Viewing profile — danieldyer

It's worth pointing out that Concorde didn't cruise using its afterburners; it only lit them briefly to punch through the transonic flight regime.

She's certainly far less well known than many of her contemporaries, but Noether's theorem is an incredibly important tool in theoretical physics, and has been described as "certai…

Don't forget Emmy Noether: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether "In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creativ…

The issue is that people confuse getting into space with getting into LEO. Virgin Galactic are not even close to getting into LEO – their plan is to fly a ballistic trajectory whic…

Yes, my Kurzweil K2000 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurzweil_K2000 ) supports fully customisable temperaments – you can even tune it to the Bohlen-Pierce ( http://en.wikipedia.or…

> Regarding the Square-Cube law, I'm not sure it's that relevant here. It's pretty clear you could put two of those engines in a AMA sized model, so not exceeding 55 lbf. That'd gi…

Roughly speaking, the drag is proportional to cross-sectional area, whereas engine thrust required is proportional to mass, which in turn is proportional to volume. So, you end up …

Exactly. It's just a radio-controlled model aircraft, which have been around for a long time. Also, it's worth pointing out that it's not a model of a fighter jet, and that this vi…

Only if it were rocket powered. The aerodynamics simply don't scale well enough for something that small to become supersonic using any currently available small turbine engine.

> Sounds shockingly good, so I have to wonder if the compressor is basically an ablative heat shield and this is good for only a few runs. The compressor isn't the part of the engi…