UI error, then: my iPhone Gmail app shows it as coming from you. I wasn't
going for a T-shirt. :-)
On Tuesday, September 20, 2016, Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Tue, 20 Sep 2016, Randall Clague wrote:
Thank you, Dave. I was going to challenge Henry's "no VTVL fast
turnaround," too.
Hey, get the attributions right -- it was Peter making that claim, and I
was trying to disabuse him of his horizontalist delusions. :-)
Re: crosswinds, Xoie and the X-Racer wete rough contemporaries, and the
X-Racer's crosswind limit was 15 knots. Its total wind limit was 30 knots,
driven by crew parachute landing constraints. Xoie exceeded both of those.
While it's true that every wind is a crosswind for a VTVL, VTVLs don't
have great big sails sticking out to catch those crosswinds. :-) This is
the downside of wings' ability to exploit the atmosphere -- the atmosphere
is not always feeling friendly, and wings interact with it even when you'd
rather they didn't.
VTVLs also have much more ability to adjust different parameters of their
descent independently. A wing landing is a precisely choreographed
performance which has to be aborted and retried if it gets more than
slightly off track, where a VTVL just corrects the problem and carries on.
Henry
