arca steam powered booster?

[sevenperforce]

1 hour ago, tater said:

The secret sauce is that it is powered by crypto! You give arca crypto, they put it in their rocket, and it comes out as exhaust, simultaneously doubling your crypto!

There's gotta be a way to get put options on their stupid AMiE token.

[DDE]

5 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Apparently they have dusted off their inanity and are now trying to launch a rocket out of a water tower?

 

Well, without a substitute to the rather risky environment of the Black Sea, their project is dead in the water.

[K^2]

On 5/3/2019 at 11:37 AM, DDE said:

But how do you like corrosion by non-distilled, boiling water? Especially salty one?

It sounds like that salt's going around. 

But yeah, snake oil for sure. 1.8 MJ/kg of some top class experimental batteries vs 9.7MJ/kg of kerolox. That would be nearly half the I_SP if you were jettisoning the batteries as you go, but expelling lithium would not only be far more expensive, but also go against their entire premise of environmental friendliness. So you have to drag these batteries with you until stage separation. At that point, a straight up water boiler rocket has better efficiency than the best they can hope for on battery power.

My best guess is that their internal pitch must be trying to get ready for beamed power, and keeping their fingers crossed. But you can't sell that to the investors, so they're selling them the battery powered nonsense.

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

It sounds like that salt's going around. 

But yeah, snake oil for sure. 1.8 MJ/kg of some top class experimental batteries vs 9.7MJ/kg of kerolox. That would be nearly half the I_SP if you were jettisoning the batteries as you go, but expelling lithium would not only be far more expensive, but also go against their entire premise of environmental friendliness. So you have to drag these batteries with you until stage separation. At that point, a straight up water boiler rocket has better efficiency than the best they can hope for on battery power.

My best guess is that their internal pitch must be trying to get ready for beamed power, and keeping their fingers crossed. But you can't sell that to the investors, so they're selling them the battery powered nonsense.

Yes, now battery powered pumps like the electron works pretty well but that is because you get higher efficiency from an electrical motor than an turbine, setup is also lighter and cheaper. If you are in deep space I say they are even more interesting as you can recharge your batteries between burns. 
Using batteries to heat water and then use the steam for trust no. But in space you could split water into hydrogen and oxygen and use this in an engine for trust. Uses in some cubesat engine designs. Not sure how it compares to ion engines. 

Electrical cars works so well because cars engines run at say 10% of their max power cruising on an highway. Much lower idling in an queue. This does not translate well to planes who cruise at much higher engine output and for long range flights you run into the rocket equation as you need more fuel to carry the fuel for the last leg. 
For rockets, the rocket equation

[insert_name]

Launching a rocket from underwater is pretty much a solved problem at this point nearly every navy with submarines can do it and the russians have even put a couple payloads into orbit from a submarine a few times

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtil'

[mikegarrison]

13 minutes ago, insert_name said:

Launching a rocket from underwater is pretty much a solved problem at this point nearly every navy with submarines can do it

Those are all solid-fuel rockets, right?

[tater]

15 minutes ago, insert_name said:

Launching a rocket from underwater is pretty much a solved problem at this point nearly every navy with submarines can do it and the russians have even put a couple payloads into orbit from a submarine a few times

USN SLBMs ignite after leaving the water.

 

[sevenperforce]

The only reason I can think of to launch from underwater is that they still absolutely lack any sort of guidance systems (remember their "Stabilio" rocket based on the "Popescu-Diaconu stabilization method" which turned out to simply be the rocket pendulum fallacy) and so they are using the open-top water tower to stabilize the rocket in a vertical position during launch and give the fins purchase during the first few moments of ascent.

Either that or they don't understand how rockets work and think that it will help the rocket engine if it has something heavier to "push" against.

[K^2]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

Not sure how it compares to ion engines.

With solar as your energy input, it's not bad. Not great compared to ions still, but it has an advantage that you can build up a bit of H2 and O2 and then do a power burst. So you can have high-thrust maneuvers while still being fairly efficient with mass and volume.

[DDE]

1 hour ago, mikegarrison said:

Those are all solid-fuel rockets, right?

No. With the exception of Typhoons and Boreis, the Soviet-Russian lineage of SLBMs is UDMH-NTO with some past research into Alumizine and ClF5. And judging by some relatively recent noises, Makeyev have been making a push for any Borei successor to be liquid-fuelled.

[AckSed]

The designer of the Sea Dragon performed some underwater tests with small rockets and found the water reduced the shock and noise significantly. These likely lads may be trying to hang on to those coattails.

[sevenperforce]

They launched their water rocket out of their ice water tower.

It went almost as high (for its length) as my kids' pump-up water rocket.

[Davi SDF]

Damn, they sure won't get to space with a glorified bottle rocket lol

The only really pratical way they could actually use steam as propellant would be through some sorts of nuclear thermal engine (and i don't think they are getting fissile uranium in any way)

[DDE]

10 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

They launched their water rocket out of their ice water tower.

It went almost as high (for its length) as my kids' pump-up water rocket.

#SpaceWealth tho

[K^2]

On 3/8/2023 at 11:29 AM, sevenperforce said:

They launched their water rocket out of their ice water tower.

#WhoWoreItBetter

(RIP Mad Mike)