On 27/09/16 03:39, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Wed, 21 Sep 2016, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
And wrong about that. Oh dear.
Is there no hope for horizontalists?
Perhaps some faint hope. :-) There are some advantages to be had there,
even though they are often overstated.
I hope you haven't joined the SSTO club though :)
I hate to disappoint you, but I'm a lifetime member. :-)
Indeed, "very poorly populated" is probably an understatement. Mach 6
at 100km is beyond anything ever done with a WWJ. Even the X-15
couldn't do that (either one, but not both simultaneously).
One saving grace, perhaps - it's not a Mach 6 aircraft. By the time it
reaches ~ Mach 4 it's operating as a pure rocket, in near-vacuum.
Helpful though that is in some ways, it's a disadvantage in others. In
particular, I think it means you'll need rocket thrust vectoring (or a
very hefty RCS) for control. I don't think that's ever been done in a
rocket aircraft before; the X-15 high-altitude flights were all
ballistic trajectories, with the noisy flamey part :-) finishing at much
lower altitude where aerodynamic controls still worked. Nothing
fundamentally hard about it, but it's another design complication (and
potentially a heavy one).
