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humans have been playing with early rockets forever, but it wasn't until ww2 that modern rocketry took off. now we have vtol rockets, we've got reusable rockets; rockets that are equally useful for the glory of either manned spaceflight OR ending humanity! they are the firebreathing flying dragons of yore, brought to life. i think they're amazing machines that are also figurative and literal embodiments of national-level dickmeasuring contests, so lets see some rocketpics!
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Feb 23, 2021 04:35
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 09:07 |
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 i love the pgm11, look at this beautiful example of a redstone-mercury rocket. so awesome we had to paint 'UNITED STATES' on it twice its basically a nazi v2 under the hood 
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Feb 23, 2021 04:35
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Feb 23, 2021 04:38
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that rockets making me hungry. here is another relic of our cold war past the real relic being the fremont neighborhood itself lmao
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Feb 23, 2021 04:48
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Space shuttle
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Feb 23, 2021 04:50
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Comedy options: shuttle centaur, delta 4 heavy
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Feb 23, 2021 04:51
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Bloody posted:Space shuttle Not a rocket but the modified 747 that carried the space shuttles around were cool
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Feb 23, 2021 04:52
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The DC-X was ahead of its time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
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Feb 23, 2021 05:29
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I'm partial to Tintin
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Feb 23, 2021 05:29
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Feb 23, 2021 05:58
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I worked with a lot of dcx vets
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Feb 23, 2021 06:21
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Delta-Wye posted:
You stand next to this thing and you really get a sense of the enormous balls it took to be an early astronaut. Sure the Saturn V is impressive, but the Redstone is so goddamned small you realize its just a missile with a dude instead of a warhead.
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Feb 23, 2021 06:29
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 Technically a turbojet, but still pretty cool.
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Feb 23, 2021 08:46
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Base Emitter posted:You stand next to this thing and you really get a sense of the enormous balls it took to be an early astronaut. Sure the Saturn V is impressive, but the Redstone is so goddamned small you realize its just a missile with a dude instead of a warhead. https://i.imgur.com/CaXSu6e.mp4 early astronauts were all(?) hotshot test pilots before they joined the space program - it could very well be that riding a stick, farting fire, into space was probably safer than what they were used to testing
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Feb 23, 2021 09:29
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Feb 23, 2021 10:00
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I've always loved how Mercury-Redstone 1 unfolded. It was like a Vaudeville act:wikipedia posted:The rocket only rose about 4 inches (10 cm) before settling back onto the pad. Alarms were immediately sounded at LC-5, but the Redstone didn't explode. Instead it merely sat in place, after which a strange sequence of events happened.[4][6][8] 
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Feb 23, 2021 10:15
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The Soviet N1 is cool as heck. It never had a successful launch as far as I know, but it was more powerful than the Saturn V, this thing was gigantic.  The Sea Dragon was a cool idea too, but that never got past the planning stages. Fun to read about though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket)
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Feb 23, 2021 11:26
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aniviron posted:The Soviet N1 is cool as heck. It never had a successful launch as far as I know, but it was more powerful than the Saturn V, this thing was gigantic. Doesn't this thing hold the record for largest non-nuclear explosion? But hell yeah it looks rad its a shame its 33 engines just broke every time and doomed it.
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Feb 23, 2021 13:39
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Pogo oscillation is a bitch and Saturn v just got lucky that it didn't get wrecked by pogo
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Feb 23, 2021 14:08
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The Saturn V was one of the coolest machines ever built and it's a shame it was designed by a Nazi.
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Feb 23, 2021 14:10
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Tater Love 
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Fun fact: Soyuz rockets are delivered to the launchpad by train and then tilted upright. Locals will put coins on the track leading to the launch pad to get them flattened for good luck.
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Feb 23, 2021 14:31
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The Moon Monster posted:Fun fact: Soyuz rockets are delivered to the launchpad by train and then tilted upright. Locals will put coins on the track leading to the launch pad to get them flattened for good luck. Don't Cosmonauts also take a piss on the track for good luck?
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Feb 23, 2021 14:34
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Lawman 0 posted:Don't Cosmonauts also take a piss on the track for good luck? They pee on the tire of their van to the launchpad, because Gagarin did it so everyone else has to. Female astronauts/cosmonauts have to get creative.
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Feb 23, 2021 14:43
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Feb 23, 2021 15:23
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Mysore/Tipu Sultan rocketry developments are pretty interesting: metal casing, clay refractory boundary to help maintain integrity, mass production, a bamboo lance to help lacerate the poo poo out of horses, the list goes on also this image is fairly wild: 
corn haver fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Feb 23, 2021 |
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Feb 23, 2021 16:16
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i think of demons posted:Mysore/Tipu Sultan rocketry developments are pretty interesting: metal casing, clay refractory boundary to help maintain integrity, mass production, a bamboo lance to help lacerate the poo poo out of horses, the list goes on Yeah learning about Mysore was pretty wild because they were importing a large amount of European experts to build like observatories and stuff. So there was a decent chance they could have made a bunch of interesting discoveries but oh well.
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Feb 23, 2021 16:40
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Bloody posted:Space shuttle Buran
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Feb 23, 2021 16:51
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 The Douglas AIR-2A Genie nuclear-warhead-equiped air-to-air missile.  I love that they came up with a plan to launch this thing at low altitude and have the pilot possibly survive (but nobody else, I guess).
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Feb 24, 2021 02:54
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ExecuDork posted:
Folks, they were hatless (hatless!) and they came in to work the next day. Case closed.
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Feb 24, 2021 03:19
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okay. actually. this is my favorite rocket https://twitter.com/torybruno/status/1361760041301200897?s=20 because my engine is on the bottom 😍
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Feb 24, 2021 04:42
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zakharov posted:The Saturn V was one of the coolest machines ever built and it's a shame it was designed by a Nazi. *chuckle* Nazi Schmazi!
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Feb 24, 2021 05:39
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Bloody posted:okay. actually. this is my favorite rocket That IS cool.
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Feb 25, 2021 00:34
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ExecuDork posted:
I love that the flightplan they went to the trouble of making a whole diagram for is "turn the gently caress around dingus".
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Feb 25, 2021 01:35
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ExecuDork posted:
Even more insane ideas were considered at one point; http://www.astronautix.com/h/hibex.html quote:HIBEX was designed for low level intercept of entry vehicles below 3 km altitude within 2 seconds of launch. Hibex' neutron-generating warhead would disable the fissile core of the incoming enemy re-entry vehicle. It would also kill all living things within a 5 km radius of detonation. That later evolved into Sprint, which got as far as testing. It was launched with an explosive driven piston, and accelerated fast enough that it glowed from aerodynamic heating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msXtgTVMcuA
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Feb 25, 2021 02:53
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My favorite rocket is Orion, no question. Not the new bullshit one they're calling Orion, but the original one conceived by atomic bomb genius Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson in the 1950s. The project schedule never progressed beyond scale-models, but they were talking about a manned mission to the moons of Saturn by 1970, and I am convinced that they would absolutely have pulled it off. The concept is simple as hell. Take one big metal plate. Put what you want to send to space on top of your big metal plate. Set nuclear bombs off under your big metal plate. Generally the issue with rockets is that they are capable of high thrust, or high specific impulse (basically you can think of this like an exhaust velocity, the faster your propellant shoots out the back the better). Chemical rockets can provide a lot of thrust, but since they can only get as hot as the melting point of the engine components, their exhaust velocities are comparatively pathetic. Stuff like ion engines or plasma thrusters have very high exhaust velocities, but their thrusts are pathetic. If you want high thrust *and* high specific impulse, you need nuclear power, and Orion is a simple as gently caress way to do it. And it scales like mad: if you build a really big one then you can use really efficient hydrogen bombs, and there's no upper limit on the size of hydrogen bombs. It's a bit more complicated than that, but not much. You have a shock absorber array to smooth out the acceleration (which would have been a modest 2-4 G), and you can spray some oil out on the bottom of your big metal plate to prevent it from ablating, and of course you're setting bombs off in the atmosphere. But remember, this poo poo was the 1950s and 60s, we were doing that all the time anyway. The Soviets set off a 50 megaton monster just to show they could. We set one bomb off that generated a truly massive amount of fallout specifically to explore the question "How big a hole can we dig with an atomic bomb?" (The answer was "a crater 400 meters in diameter and 100 meters deep). This thing could have soft-landed an entire base on the moon the mass of a naval destroyer in a single launch, and you'd only need to set off 100 kilotons of bombs in the atmosphere. The bombs you'd be setting off at sea level would be sub-kiloton: launch it from a floating platform in the middle of the South Atlantic or something, nobody'd even loving notice. Or more seriously, build one in orbit, load it full of bombs, and launch it from there.  Project Orion: hard numbers by Xeni Jardin, on FlickrAs I mentioned, this progressed to the scale model stage before the atomic test ban treaty that forbade setting off nuclear bombs in space came down (and it suffered from the same thing that the post-Apollo space program plans suffered from: too ambitious). Anyway, here's one of the scale models, using little balls of C4 instead of nuclear bombs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Sv5y6iHUM Failing that, I'll go with Sea Dragon, which also never existed. It would have dwarfed the Saturn V, and been so big it would have been launched from the ocean. Not from a *platform* in the ocean, it'd float. Fill the fuel tank with kerosene, tow it out to see, fill the oxidizer tank with liquid oxygen generated from seawater via electrolysis powered by a handy nuclear aircraft carrier, and launch it. The TV series For All Mankind has a good visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRMDcC0QvFQ
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Feb 25, 2021 03:18
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LostCosmonaut posted:Even more insane ideas were considered at one point; http://www.astronautix.com/h/hibex.html You know it's the good poo poo when the slow mo looks fast
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Feb 25, 2021 04:06
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Phanatic posted:Orion  Video with slow motion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2ZbIMUGUPw The bomb (not shown, I ought to make a more finished version) pops when the pushers are at their furthest extension. The airbags do multiple oscillations per pulse.
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Feb 26, 2021 18:49
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Phanatic posted:
Yeah Sea Dragon is some really mind bending stuff.
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Feb 26, 2021 19:14
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The electron   Mostly because I helped build it, also because it's the first entirely carbon-composite rocket to fly to orbit and the first with 3D printed engines. Also because it's so tiny, I've personally picked up and carried one of the engines myself and pushed the entire rocket (unloaded of course) on some wheeled trolleys between the hanger and launch pad.
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Feb 27, 2021 04:46
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that's pretty rad for a small-scale project! rocketry is amazingly accessible these days imho.
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Feb 27, 2021 04:51
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