Twokinds ARCHIVE Forums

Topic 1: plasma engine
Okay, you know - well any type of rocket? Particularly the space shuttle; it can go mach 25 (25X the speed of sound) in orbit!
Well, what NASA is doing right now is building a plasma engine that Within the earth's atmosphere can go 25X the speed of sound!
runs on plasma!

Topic 2: the northern lights
The Aurora Borealis is made up of plasma. From the sun, every time a solar flare is made, it's really billions and billions of protons. Once it hits the earth's atmosphere, it deconstructs itself into waves of radiation - light and heat, of course. We all know what protons do to electrons - black out!

topic 3: heat is radiation
Heat is radiation being emitted by light. I'm done with this one already? I'm shocked. :shock:

Topic 4: NASA's cars
In 2001 they've begun a project that extends till 2010 - portable air cars! Sounds really stupid right? They're cars with wings, and yes, they fly. They can fit into your garage. I heard about this project in like 2003 or so on TV.

Topic 5: learning how to spell
the admins did this lol..... plz vote for something other than this!

More than you know people. :wink:

This is why I picked the flying car. XD

And does this belong in the gaming board?
Not that I really care.

it says in the rules anything about recent technologies so yeah

Hmm... I'm gonna move this to the tech board since it's kinda hard to play the northern lights on your TV or at the arcade.

The plasma engine is probably my favorite. The college I'm going to next year is getting a plasma thruster for their engineering labs, and since I'm majoring in EE I'll get to play with it some. :D

I'd like to know more about that Plasma Engine... and how we can put it on our flying cars...

well get this, its top secret -> my dad told me about it! their testing it on SR71s since its the fastest plane known to man (until this engine is complete of course)

oh yeah, and your going to have a test plasma thruster in your lab!? that would be real hard to get! let me guess, your school is rich, your in the U.S., and your down by the smithsonian instutute?

^ They're testing it on jets that have been out of use for nearly ten years?
Whyyyyyyyy?
O.o

...and why would we want a jet that can go Mach 25 in the atmosphere? What would the skin be made out of? It'd be a huge high-speed fireball due to the massive friction...and you couldn't fly it over land, or the sonic boom would cause everything under it to shatter, people included...
:|

...and your definition of heat is pretty limited, and generally inaccurate...

I think the Mach25 thing is to be used to break orbit more easily- Go to the highest safest flying height and kick that engine into high gear for a bit- and you're outa the atmosphere.

Oh and you answered your own question- if you have an unmanned aircraft that can go that fast and survive- you also have a weapon that can return after use and not loose anything but Fuel... Problem is still getting the darn thing to not turn into a fireball...

Actually, my school is just a rather average college in Mobile, Alabama. Though it is in the US. :D

its supposed to be top secret. search it up on google and you wont get what your looking for :roll:

the heat thing Is unaccurate, but i heard it on the radio so i dont know the details..

the SR71 is made out of a special material. it goes mach 3.2. Get this, my grandfather took a picture of an SR71 landing! the sr71 used to be top secret before the government hated it lol. anyways my grandfather took a picture while it was landing, later on when he was just about to get in a helicopter the military police went over and took the camera's film!

Somebody's going to have to check my math, but speed isn't the deal with that plasma engine. I'm guessing it's a big deal because it's lightweight (no evidence to support this assumption, but that's what'd make sense to me). We can't beat about mach 3.2 with a jet fueled engine (that's what a quick look puts a ramjet at before it starts to overheat) but that's not a problem with true thrusters. We push the shuttle to about 7,823 m/s to acheive low Earth orbit (fortunately we don't need the 11,186 m/s of true escape velocity). So all you're saying is that you've got an engine that isn't a solid state rocket that can achieve 8,507.25 m/s (assuming a sea level speed of sound as 340.29 m/s), which is pretty roughly what we do for low Earth orbit. So unless it can do it for cheaper, I don't really see the value. It's not all that useful for in atmosphere transit; when you can go LOE, and you have to go somewhere fast, there's no reason not to -- the extra distance is more than made up for by not having to fight the atmosphere the whole way. And, as Tuna pointed out (mostly, don't feel bad -- the average person thinks the same thing you do, and you're only a little off), the ram-pressure makes travel at high speed burns prohibitive.

Generally speaking, plasma's not the most energy efficient thing in the world (considering the costs to put something into the plasma state), but if you could run that with less weight than a rocket booster, then I can easily understand NASA's interest in the technology. And it's a good pair with their high impulse/low acceleration engines that they've been working on (ion engine).

Incidentally, the SR-71 isn't "hated" by the government, so far as I know, it just isn't useful anymore. It's a spy plane, and it was a really good one for its time. We just have better ones now (see the U-2). And the advent of satellites vastly decreased our need for spy planes.

-- UPDATE --
Incidentally, the SR-71 would make a reasonable test bed for such a technology. They're actually very stable in flight, built for speed, and constructed so that they will tolerate both high speeds and very high altitudes without harm coming to the pilot. We don't have a lot of modern jets built for those purposes. Pretty much all our fast stuff is unstable (high maneuverability ==> unstable) and our high altitude stuff is (relatively) slow.

the testing plane isn't the problem. it's the number of Gs the pilot can take. in zero gravity you can go 25X the speed of sound because there isn't any gravity. reletively no force is necessary from the body to withstand the ammount of Gs.

(lets just say, if the pilot stops immediantly, it will be hard to remove the blood stains.)

we need some sort of pressurized suit or a zero gravity cockpit - or something. you know more then me in aviation and aeuronotics!

what about the starwhisp? it uses the suns energy magnified by the space station. now thats a cool idea.

You're misunderstanding what "G's" are. They're a measure of force from acceleration, where one G is equal to the gravity felt on Earth at sea level. It actually has nothing to do with gravity and everything to do with inertia. In addition, you're missing out on what our astronauts experience (this is again, a very common misunderstanding). Space isn't "zero gravity." Rather, the shuttle exists in what's called "microgravity," a state of free-fall. Ever ride one of those amusement park rides where they take you up a tower and just drop you? That time when you're being dropped is pretty much what the astronauts experience the entire time -- they even do training in specially designed planes which freefall for short periods. We don't have to worry about stopping -- inertia prevents immediate stops (we don't have an inertia-less drive, and right now, by our understanding of physics, that's the same as friction-less or perpetual motion -- it falls under the aegis of "magic," i.e. impossible). The only time G's affect the human body is when the body is put under the affect of rapid acceleration. Getting up to speed puts G's on the body, and rapid turns do something similar, which is why pilots of high speed air superiority fighter planes wear "G-suits," flight suits with inflatable bladders that force the pilots blood away from their extremities so that they won't black out. The SR-71 not only supports the use of G-suits, but also has a pressurized cockpit to support high-atmospheric flight. (I should note that this is all from memory from my last trip to the Air and Space museum in Omaha, so it's possible that I'm missing something or getting something confused). Once you reach your cruising speed, as long as you don't change your velocity very much at a time, you don't experience much force (ever notice how you're pushed back in your seat when an airplane takes off, but not after its actually in flight? Or when you accelerate off the line at a stoplight, but not when you're driving on the freeway?). The reason that microgravity works is because the astronauts are constantly being pulled back to the Earth (albeit much more weakly than us ground-pounders are), however, the rotational velocity of the shuttle keeps moving the position of the Earth (more or less), allowing them to continue to "fall" the entire time they're in orbit.

i dont live in the US, i Just got my passport, and ive never even been down to any space museums. :?
this wednesday i'm going to new-york as apart of a contest i won at my school. (aka the easiest contest ever)
(but in this case, I know nothing, period :( )

I'm a grade seven-er, so i don't learn about advanced physics until grade 10 lol. but a close friend of mine is taking that class in halifax, they teach advanced physics there.


I was confused too. i guess it's just a basic difference towards what school i go to, i live in quebec, and she lives in nova scotia.