day so I read a lot about it. Books, tech papers,
attend classes, etc.
When I earlier said that:
"As proper development occurs, the technology problems will be solved."
You replied:
"It's stupid to try to push a bad solution for a problem when better ones exist"
Well then I guess I'm stupid ! Except I don't see this as a bad solution. I see it
as the future.
After all, given the 100X combustion pressures that rockets have today over airbreathers,
rocket technology has not had an easy time of it either. Combustion instabilities, and even
having to handle high temperatures in the nozzle and chamber walls, as well as being able
to pump fuel and oxidizer to the large pressures required mechanically, to say nothing of
having to handle Mach 25 air loads and aerothermodynamics on reentry, show that these
problems can be solved. I think of the turbine airfoils in the hottest sections of todays
jet engines as airfoils subjected to hypersonic environments. I see the regen. cooled walls
of rocket nozzles and combustion chambers as similar to sections of hypersonic airbreather
airframes. Did you know that one of the next development ideas for rockets is supersonic
turbines? Maybe some day we'll see supersonic combustion in turbopumps downstream of fully
supersonic turbines? You never know!
Airbreather SSTOs will require levels of efficiency never before attained by any airbreathing
vehicle. They will have to learn how to use the heat they create and also how to lose minimum
energy. This is the study of exergy which is popularized these days in airbreathing SSTO
technical papers. There is also the usage of high temperature environments that airbreathers
create to cause low temperature plasmas to do the work of variable geometry in inlets and nozzles
and help accelerate flows in combustors and also to help with aerodynamic flow control, onboard
power generation plasma assisted combustion, and advanced endothermic fuels. In other words,
taking energy out of the high temperature envionment and using it.
These things are a ways off, but I find them extremely interesting, and the way some people
like me work, is they like to figure new stuff out! So maybe in the end we'll be left with today's
rocket. But I don't think so.
So I am hopeless and don't want to be saved!
Regards!
