Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rolls Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership

airwaysmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 254 posts

Re: Rolls Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership

#151

Post by inamberclad »

nickff wrote: post #53
ajross wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is to say: Boom is aimed at the wrong product. The High Tech part of efficient supersonic transport is the engines, not the airframe. If there was an off the shelf engine solution, they could just buy it on investor money. The dirty truth is that there isn't.

Engine manufacturing is much more profitable, and seemingly challenging than airframe manufacturing. The engines they'll use are unlikely to be very different from those in other applications, so I'm not sure there's room for a new entrant. Keep in mind that the R&D and capital costs of becoming a turbine engine manufacturer are immense, and likely much higher than the costs to develop a new aircraft.

Rolls Royce, and most other engine makers on this level, are essentially metallurgical gods.

Re: Rolls Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership

#152

Post by yabones »

rocket_surgeron wrote: post #60

Regarding Boom there are only two reasonable conclusions one can reach: 1. They are a Theranos-style operation 2. They are a Madoff-style operation I, a lone aerospace engineer working out of my garage in my spare time, have a better chance of achieving supersonic flight than Boom does. Even their technology demonstrator is an obvious scam. It demonstrates nothing. It does not demonstrate the ability to design, build…

Well, the problem was never technological to start with. The problem with supersonic transports was and will always be economic. There's a reason that there were only two SSTs in the 20th century instead of the five or six that were planned, and it's because the bean counters at Boeing, McDonnel-Douglas, and Lockheed-Martin wouldn't let their companies bankrupt themselves over a vanity project.

So, you take that and couple it with 21st century VC-appeal and you have a fantastic money-losing-machine whether it works or not. Hell, it probably does work with enough R&D, but that was never the problem in the first place.

Re: Rolls Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership

#153

Post by silon42 »

signatoremo wrote: post #139
gamblor956 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existing automakers are making EVs faster and cheaper than Tesla did, and the EVs they are making have substantially greater build quality than Tesla's vehicles.

Tesla’s profit margin is higher than most of automakers. So no, EVs made by traditional automakers are not cheaper. If anything that means Tesla’s cars are more desirable because they can command a premium. Faster? What is that supposed to mean? Tesla is the largest EV maker by volume (not sure if I miss any Chinese ones). Substantial better build quality? Define substantial. Who decide that? Certainly not the consum…

They can easily make a better interior on usability.

Re: Rolls Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership

#154

Post by rollinggoron »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #148
chadash wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but to play devil's advocate, what if I changed your comment to: Agreed. I know nothing about automotive engineering or car design, but the hype around Tesla always puzzled me. If this start up can all of a sudden make an economical electric car, then surely the existing automotive manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper. Toyota, Mercedes, Ford, etc... already have existing designs from decade…

Yeah, I hate this kind of weakly justified pessimism. Sure, if you just assume every new idea will fail you'll be right 95% of the time. But if everyone did that we'd be stuck in the dark ages. I applaud people and organizations that take that chance, innovating and trying new things even when there's a high chance of failure. Worst-case, they fail and other people can learn from their mistakes and hopefully do bette…

I wasn't trying to be pessimistic, just trying not the fall for the "too good to be true" hype machine common in tech (e.g. new batteries with 100x the capacity are right around the corner, carbon nanotubes uses, etc...).

Is this a new idea, though? It's not like supersonic commercial jets are a new thing and they haven't been built. The economics of building a commercially viable production supersonic plane is much more difficult to do than building a car or writing a new website to disrupt Facebook or Google.

I 100% agree that people need to be exploring this stuff. That being said, I'll believe it when I see it.

Re: Rolls Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership

#155

Post by sidewndr46 »

yabones wrote: post #152
rocket_surgeron wrote: post #60

Regarding Boom there are only two reasonable conclusions one can reach: 1. They are a Theranos-style operation 2. They are a Madoff-style operation I, a lone aerospace engineer working out of my garage in my spare time, have a better chance of achieving supersonic flight than Boom does. Even their technology demonstrator is an obvious scam. It demonstrates nothing. It does not demonstrate the ability to design, build…

Well, the problem was never technological to start with. The problem with supersonic transports was and will always be economic. There's a reason that there were only two SSTs in the 20th century instead of the five or six that were planned, and it's because the bean counters at Boeing, McDonnel-Douglas, and Lockheed-Martin wouldn't let their companies bankrupt themselves over a vanity project. So, you take that and…

To be technical, I'd actually argue there were four. The first Concorde reached production & was later redesigned to include an afterburner (or reheat). Why I forget, but it apparently did actually save some fuel since it was used while accelerating to supersonic then shut off.

The Tu-144 went the opposite direction. Introduce with military engines which require full time afterburner. Later it was redesigned and re-engined with a non-military engine not needing afterburner all the time.

So two airframes, but with four distinct airplanes produced as a result.

None of these were particularly economical, to your point.

Re: Rolls Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership

#156

Post by MichaelCollins »

bombcar wrote: post #111
njarboe wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, SpaceX developed all of their engines in-house[1]. Other American rocket companies use Russian engines and Congress's bill forbidding that going forward has put ULA in a very bad place because Blue Origin's BE-4 engine still is not ready after more than a decade of development. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_rocket_engines

Ah, then it fits even better. I could have sworn someone had been launching on borrowed Russian engines, but maybe that was Boeing.

ULA's (Boeing/Lockheed) Atlas V has been using Russian RD-180 engines, and Orbital Science's Antares has used Russian NK-33 and RD-191 engines.

None of these were borrowed though, since they're all single-use only. Only SpaceX lands and reuses their first stage boosters.

Re: Rolls Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership

#158

Post by __m »

keepquestioning wrote: post #14
topspin wrote: post #5

There are perhaps 3 companies on Earth that could conceivably provide engines for this application. RR was one of them. Where to now?

Couldn't SpaceX or Rocket Lab's engine be repurposed for this task?

Boom is a competitor of SpaceX. Both plan supersonic international travel.

Re: Rolls Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership

#159

Post by mrguyorama »

mrtksn wrote: post #145
mrguyorama wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I desperately want the software world to stay as far away from cars as possible. Even in a VW, I know I will go 100k miles with zero issues with most of the stuff. Someone somewhere wants to put javascript between me and that, and I hope they have a bad life.

I suspect you are thinking of touchscreens, not necessarily the computerised cars?

No, as soon as we allow average devs (instead of people working on much more limited ECU software) there will be someone insisting they should put node into it, and run some part of the car on some stack that involves 3 gb of js dependencies, and will inevitably only work half the time, outside of their extremely limited testing.

Car software will only be reliable as long as it doesn't seem prestigious to write software for cars.

Re: Rolls Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership

#160

Post by adolph »

bri3d wrote: post #86
rocket_surgeron wrote: post #60

Regarding Boom there are only two reasonable conclusions one can reach: 1. They are a Theranos-style operation 2. They are a Madoff-style operation I, a lone aerospace engineer working out of my garage in my spare time, have a better chance of achieving supersonic flight than Boom does. Even their technology demonstrator is an obvious scam. It demonstrates nothing. It does not demonstrate the ability to design, build…

Isn't there a third kind of operation, maybe a Magic Leap-style operation, where employees are earnestly developing against a goal which is fanciful but appealing to VCs? And in that case, what's the difference between that and the "usual" VC funded company? I don't really think Boom are a Theranos style operation, because they aren't claiming to have an operational product when no such item exists. A Theranos style…

Wasn't Theranos sending lab tests to other vendor and passing it off as their results? That would be difficult for Boom to pull off--send someone blindfolded on a regular commercial flight, reset the time on their watch and pretend supersonic happened.
Post reply on HN