mikegarrison Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 11 minutes ago, RedKraken said: I wish the Bez would just tell us. What's in it for him? I wish our competitors would just tell us all the technical data about their products, but sadly they don't do that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RedKraken Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 6 minutes ago, mikegarrison said: What's in it for him? Nothing. Meh. We will be able to work it out from launch vision/telemetry. Looking forward to seeing this baby fly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Racescort666 Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 18 minutes ago, mikegarrison said: What's in it for him? I wish our competitors would just tell us all the technical data about their products, but sadly they don't do that. Space nerds have hypothetical missions to calculate!! Seriously though, when you put it that way, it makes a lot of sense. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikegarrison Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 5 minutes ago, Racescort666 said: Space nerds have hypothetical missions to calculate!! Seriously though, when you put it that way, it makes a lot of sense. I am in the middle of participating in what we call an "audit", where we go over the publicly available data about one of our competitor's products and try to reverse-engineer our best estimate of their design and performance. It makes me more aware of just how useful certain seemingly harmless data can be to knowledgeable competitors. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Racescort666 Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 7 minutes ago, mikegarrison said: I am in the middle of participating in what we call an "audit", where we go over the publicly available data about one of our competitor's products and try to reverse-engineer our best estimate of their design and performance. It makes me more aware of just how useful certain seemingly harmless data can be to knowledgeable competitors. I work in the auto industry and believe me, benchmarking is serious business. We are currently in the process of building test equipment to reverse engineer competitor vehicles and being on this forum and seeing people beat the scientific method drum gives me a warm fuzzy because I get to do it for my job too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikegarrison Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 25 minutes ago, Racescort666 said: I work in the auto industry and believe me, benchmarking is serious business. We are currently in the process of building test equipment to reverse engineer competitor vehicles and being on this forum and seeing people beat the scientific method drum gives me a warm fuzzy because I get to do it for my job too. It's a little too expensive to buy a competitor's commercial airliner in order to take it apart and reverse-engineer it, so we have to make do with analytical methods. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 They will be public about their engine, as they are selling engines, in addition to selling launches. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikegarrison Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 14 hours ago, tater said: They will be public about their engine, as they are selling engines, in addition to selling launches. NDAs. They aren't selling engines to the public. There are only a few potential customers for their engines, and it's easy to keep all the details confidential. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 4 minutes ago, mikegarrison said: NDAs. They aren't selling engines to the public. There are only a few potential customers for their engines, and it's easy to keep all the details confidential. The customers of the final rockets include NASA and the USAF. That makes ME the customer. I think the Isp of Vulcan will certainly be public, since knowing that is critical to knowing which LV is picked for which mission. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikegarrison Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 (edited) 2 minutes ago, tater said: The customers of the final rockets include NASA and the USAF. That makes ME the customer. I think the Isp of Vulcan will certainly be public, since knowing that is critical to knowing which LV is picked for which mission. Sorry to disappoint you, but unless you are walking into their building with cash in hand and a vehicle that needs an engine, they do not consider you their customer. The ISP will eventually be in Jaynes and Wikipedia and all the other sources, but it won't necessarily be anything other than an educated guess. Edited March 15, 2018 by mikegarrison Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 11 minutes ago, mikegarrison said: Sorry to disappoint you, but unless you are walking into their building with cash in hand and a vehicle that needs an engine, they do not consider you their customer. The ISP will eventually be in Jaynes and Wikipedia and all the other sources, but it won't necessarily be anything other than an educated guess. So the Isp numbers for other engines are just guesses? Like these? http://www.rocket.com/files/aerojet/documents/Capabilities/PDFs/Bipropellant Data Sheets.pdf http://www.rocket.com/rl10-engine Clearly Aerojet Rocketdyne is hiding their critical data from prying competitors. If their goal is to sell engines to 3d parties, they will have to advertise the specs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sevenperforce Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 The BE-4 is only going to have about 54% of the chamber pressure of the Raptor, so we can expect a much more significant difference between SL isp and vacuum isp than with Raptor. The BE-4 will need a higher expansion ratio to achieve maximum efficiency in its vacuum variant. BE-4 is a single-shaft ORSC engine, so its turbopump assembly will be slightly smaller than Raptor's. But Raptor's much higher SL isp and ridiculous chamber pressure will give it a higher TWR nonetheless. If it edges out the RD-180's isp, it will do so only barely. Another thought, however: Bezos said that was a mixture ratio sweep. The single-shaft turbopump (assuming there are dual transmissions) should be very good for aggressively varying mixture ratio, something that would be a bit more difficult for the higher-performance RD-180 or the higher-still Raptor. So there's a chance the engine can uprate thrust at liftoff and uprate isp further on by pulling an Apollo. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikegarrison Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 54 minutes ago, tater said: If their goal is to sell engines to 3d parties, they will have to advertise the specs. No, they don't. I'm sorry, but this is just dead wrong. Advertising is for when you don't know who your potential customers are. Sales meetings (and NDAs) are for when you already know who might be buying your product. The only reason they would use advertising is if they wanted to generate external pressure on a customer like the USG to choose them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 Advertise=publicize. I'm not suggesting an ad campaign, just a spec sheet. People who use rockets are a broader audience, and they might care about engine specs relative to whatever their mission goals are. JPL wants a transfer to Pluto. The Isp of the upper stage matters. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bill Phil Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 2 hours ago, mikegarrison said: No, they don't. I'm sorry, but this is just dead wrong. Advertising is for when you don't know who your potential customers are. Sales meetings (and NDAs) are for when you already know who might be buying your product. The only reason they would use advertising is if they wanted to generate external pressure on a customer like the USG to choose them. Well, there is targeted advertising these days... in which case they know exactly who you are. They would certainly need to communicate engine performance to customers... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikegarrison Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 42 minutes ago, Bill Phil said: They would certainly need to communicate engine performance to customers... Of course. I'm just pointing out that while some Blue Origin engine customers might or might not play KSP in their spare time, that does not mean that all KSP players are customers of Blue Origin engines. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted March 22, 2018 Share Posted March 22, 2018 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CatastrophicFailure Posted March 22, 2018 Share Posted March 22, 2018 The old blockhouse looks pretty clean, wonder if they’re keeping it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted March 22, 2018 Share Posted March 22, 2018 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted March 26, 2018 Share Posted March 26, 2018 From an Aviation Week article: Quote “Early on, we decided the BE-3 was going to be a family event,” says Meyerson. “The BE-3 always was envisioned as something that would be upgraded or upgradable for an upper-stage, high-performance rocket engine that we would use for deep-space exploration. We also envisioned clustering engines for powering an orbital vehicle. The BE-3 has become the cornerstone of our development. It’s an engine we expect to be iterating on 50 years from now.” http://aviationweek.com/space/blue-origin-shakes-its-short-game (you need to register, but the reg is free) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted March 29, 2018 Share Posted March 29, 2018 This is pretty interesting. 2X Be-3U engines for NG stage 2, instead of 1 Be-4U. Haven't bothered to do the math on payload improvements given the higher Isp of the hydrolox engines. Gotta be 430-450s I would expect. If AJ isn't afraid, they should be. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sevenperforce Posted March 29, 2018 Share Posted March 29, 2018 12 minutes ago, tater said: This is pretty interesting. 2X Be-3U engines for NG stage 2, instead of 1 Be-4U. Haven't bothered to do the math on payload improvements given the higher Isp of the hydrolox engines. Gotta be 430-450s I would expect. If AJ isn't afraid, they should be. Whoa! This is huge. Really really huge. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CatastrophicFailure Posted March 29, 2018 Share Posted March 29, 2018 BE-3 is the New Shepherd engine, right? Ok, makes lots of sense, they’ve already got a good amount of runtime data from that booster, and it saves developing a vacuum BE-4. But what about the structural changes? They’d need to make the second stage a lot bigger to get enough LH2... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ment18 Posted March 29, 2018 Share Posted March 29, 2018 I'm confused by the drastic decrease in 2nd stage thrust. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sevenperforce Posted March 29, 2018 Share Posted March 29, 2018 3 minutes ago, ment18 said: I'm confused by the drastic decrease in 2nd stage thrust. Second stage will be lighter, requiring lower thrust, but the much higher isp means more total impulse. Probably a small drop in TWR. This also means that the BE-4-powered first stage will have a smaller mass to lift to staging, which means bigger margins and better all-around performance. I am concerned about TWR and ascent profiles for when they try to man-rate this. 6 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said: BE-3 is the New Shepherd engine, right? Ok, makes lots of sense, they’ve already got a good amount of runtime data from that booster, and it saves developing a vacuum BE-4. Not only that, but they were already well along the path of developing a vacuum BE-3. 6 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said: But what about the structural changes? They’d need to make the second stage a lot bigger to get enough LH2... Second stage will grow. As a result, they can now hit ALL specified national security orbits using only the two-stage reusable configuration. I don't think SpaceX can hit all orbits with full reuse. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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