Recent content by eljefe

That 100,000 tons seems a bit much to me. There are naval platforms that host a comparable crew indefinitely that weigh much less than that. And ISS can support about 6 people for a long duration. 100/6*450 = 7500 tons. The real answer is somewhere between 7500 and 100,000. Anything of any...

When I was a new engineer fresh out of college in 1985, I testified before a commission on America's future in space. I emphasized that the Shuttle was great, but it had no place to "go to". I urged that we build a Space Station, and testified at length how its best use was as a transportation...

The reason for this is that at about 50 psi, alveoli in the lung ruptures. At 65 psi, there may be 99% fatalities, but aside from having no pulse the remains appear no different from that of someone who succumbs to a heart attack or stroke. Remains can be recovered intact from depths...

My aeroclub once shared a hangar with a privately owned CF-104. That had to be about the most challenging privately owned aircraft on the planet to fly, but once you got it out over the gulf and hit those burners...

The more heat you dump into a Meredith duct, the better it works (aerodynamically). If you are going to arrange items within the duct sequentially, you would want to think in terms of heat load that you could remove with air at a given temperature...a small, hot oil cooler might not heat the...

You load 15 tons, and what do you get? A big hole deeper and your enemies fret. St. Peter's going to call them and where will they go? The hole's already dug to the place that they go.

It was my pleasure to work with Hoot in the Space Shuttle program. I've heard the best natural aviators who have ever flown for NASA were John Young, Neil Armstrong...and Hoot Gibson.

Coucy, prior to WWI. Today View from the opposite side Dynamiting by retreating Germans (artist's concept) Reconstruction

Standard Rayleigh distribution, so sigma = 1. We don't know what the standard deviation is, so I just put in numbers until I found that x = .5364 gave a cumulative probability of 0.25, and x = .8326 gave a probability of 0.5. 0.8326 / 0.5364 = 1.552, so 1.552 x 30 meters = 46.6 meters. A real...

I've been thinking about this thread again. Is there any apples-to-apples comparison of H, double-V, W, and X layouts with regards to frontal area? Same bore and stroke, poppet valves for all, etc.?

Excellent post summarizing the importance of dates and logistics. I've quoted the above paragraph to discuss dates. Chelmno was reopened for mass killing June 23, 1944, with the intent of murdering the 70,000 Jews of Lodz. Starting in mid-July, they began shipping the inmates to...

I think someone needs to extend an invitation to this forum to the proprietor.

CEP assumes a Rayleigh (2 dimensional circular) probability distribution, so if you're putting 25% within 30 meters, you should expect to put 50% within 1.552 * 30 = 46.6 meters.

I'll leave it to others to argue over whether you're being pedantic. You have correctly observed that the path of the prop tip is a helix. In my defense, tangential tip speed is proportional to D * n, you just have to multiply by Pi and divide by 60 to get the units to work out. I think we...

Helicopters are perverse beasts that can go backwards and forwards at the same time. For this reason, no helicopter has ever gone supersonic. And that's why I like tilt-rotors when you absolutely have to go straight up from the deck.