Object.method() doesn't really make sense due to multiple dispatch, I think.
207 karma · joined August 27, 2013
"Problems like these are almost always the result of management pushing things faster than the engineering progress warrants."
Coincidentally, we were talking about such an instance today at work, the Conestoga 1620. As relayed to me, the "low frequency noise" mentioned in the wikipedia post was a low frequency structural mode that was missed because management didn't want to pay for a high enough fidelity finite element analysis.
I'm not sure what constitutes adequate qualification, though. Both engines were ground tested at least some. And in Virgin's case, this flight was one of tests.
"Liquid/liquid engines, by any measure, are orders of magnitude more stable."
What do you mean by stable?
A reason to go with hybrids, at least on paper, is that they are mechanically simple but throttlable, hopefully combining the simplicity of a solid booster with the ability to throttle and shutdown of a liquid.
Of course, much of that also applies to blowdown liquid systems, and I personally find a blowdown methane/lox system particularly compelling. I figure Virgin wanted to avoid cryogens, though.
Strong oxidizers are almost universally hard to handle. About the nicest ones around are Lox, Nox and hydrogen peroxide.
1. They didn't stay with rubber/nitrous.
2. Like the sort used on Antares?
"Seeing only the first paragraph, I already know that some rubber in the hybrid engine detached blocking the nozzle and causing the whole engine to explode."
But what you know is wrong, they weren't using rubber.
I think a good case can be made that they didn't do enough ground testing, but your post mixing disdain and falsity doesn't advance that case.
And parasitic drag dominates, right? Ok, so yeah, I was thinking in terms of induced drag. Thanks for the discussion. I enjoyed it and it was a good refresher.
For low speeds, maybe. For high speeds, you're well into the high Reynolds number turbulent regime. I've worked on R/C aircraft designs and I'm reasonably sure we got decent results with inviscid aerodynamics. At sea level, you're going to see Re in the millions.
Regarding the Square-Cube law, I'm not sure it's that relevant here. It's pretty clear you could put two of those engines in a AMA sized model, so not exceeding 55 lbf. That'd give you a thrust-to-weight ratio of greater than 1.0.
Does the Mill even need an FP unit? Or rather, couldn't a VLIW architecture be able to emulate floating point in such a way that it's nearly as fast and/or more flexible as far as precision and/or might be more optimizable for certain values?
Minimally, if you break down the FP opp into it's constituent integer operations, you put all of those in flight at the same time or schedule them to hide latencies of other operations, I would think.