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DDE

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Everything posted by DDE

  1. ABORT ABORT ABORT! I said "abort", not "full th"...
  2. Unsymmetrical dymethylhydrazine Inhibited Red Fuming Nitric Acid Brennschluss Ferranti-Shirley viscosimeter
  3. I'll just leave this here... http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/futuregames.php
  4. Two nitpicks. First, vapor core and gas core are two very different things according to @nyrath of the Atomic Rockets fame. Second, there's an intermediate class of a vortex-confined GCNR, and possibly MHD-choke-augmented; not quite as thoroughly contained as a nuclear lightbulb, but without wafer-thin quartz walls.
  5. That's because carbon fuels are best burned with an oxygen carrier; FLOX has a wonderful tendency to produce FOOF, which makes your rockets go BOOM, hence fluorine monoxide may be a superior alternative. Its a cryogen... so you might want to roll out some mix based around ClF5 instead if you want to avoid cooling issues. I also happen to have a manual on ClF3 handling, and some papers on FLOX spills. Then there's the RD-301, a flight-rated fluorine-ammonia engine. Just because you're afraid of fluorine, doesn't mean more desperate people would be.
  6. Off-topic question: what's your opinion on ammonia? High boiling point, not as stupidly scarce as RP-1, decomposes unlike water.
  7. Hm. I thought you were going to bring that to the matter of Single Stage From and To Orbit. I have tried to reconcile sci-fi dropships with physics, and ended up with aneutronic microfusion airbreathing motors, alongside chemical rockets for hover and VTOL. If we can somehow get a bimodal GCNR... The Soviets ultimately went with a separate solid-core reactor for starting up the RD-600.
  8. Hypeloop not panning out? The success of Falcon 9 has little to no bearing on his other projects. He has, however, produced a cult of personality akin to the Wizard of Menlo Park, despite being a clear and apparent layman.
  9. Heck, I've seen a NASA paper that suggests a liquid fluorine leak can be neutralized by a barrier of charcoal.
  10. @Kryten Predictable. It didn't exactly fit into the overall Russian launcher line-up.
  11. Yes. Most importantly, TV shows don't bring in cash while the mission isn't launched yet.
  12. Now I have the mental image of nuclear warhead simulators in a movie theater. There appears to be a very slow-moving nativization program, and S7 intends to buy them from Ukraine for Sea Launch and Land Launch. It ain't gone yet.
  13. Meh, I still remember Roscosmos movies where the R-36 ICBM pops out of the silo... then falls right back into the silo, with Jeb-compliant results.
  14. As I said, it's kind of irrational, to the point Baikonur no longer shoots on Wednesdays, and all R-7 launch orders had to be written on cheap yellowish paper because those written on high-quality paper resulted in crashes... for some reason. Apparently R-16 got a particularly bad reputation because the Soviets hadn't quite figured the Inhibited in Inhibited Red Fuming Nitric Acid (pattern АК-27И) and had to scrap one fully fuelled missile after its tanks became full of Green Goo (and acid).
  15. It's largely an irrational hang-up. There was a nasty, multidimensional conflict between Korolev and the kerolox people, and Glushko and his chillingly rational view on propellant toxicity. The R-16 explosion, caused by premature second stage firing and killing the head of the Missile Troops, didn't help.
  16. Yeah, I suspect the incremental improvements should allow it to carry an orbital module... or it could be a one-man affair. However, there is an old problem: thanks to Korolev himself, hypergol-based launchers are considered non-man-rated by default.
  17. Angara with the five first stages. Flew once, never heard from since. Apparently Roscosmos wants to embrace the Kerbal Way; its future superheavies will likely be clusters of Zenit or Sunkar first stages as well.
  18. Not to mention how the whole N-1 ground infrastructure got neatly cannibalized for Energiya...
  19. And because we don't have the large transport aircraft used for Energiya, that limitation is still there. It's even worse for Vostochnyi! Oh, and then there was the RD-270. Very nearly the thrust of F-1, but it was one of Glushko's beloved UDMH-N2O4 large hypergolic motors. As the nutter reasoned, maximum safe UDMH contamination levels are much lower than those for elemental fluorine, so why is everyone so nervous about the fluorine-ammonia RD-301?
  20. FYI, that radiation marker is from the gamma-ray backscatter altimeter. What is this guy even doing here? Do you want to cause another deadly stampede?
  21. If it's the USN it's likely to be atomic. They're supposed to produce a Fast Electron prototype this year.
  22. And that's why I think we're ought to go straight to pulse-laser ablation.
  23. r/space has a copy-paste list, courtesy or u/Senno_Ecto_Gammat:
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