sneakeypete

Rocket#1 From this To this. Rocket#2 From this to this. More fuel, and could be even more if i'd launched it slightly better (that's 10 and 3 halfs by the way)

Been messing around with the horizontal lander idea with stock parts, and i have to say, it aint happening.

Knife fight? we're talking about rocket engineers here, i'd assume some kind of explosives would be involved

But agian, even if the design is outdated, that only means that its not going to work as good as some newer high tech designs*, not that it's going to work worse than as designed. *that being said, a new design isn't always what's needed, you can get a lot of extra performance just by going back and redesigning components, eg with new materials or something to reduce weight in some cases. Not all cases, but some.

Media coverage of this makes me want to tear my hair out. 'Russia's aging rockets'. Each rocket is assembled brand new. the design might be 30 years old but that doesn't mean the rocket works worse than it would have 30 years ago!

We do a fair bit of hypersonic's research at my uni, including some scramjet research (though i'm not personally involved in any of it). We were the first to light an actual scramject though, supposedly. The technology (that we're using here) has a very long way to go from making burning proof of concept flights to actually powering anything significant though.

(internal) name: 'orbital heavy lifter' mods: none Capacity: 15 'kg' to 50km circular orbit. Shown lifting two stages to orbit, (fuel tank and motor plus SAS, 2 tanks and a motor). Will also lift 4 tanks and one motor with the SAS module. Stages: 4.5/3.5, depends on configuration of payload First stage is 6 sets of 3 solid boosters. The second stage is 6 mirrored stacks of a solid booster and 3 fuel tanks+motor around a central stack of 4 tanks+motor. second and a half stage is the solid motors firing after the outer liquid ones have been spent. After solid motors have been jettisoned, there should be just enough propellent left in the main stack to reach orbit. The stages above can then be used for maneuvering, and with 3-4 fuel tanks... a lot of that could be on the cards. Notes: surprisingly stable rocket. Without the first stage of boosters, and the sticky launchpad bug, this rocket would probably be able to still get the payload into a lower 35km orbit. Pictures: