Humor Random Comments Thread

[Quick_Nick]

I now own a car. I'd been driving the thing for almost a decade, but I just bought out my parents' and brother's shares.

I just got my first car a few weeks ago. Not close to owning it though!
Taking it for its first (first with me) long drive today back to university.

 

[SolarLiner]

http://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/12/30/0600Z/wind/isobaric/10hPa/stereographic=134.54,270.00,100

Seriously this site is my new favorite. Didn't I tell you that guys? It is. The Best. Website. EVAH.

 

[fsci123]

According to what? I suppose making one the size of a planet would pose some challenges...

I was thinking about making an inflatable module 28m in length and 15m in diameter and I had some weird ideal that this was physically impossible.

Anyways I'm designing a space station and I'm working on the design of one of the support craft. And I became obsessed on whether I needed turbo pumps to pump liquid water into a NTR...only to realize, after 3 hours, that no previous competition winners made any detailed schematics on how their support craft work.

So that brings me to a new question:

Can a NTR engine work if the reactor sits outside the reaction chamber. And the heat exchanger which heats the fuel is actually a radiator like device connected to the external nuclear reactor.

 

[MaverickSawyer]

I was thinking about making an inflatable module 28m in length and 15m in diameter and I had some weird ideal that this was physically impossible.

Anyways I'm designing a space station and I'm working on the design of one of the support craft. And I became obsessed on whether I needed turbo pumps to pump liquid water into a NTR...only to realize, after 3 hours, that no previous competition winners made any detailed schematics on how their support craft work.

So that brings me to a new question:

Can a NTR engine work if the reactor sits outside the reaction chamber. And the heat exchanger which heats the fuel is actually a radiator like device connected to the external nuclear reactor.

Depends. What's your heat transfer medium?

 

[jedidia]

And I became obsessed on whether I needed turbo pumps to pump liquid water into a NTR...only to realize, after 3 hours, that no previous competition winners made any detailed schematics on how their support craft work.

You cool an NTR by the proellant you run through it (and yes, propellant feed definitely needs turbopumps). Usually you'd have a closed cooling cycle that cools the engine and passes the heat to inflowing propellant via a heat exchanger.

Can a NTR engine work if the reactor sits outside the reaction chamber. And the heat exchanger which heats the fuel is actually a radiator like device connected to the external nuclear reactor.

Sounds terribly inefficient and unneccessarily complex. What advantages do you hope to get out of such a setup?

 

[fsci123]

Depends. What's your heat transfer medium?

Sounds terribly inefficient and unneccessarily complex. What advantages do you hope to get out of such a setup?

I was thinking of using helium or some molten metal or salt. The spacecraft has multiple, but inert, fusion reactors strapped in a compartment. When it's time to deploy a landing craft, a robotic arm takes the reactor and mounts it to an engine assembly(Canadarm style).

I figured this would be a cool setup considering how hard it would be to build a new reactor from scratch and I also figured that the reactor could be used elsewhere(melting small comets, powering mining bases, manufacturing) and should be ejectable if needed. Plus I thought it would be too complex to swap out the whole heating chamber so I chose to swap the reactor instead.

For some reason I also fear that fusion reactors are much more fragile and are thus more prone to stress than fision reactors. Perhaps someone can correct my thinking.

All the NTR designs I've seen used open core fusion reactors and I've never seen a design with a fusion reactor.

 

[MaverickSawyer]

I was thinking of using helium or some molten metal or salt. The spacecraft has multiple, but inert, fusion reactors strapped in a compartment. When it's time to deploy a landing craft, a robotic arm takes the reactor and mounts it to an engine assembly(Canadarm style).

I figured this would be a cool setup considering how hard it would be to build a new reactor from scratch and I also figured that the reactor could be used elsewhere(melting small comets, powering mining bases, manufacturing) and should be ejectable if needed. Plus I thought it would be too complex to swap out the whole heating chamber so I chose to swap the reactor instead.

These make for added complexity, more possible failure points, reduced efficiency, higher mass, and more maintenance.

For some reason I also fear that fusion reactors are much more fragile and are thus more prone to stress than fision reactors. Perhaps someone can correct my thinking.

There's not really much hard data for us to judge fusion reactors on yet.

All the NTR designs I've seen used open core fission reactors and I've never seen a design with a fusion reactor.

That's beecause a fusion reactor, if you let a small amount of the plasma out through a magnetic nozzle, is a fusion engine, not an NTR.

 

[fsci123]

When I meant open core I meant the nuclear reactor allows fuel to run through the core. The reactor was built like a ring with the fuel flowing though the center.

 

[jedidia]

All the NTR designs I've seen used open core fusion reactors and I've never seen a design with a fusion reactor.

Erm... you got your acronyms wrong. NTR means "nuclear thermal rocket". The nuclear thermal part refers to a fission reactor, not a fusion reactor. Fusion would be an altogether different kind of animal and hell to cool, depending on what ISP you want out of it...

powering mining bases, manufacturing

While melting a commet would work, to produce electrical power with it you'll need a rather large radiator array (you know, that heat must pass somewhere from your cooling system). This would make the suggested modularity rather difficult.

 

[Andy44]

When I meant open core I meant the nuclear reactor allows fuel to run through the core. The reactor was built like a ring with the fuel flowing though the center.

I think you mean propellant, not fuel, right? In an NTR, the fuel is the fissionable elements in the core that make heat, usually uranium. What passes through the core, heats up, and produces thrust on its way out the tailpipe is propellant, which is hydrogen or some other fluid.

Sorry to be a rocket nazi but it helps to use the right terminology.

In a chemical rocket, the fuel and oxidizer are also the propellant.

 

[Fabri91]

Fighters in alternate colors:

 

[Urwumpe]

Fighters in alternate colors:

Yeah, but those are all highly hypothetic... except the last one. :lol::thumbup:

 

[Andy44]

USMC aggressor squadron VMFAT-401. Love these paint schemes. I once saw one of these F-5's at an airshow and inside the red star on the tail was a little USMC emblem, wish I could find a pic:

 

[ISProgram]

Orbital updated their Antares factsheet a few days ago, the RD-181 Antares is now Antares-200 (so Antares 230 or Antares 232)...

 

[BruceJohnJennerLawso]

Just a question for curiositys sake, but

Why do so few Orbiter developers use Github for their projects? It seems that very few Orbiter addons use github, compared to the number that use (or used to use) Sourceforge.

 

[jedidia]

USMC aggressor squadron VMFAT-401. Love these paint schemes. I once saw one of these F-5's at an airshow and inside the red star on the tail was a little USMC emblem, wish I could find a pic:

That reminds very strongly of some cheesy movie I saw back in the 80s... :lol:

 

[Urwumpe]

Just a question for curiositys sake, but

Why do so few Orbiter developers use Github for their projects? It seems that very few Orbiter addons use github, compared to the number that use (or used to use) Sourceforge.

git was for a long time not available and then not really user-friendly in Windows. Unless you have been a computer science student with too much freetime, it was vastly inferior to Subversion/TortoiseSVN solutions.

But this has changed.

 

[BruceJohnJennerLawso]

git was for a long time not available and then not really user-friendly in Windows. Unless you have been a computer science student with too much freetime, it was vastly inferior to Subversion/TortoiseSVN solutions.

But this has changed.

Howso has it changed?

 

[Urwumpe]

Howso has it changed?

For example that you can get binary distributions for windows of the command line client. :lol:

 

[Andy44]

That reminds very strongly of some cheesy movie I saw back in the 80s... :lol:

Ah, yes, the Northrop "MiG" F-5 LOL. If these had been piloted by Marines Tom Cruise would've lost.