Whoop-dee-derp, looks like they aren't trying to make the Skylon an SSTO anymore

[Van Disaster]

BAE sold all their remaining commercial air interests to Airbus last decade - irritating to someone who remembers homegrown airliners but just another BAE idiocy, so I can't imagine any of their plans being anything related to passengers or even commercial payloads. I'm still surprised it was BAE and not RR who invested, it's not like RR haven't looked at similar things in the past. There are other UK space interests, I think we have about 7% of the commercial space market without having a space program at all ( our ESA contributions have been somewhat unenthusiastic ).

Slightly offtopic, but the Concorde project was a vast success - called Airbus. The Concorde airliner was a bit less so,  but it did have some awful luck with events in the 70s & it wouldn't have taken that much work to make it a more palatable product.

[wumpus]

20 hours ago, DDE said:

Which is exactly what I was talking about. [about issues air launching at mach 6]

Now that I think of it, the Blackbird was originally designed with a launchable rocket to go anywhere the Blackbird couldn't.  Since the only thing stopping the Blackbird were treaties and threats of Soviet reprisals (they couldn't hit the thing directly), the extra rocket was "never" used.  Anybody know if it was tested (and the results unclassified/leaked)?

Another example would be the Pegasus booster for the X-43.  That takes the combined aircraft from nominal jet speed (~mach .8?) to over mach 4.  This appears similar to vertical staging, except the vehicle is flying horizontally.  Note that since both craft are disposable, they might even use "fire in the hole" staging.

That little black spot on the front is the X-43, the rest is the Pegasus booster.

[Van Disaster]

7 minutes ago, wumpus said:

Now that I think of it, the Blackbird was originally designed with a launchable rocket to go anywhere the Blackbird couldn't.  Since the only thing stopping the Blackbird were treaties and threats of Soviet reprisals (they couldn't hit the thing directly), the extra rocket was "never" used.  Anybody know if it was tested (and the results unclassified/leaked)?

Lockheed M-21, could have worked better...

[DDE]

23 minutes ago, wumpus said:

Now that I think of it, the Blackbird was originally designed with a launchable rocket to go anywhere the Blackbird couldn't.  Since the only thing stopping the Blackbird were treaties and threats of Soviet reprisals (they couldn't hit the thing directly), the extra rocket was "never" used.  Anybody know if it was tested (and the results unclassified/leaked)?

Another example would be the Pegasus booster for the X-43.  That takes the combined aircraft from nominal jet speed (~mach .8?) to over mach 4.  This appears similar to vertical staging, except the vehicle is flying horizontally.  Note that since both craft are disposable, they might even use "fire in the hole" staging.

And that's still slower than expected. Not to mention those goddamned hydrogen tanks, which will likely be designed as close to structural limits as possible...

[wumpus]

5 minutes ago, Van Disaster said:

Lockheed M-21, could have worked better...

Ouch.  Looks safe enough for the X-43 program (as in I wouldn't expect that to be safer for a low run of disposable craft).  Not good enough even for an unmanned SABRE-powered launcher.

[Emperor of the Titan Squid]

What upper stage would they use, I wonder.

[Starwaster]

On 7/14/2016 at 11:11 AM, wumpus said:

Now that I think of it, the Blackbird was originally designed with a launchable rocket to go anywhere the Blackbird couldn't.  Since the only thing stopping the Blackbird were treaties and threats of Soviet reprisals (they couldn't hit the thing directly), the extra rocket was "never" used.  Anybody know if it was tested (and the results unclassified/leaked)?

What stopped it was that it was never very successful. In fact, a plane was lost and someone died because of that thing. (Mach 3 launch, engine on the drone didn't start and it collided with its mothership and destroyed it)

[Lord_inter]

Is this thread to old to bring up again, I have a valid point to make.

Concorde was phase one of hotol (now named Skylon), what has held Alan Bond etc up is the top secret parts of concorde design.

So let's see if we can find a relatively large craft that can travel supersonic as a test bed for the sabre engine. Maybe one that's very reliable, maybe only ever 1/2 crashes in 30ish years

 

No one ever though it was weird how the engines concorde had looked really out of place (they were just taken off a fighter jet and bolted on)

[kurja]

10 hours ago, Lord_intet said:

 

No one ever though it was weird how the engines concorde had looked really out of place (they were just taken off a fighter jet and bolted on)

Except that they weren't? No other aircraft flew with those engines. Design was based on military use engines though.

[hms_warrior]

10 hours ago, Lord_intet said:

Is this thread to old to bring up again, I have a valid point to make.

Concorde was phase one of hotol (now named Skylon), what has held Alan Bond etc up is the top secret parts of concorde design.

So let's see if we can find a relatively large craft that can travel supersonic as a test bed for the sabre engine. Maybe one that's very reliable, maybe only ever 1/2 crashes in 30ish years

 

No one ever though it was weird how the engines concorde had looked really out of place (they were just taken off a fighter jet and bolted on)

So your basic idea is to take one of the old concordes, change the engines, fill the passanger-cabin whit hydrogen tanks and see what will happen? ... i like that XD. Could save millions of euros/dollars/pounds that way. I mean it most likely would not be very efficient...but who cares? it's just a testvehicle anyway. Of course you can't go up to mach 5.5 because the hull would melt...but up to mach 2.5? you could test the engine.

[p1t1o]

12 hours ago, Lord_intet said:

Is this thread to old to bring up again, I have a valid point to make.

Concorde was phase one of hotol (now named Skylon), what has held Alan Bond etc up is the top secret parts of concorde design.

So let's see if we can find a relatively large craft that can travel supersonic as a test bed for the sabre engine. Maybe one that's very reliable, maybe only ever 1/2 crashes in 30ish years

 

No one ever though it was weird how the engines concorde had looked really out of place (they were just taken off a fighter jet and bolted on)

Wow, thats quite a few spurious claims...

lol, no, there is little linking the three projects, they certainly aren't 3 parts of the same project.

Top secret parts of Concorde's design? Doubt it.

Concorde as SABRE testbed? Sure, but its been a while since any of those airframes have flown, it may well be easier and cheaper to build a bespoke platform.

And concordes engines are precisely where they ought to be...The reason that they look like they come off a fighter jet is that until concorde, military aircraft where the only ones to break the sound barrier (barring any one-off exceptions) so that is the only other place you'd have seen similar engine/intake geometry. You wanna see an engine out of place? Check out how they tested Concorde's engines...

[magnemoe]

Yes, for an rapier testbed it would be better to use an MIG-25 the same way.
Its an mach 3 plane and its plenty of them around the world. 
downside would be that you could not bring much hydrogen and you could only test an sub scale engine anyway. 

[Lord_inter]

Well my dad said the couldn't develop the air breathing engines (which are now sabre) as they knew they didn't have the materials, carbon fibre was the best they managed.

Concorde was so far ahead of its time....

[Nibb31]

6 minutes ago, Lord_intet said:

Well my dad said the couldn't develop the air breathing engines (which are now sabre) as they knew they didn't have the materials, carbon fibre was the best they managed.

Concorde was so far ahead of its time....

Carbon fiber didn't exist when Concorde was designed. Sabre engines have nothing to do with Concorde. You're utterly confused.

[magnemoe]

16 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:

Carbon fiber didn't exist when Concorde was designed. Sabre engines have nothing to do with Concorde. You're utterly confused.

You don't want to use carbon fiber in engines anyway outside of the air-frame part who don't run too hot. 

[Lord_inter]

Hmmm I'll concede no carbon fibre but they did want different engines and it was a test bed, it was part of the hotol project. Alan Bond and a load of others working for reaction engines worked on concorde. They've said they had problems getting the designs for concorde because they're still a state secret (or wee)

[Steel]

23 minutes ago, Lord_intet said:

Hmmm I'll concede no carbon fibre but they did want different engines and it was a test bed, it was part of the hotol project. Alan Bond and a load of others working for reaction engines worked on concorde. They've said they had problems getting the designs for concorde because they're still a state secret (or wee)

Ok let's cut some confusion, HOTOL is a 1980s project, Concorde was designed in the 60s. Also I'm fairly sure the designs aren't a state secret considering Concorde was a joint venture between the UK and France via two separate aerospace companies (one of which wasn't state owned). Moreover, Concorde isn't an amazing marvel full of technological secrets that are still cutting edge to this day, it's 1960s design that has been surpassed in most ways by todays technology, so goodness knows why two governments would go to great lengths to keep the designs top secret.

 

EDIT: Also I've just done some brief reading, as far as I could tell Alan Bond never worked on Concorde, he was working with Blue Streak missiles and dreaming up SSTO concepts when all of that was going on.

Edited November 29, 2016 by Steel

[p1t1o]

@Lord_intet @Nibb31 @magnemoe

Here is my hunch for what is going on:

Yes, SABRE had to wait for new materials, but it is not likely to be carbon fibre. Their heat exchanger is the major piece of new technology in the engine and uses proprietary materials and manufacturing techniques, this is how they were able to achieve the massive heat-exchange rates and this was the limiting factor in engine design. 

Technical information from Concorde: the variable supersonic intakes of the Concorde (and other supersonic features such as wing design etc.) were probably sensitive at the time, and as has been mentioned only military aircraft had a need to be supersonic up until this point so intake/aerodynamics technology may have been borrowed from military projects, or at leasat similar ground was covered. More likely though, that the intake/aero design was simply a trade secret and negotiations would have had to have been made to share/purchase knowledge (not necessarily exact designs of Concorde, could be just research data).

On the subject of research data, there exists a possibility that the various bodies that contributed to the design of the Concorde have (or had) some of the only civilian data on supersonic dynamics, and some of it could even have been officially classified (propulsion tech being what it is) so there could have been some contact between people on these various projects.

I am just guessing however, but there could have been some grounds for contact between the various people on the Concorde project and other high-speed projects of the era.

[Lord_inter]

Concorde used the engines from the tsr2 which was originally designed for the vulcan bomber. Why would they design an engine that would be shared between military and commercial planes. The requirements would be completely different. The engine was horrendously greedy on fuel and the plane had to sit with it brakes on even at idle, a silly engine to use. So design a new one right? Everything else is being designed new.

Now picture concorde with better engines designed for it and it is an ssto space craft. Also the infamous picture of concorde as a prototype of being used as a hotol prototype design with its delta wings (which hotol now doesn't have).

It was officially designed from 1965-1970, started flying in 1979 (which is when design was actually pretty much finished) then hotol officially started design in 1980.

The French got the designs because the Americans gave them to them not because the British shared. However the funding from the French was nice.

Hotol was canned because of pressure and threats from America who also hated concorde (gotta love the special relationship). 

Concorde has not been surpassed by any plane at the moment for speed and it's design, we have nothing like it anymore. Now days they have better materials and IT after 30 years of extra development on the control systems but nothing really ground breaking. They all share the same basic airframe and have similar engines, its the same as cars.

Concorde was designed with the most basic computers too (another genius share with the American).

You have to trust the conspiracy theories here, this is a time where the post office tower (one of the tallest buildings in London at the time) didn't officially exist and mi6 was not based in the building on James Bond.

[p1t1o]

Hotol may have been canned for political reasons (like a lot of projects around the world in this era), but it would never have become a successful SSTO, the engine just did not cut it. Hence why SABRE had to wait for material science to come up with solutions - and it *still* is on a knife-edge of SSTO-viability.

There is a reason why there are no other supersonic civilian aircraft.

And the reason we don't have working SSTOs is from the same ballpark.

Its *hard* to push through the atmosphere at several times the speed of sound. For a civilian airliner this equates to fuel costs and passenger economics. For SSTOs it means worthwhile mass ratios are extremely difficult to achieve.

3 minutes ago, Lord_intet said:

You have to trust the conspiracy theories here.

Heh? We do?

[Steel]

14 minutes ago, Lord_intet said:

Concorde used the engines from the tsr2 which was originally designed for the vulcan bomber. Why would they design an engine that would be shared between military and commercial planes. The requirements would be completely different. The engine was horrendously greedy on fuel and the plane had to sit with it brakes on even at idle, a silly engine to use. So design a new one right? Everything else is being designed new.

Nope, they did not just use "the engines from the tsr2". They based the designs for the Concorde's engine on the 22R engines (because they were one of the best turbojet engine designs available to them at the time), but then developed them to be suitable for civil aviation.

18 minutes ago, Lord_intet said:

Concorde has not been surpassed by any plane at the moment for speed and it's design, we have nothing like it anymore. Now days they have better materials and IT after 30 years of extra development on the control systems but nothing really ground breaking. They all share the same basic airframe and have similar engines, its the same as cars.

Concorde could be easily surpassed today if we had the same conditions for the genesis of the design: several national governments pushing for SST vehicle development and willing to pump huge amounts of money in to fund an ultimately economically unviable form of transport. It has no noteworthy or groundbreaking technology in it by comparison to what we have available now, and the only reason it hasn't been surpassed is because there have been no further attempts to build anything like it since it's eventual decline due to it's failure to make economic sense.

[Nibb31]

 

39 minutes ago, Lord_intet said:

Now picture concorde with better engines designed for it and it is an ssto space craft. Also the infamous picture of concorde as a prototype of being used as a hotol prototype design with its delta wings (which hotol now doesn't have).

No it isn't. You need more than just wings and engines to make an SSTO spacecraft. There's quite a difference between an aircraft capable of flying at 2500 km/h and a spacecraft capable of reaching 25000 km/h.

The biggest limiting factor for Concorde was its aluminium skin, which couldn't withstand temperatures above 126°C. This limited its speed to Mach 2.2.

39 minutes ago, Lord_intet said:

It was officially designed from 1965-1970, started flying in 1979 (which is when design was actually pretty much finished) then hotol officially started design in 1980.

The French got the designs because the Americans gave them to them not because the British shared. However the funding from the French was nice.

Huh? Sud Aviation had been working on a Super Caravelle since 1960, while BAC was working on its Bristol 223 since 1959. Both governments agreed to merge the two designs. Boeing only started serious work in its 2707 designs after the Concorde merger. 

39 minutes ago, Lord_intet said:

Hotol was canned because of pressure and threats from America who also hated concorde (gotta love the special relationship). 

HOTOL came 20 years later. It has no relationship whatsoever with Concorde. Most of the people who had worked on Concorde had retired by then and knowledge of hypersonic flight was way beyond what was available at the time of Concorde. Check out your timelines.

39 minutes ago, Lord_intet said:

Concorde has not been surpassed by any plane at the moment for speed and it's design, we have nothing like it anymore. Now days they have better materials and IT after 30 years of extra development on the control systems but nothing really ground breaking. They all share the same basic airframe and have similar engines, its the same as cars.

Yet none of today's airliners use the same configuration as Concorde. One could argue that it was a dead end, like the Reliant Robin or the Chevrolet Corvair.

39 minutes ago, Lord_intet said:

Concorde was designed with the most basic computers too (another genius share with the American).

Actually, I don't think there were many computers involved at all. Most of its design work involved slide rules, Rötring pens, and 1:1 plywood models.

39 minutes ago, Lord_intet said:

You have to trust the conspiracy theories here, this is a time where the post office tower (one of the tallest buildings in London at the time) didn't officially exist and mi6 was not based in the building on James Bond.

Nope, we're not going there.

[Green Baron]

1 hour ago, Lord_intet said:

*snip*

It was officially designed from 1965-1970, started flying in 1979

*snip*

'69

[Lord_inter]

The difference between 2500 and 25000 is a question of altitude when it comes to sstos like Skylon and planes like concorde, it's why concorde flew so very high compared to what we had and have.

It was a design the Americans gave sud https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde yes it's Wikipedia but it's cited and I know it as a fact.

None of the airlines today use that configuration because they prefer designs that are less risky and can take more people for less cost.

They had a computer to check some of the math but it wasnt capable of any more then that. They needed to test how a larger supersonic plane would work.

Everyone always says how uneconomical it was, in its lager years it was profitable. not as profitable as larger slower planes but it was making a profit. It was so tiny didn't fit very well at 6'4, luckily I was only on it for a few hours to New York hehe

[Lord_inter]

It's first flight was '69 introduced in '76 they stopped building them in '79 because they didn't have anymore customers. This is also the date they stopped modifying it except for minor alterations.

 

Furthermore everyone was pulled off concorde to hotol at this point as concorde was working fine, the delta wing air frame was fine, the fly by wire worked (you're welcome), so did a lot of the other concepts I had no part in.

Edited November 29, 2016 by Lord_intet