China plans to build a giant rail gun to launch hypersonic planes into space
China plans to build a giant rail gun to launch hypersonic planes into space
It was a project that Nasa abandoned. Now China is determined to make electromagnetic hypersonic space launches a reality.
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@yogthos article says Mach 7.
This is not a serious space launch proposal. Nowhere near fast enough. It’s the sort of suborbital malarkey that Branson is doing.
Orbit or GTFO.
This is completely different from what Branson is doing which is tourism for rich people. The proposal here is to launch large planes to the edge of atmosphere for rapid transportation.
@yogthos So not “launching hypersonic planes into space” then, but a horizontal catapult for feeble rockets.
Assume this is just to save an SST having to spend fuel getting up to low supersonic speed, and then it lands as a glider.
There are lots of designs for engines that work from stationary to hypersonic speed, which are air breathing, and have the advantage of being able to take off from runways.
If you bother reading the article you'll see that the motivation here is to save fuel. It's a lot cheaper to use an electromagnetic launcher to launch the plane.
@yogthos Not when you then have to expend shit tonnes of delta V turning the plane to face the right way because you can’t just take off from a normal runway and turn to face the right direction at a normal speed, like normal planes can.
This is the aviation equivalent of a gadgetbahn. Someone saw Top Gun and got stupid ideas about scaling up steam catapults, didn’t they?
Yeeting planes is not new. The reasons we don’t do it in civil aviation have not changed.
I love how you think you know more about the subject than the actual engineers building this stuff. 😂
@yogthos @goatsarah Thing is: This idea is not new. People have thought about it for a long time. And in the end they all came to the same conclusion: it isn't worth it.
Thing is that the west stopped making any ambitious engineering projects. The idea isn't new, but the will to put these kinds of things in practice doesn't exist outside of China.
@yogthos Physics is the same all over the world. Your goal is to reach orbital velocity, otherwise you don't stay in the orbit. You cannot achieve this on the ground level, since the air resistance would melt your device. Also the drag would slow the system down massively. This means that you would had to carry fuel with you, to be able to accelerate, once you reached the upper atmospheres.
Also the article claims that people should be carried with that device as well. This limits the acceleration to around 4g.
I recommend to watch the following video, where someone calculated all the values: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQCTTvkh7gw
Physics states that this type of travel is perfectly possible. The question is whether people want to invest into making this sort of tech or not. I'm familiar with the arguments for and against this tech already. What I'm trying to explain to you is that serious people are working on this project, and it's absurd to assume that they don't understand basic things you learned from a short youtube video.
@yogthos I don't need that video for that. I'm interested in that topic for many years, means that I know enough physics to understand the problems behind that. I'm able to use the appropriate formulas for stuff like acceleration. Also I know how to perform proper research. And with this I don't mean "Youtube".
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=hQCTTvkh7gw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It smells like tech bro nonsense, doesn’t it?
Save fuel is it? Ok, put it on a train. Water in the way? Put it on a boat. They’re super efficient.
@goatsarah BTW: This sounds like a super sized "Spinlaunch" in my ears - which also has got a lot of technical difficulties.
@heluecht Yeah, without the whole centrifuge thing.
I think, reading between the lines, someone is daydreaming about some pointless nonsense and a journalist added 2 and 2 and came up with 10000
@yogthos also, how much fuel are you using transporting shit to your yeeter, driving past a few dozen perfectly good airports en route?
@yogthos @goatsarah You would had to enter hypersonic regime at ground level to even have got the possibility to reach the edge of space. Just imagine the sonic boom from that ... Also think about the thermal protection that would be needed for your device to withstand the air friction.
Again, I'm sure actual engineers designing this stuff have in fact thought about these things.