Would you give Lockheed Martin a small loan of one billion dollars

>>32037556
NO!

My criteria
>mach 6
>stealth
>Unmanned
>Must be able to carry a nuclear bomb internally

Why do I want these things? Cause they're fucking cool. Get on it locheed.

>>32037556
Depends, will it have lasers or not?

>>32037602
It's got 3 out of the 4. Though I think it's stealth is an afterthought vs. being fast.

It must be hard to keep secrets anymore with so many damn satellites. That and every nerd with some spare time can setup his own satellite tracking and shit
80's skunkworks had it easy

What bird should it be named after?

>>32037724
For something plane-sized I wouldn't think so. Fly at night, leave in hangar during day. Easy.

>>32037602
>Unmanned
What a loser

>>32038029
Robots are going to be better at planes than chairforce dudebros within a generation.

>>32037556
How far would a billion even get you? Doesn't seem like a lot, considering they are building, designing, and testing a new aircraft.

>>32037556
...only if I have at least ten billion more dollars, and then only if its capabilities include:
>atmospheric cavitation (for that zero drag vacuum bubble)
>transorbital ("space") flight
>mach ten plus
>ten ton payload
>deliver nuclear bombs anywhere
>laser combat
Otherwise, I'll just continue to buy cheaper solutions to more relevant problems like maybe a whole bunch of flying pistol drones.

>>32037991
Vulture

Lockheed Martin must really believe in the project. Or they already made something better and this is a red herring to make China think it is still on the drawing board.

>>32037991
White Ruppell

>>32038256
Swirly yourself, nerd

>>32037991

The Seagull.

Because it shits all over everything.

>>32038256
Enjoy your ace combat 3 world

>>32037648
Stealthy and fast really don't work well.

The fastest shape is a fucking needle, which isn't very stealthy since cylinders always have a flat side facing any direction perpendicular, which means radar scatter will almost always return a signal.

More very aerodynamic shapes are flat. Just flat. If you need a large intake (think Mig-25) then curving it off to be stealthy is far less aerodynamic than keeping the straight face all the way down until the engine exhaust outlet.

If you need wings they should be as knife edge and flat on the top and bottom as possible, curving them back slightly to help with mach transition helps but going very fast in atmosphere is all about dispersing mach cones and making sure you're not creating any subsonic drag pockets because they'll literally fuck your plane in half.

If you want a high altitude Scramjet powered aircraft it has to be a very fast skipping stone, or have many properties like that. Scramjets will more or less bounce along the atmosphere than fly through it at altitude, and once again it's basically impossible to incorporate stealth features into something that requires very large flat wings and body.

RAM is also not applicable since it will just melt. Heatshielding will have to be applied to any and all surfaces likely to encounter any sort of drag or atmospheric friction which once again limits stealth capabilities.

With current technology of air breathing engines S or Y ducts will also not be an option whatsoever as pressures along the "S" would just tear it apart, as well as either reducing incoming pressure or creating a mach cone inside the engines which would mean you would need to bleed off a great deal of air further hurting the bypass ratio of the engine.

I'm just starting to get into fluid mechanics related to jet and gas turbine engines and turbofans so I'm unable to give more detailed explanations than this but stealth and high speed high altitude performance do not really go hand in hand.

>>32038483
>T. 2nd year Aerospace engi

>>32038483
SR-71, for its size, has very low RCS.

It's possible, but definitely much harder.

>>32038513
Size != RCS

What I'm getting at is designing a plane first and foremost for aerodynamic performance will lead to significant drawbacks in the amount of other features you may implement.

Load is one, the ideal spy plane would have extremely high Thrust to weight and so carrying as little as possible would be a must.

Electronics. Electronic systems draw from batteries (increased load) or from generators powered by the jets which takes energy from the jet itself (specifically from the compressor turning), though with a scramjet this wouldn't be possible due to very few moving parts.

Control surfaces. This one should be intuitive but flaps and ailerons don't work so well when there's hardly any air or you're at risk of tearing them off should they create an "aggressive" (for lack of a better term) drag bubble behind them.

On the SR-71 it just so happened that the shape of the plane was beneficial to cutting its RCS. That being said Nork radars were able to lock it frequently and even fired upon it or simulated many missile attacks on SR-71's so it really wasn't "that" small considering the altitude it was flying at.

>>32037556
YES
>>32038483
fuck stealth, who needs it when ur going 7,000mph
also, have fun gettign a good job ha ha
i work with 3 Aerospace engineers on the shop floor (f35 parts) and i make more than all of em.

>>32038513
the sr71 had a very small RCS, like 2 square meters.
for a jet that's FUCKING HUGE, it was pretty good.

>>32038541
I'm in Canada so it's Bombardier or some other hipster company for me. I'm going into jet propulsion and I'm pretty sure I'm attention MIT's jet propulsion lab for a graduate or technical degree.

If I wanted money I just would have gone into Networking or IT. My brother makes ~$400K and many companies here offer around the same for qualified Cisco and Microsoft network engi's or techs.

Instead I'm doing mathematics and aerospace majors. Because I like planes and it's a more focused mech E, and math is fun. I didn't pick my major for salary desu.

>>32038553
>Attention

It's too early..

**Attending

>>32037991
Whitebird?

>>32038553
>I didn't pick my major for salary desu.
well that's good
cuz we make a garbage 50K a year
gotta get that F35 price down a 80 million i guess

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>>32038535
We could just put a really tiny fan turbine on the front of the craft to generate power, which should be more than enough at optimal scramjet speeds. Like, a really tiny one.

>>32037991
valkiry. Soars above anything else. hmm. Dynasoar? No, Valkiry it is. I wonder what the service ceiling on that thing would be.

Also, I think they should go for the older low penetration doctrine. I have a feeling that the SAMs have a higher service ceiling than this bird might get to. If you go Mach 2+ at a few yards above sealevel, the baddies won't even know what exactly just happened and you will be beyond the horizon before they can get a response going.

>>32038443
I'm okay with this

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>>32038569
>gotta get that F35 price down a 80 million i guess
Guess they're cutting somehow

I'm duel majoring in mathematics for the purpose of going into research. It would be essentially the same thing as going into theoretical physics for me. I'm wanting (hoping) to get in with some company and do work on advanced jet technology. I'm hoping not to get stuck in a company where I would slightly fine tune an engine to yield 3% better efficiency and has a better take off TTW but there's a larger chance of that then to end up in a jet lab.

>>32038580
Actually that's how E-war pods on Growlers get power, but scramjets do NOT operate "in atmosphere". Scramjets are like trying to keep a candle lit in a wind tunnel (very large wind tunnel). It is extremely hard. The reason for a scramjet is not necessarily that is more powerful. While they do offer more thrust it is not magnitudes more that would be required for hypersonic speeds. You would use one to fly at a higher altitude where there is less air resistance. Same reason why rockets fly straight up and not in a "space plane" fashion. Most of the rockets fuel is used before the time it's a few hundred meters off the ground but it means the rocket gets to higher altitudes faster and encounters less and less air resistance faster and the rocket becomes more efficient.

So to clarify. Scramjets at altitude of operation would bounce off the atmosphere rather than fly in it per se. Either way at the altitudes a scramjet would be useful there would be very little air anyways, which would mean to turn your turbine it would be exceedingly hard and generate very little energy for the included weight of the system.

I'm still under the impression from everything I've seen that battery banks are still the best option for powering a scramjet aircraft. You don't really need anything more or less complicated than that.

>>32037602
>Unmanned
>Nuke

Yeah right

>>32038599
wat
how are batteries supposed to power a scramjet

The point of scramjet is not altitude.. but speed...
Normal jet engines can't operate at mach 3+
So of course you'll need something to accelerate it up to that speed.

>>32037602
"Lockheed Martin can definitely do that!"
After 3 years
"Make it Mach 5 since we can't do Mach 6 and you've already paid half of the project"
After 6 years
"We should make it manned since unmanned is too hard and you've already put effort and money into it"

>>32038742
Grats, you fell for the memes.

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>>32038682
>how are batteries supposed to power a scramjet
They're just supposed to power the scramjets electronics and hydraulics systems since bleed air from the engines would be (possibly) insufficient and I don't see a way to generate electricity since a normal electric generator on a jet is attached to the compressor shaft of the turbofan.

On a scramjet there is no such shaft or spinning compressor.

>The point of scramjet is not altitude.. but speed...
But altitude IS speed. Less atmosphere at higher altitudes drastically reduces drag. Scramjets really wouldn't offer much of a benifit in thick atmosphere because the power they produce in thrust isn't significantly more than a typical turbofan (I'm not sure as to what the margin would be but it's not magic). Remember you're burning the same fuel. Flow rate of fuel is the only thing that increases exhaust power per second. More fuel per second needs more air flow per second. The only way you can get more air is by increasing your speed (which redundantly require more power) or compress the air. This is done with a lateral compressor attached to the power shaft of the engine or with a shock body inlet that lines a shock wave diffraction at a specific angle to the diffusion surface causing supersonic compression.

More compression = more air flow and so you can fly at higher and higher altitudes burning the same amount of fuel whereas with lower compression ratios you would be unable to combust enough fuel due to lack of oxygen and so lose power.

I'm not sure how much more power a scramjet offers at the same altitude than a turbofan but I can assure you that a scramjet's speed does not come from raw brute power. If that was all that was needed or wanted rocket motors would be the quick, simple, and end goal solution to our high altitude air breathing engine woe's.

>>32038769
You could always hybrid it, much like the J-58 .

>>32038811
That's basically the only way to get the scramjet up to altitude where it will work. But that also means "at altitude" you can't use the turbofan ergo you can't use the generator attached to it.

This is the power delivery problem of scramjets, current ones use batteries iirc.
To solve this I guess you could use some sort of seebeck plate around the scramjet to generate electricity...

>>32038846
Well, i think you can let a little air leak though to power a small turbofan, or the turbofan itself at a slower speed to power.

If you wanted to be a real cheeky cunt you can throw in a small rotery engine that uses the same fuel to gen power

>>32039162
I'm not quite sure. As far as I was aware a scramjet operated on 0 bypass which is why it's so hard to keep it burning in low atmosphere because all the air entering the engine will be compressed and enter the combustion chamber which means in low altitudes you're dealing with absolutely ludicrous pressures.

The generator idea is still not feasible because that requires taking compressed air from the scramjet which like I said iirc is against the concept of a scramjet or carrying seperate oxidizer to burn the fuel in the piston engine which still defeats the purpose of using an air breathing engine (and not just the use of oxidizer).

For power generation I see what you're saying but the fact that the only air breathing engines that work in high altitudes are insanly high compression engines drastically limits the uses of the engine beyond simply propulsion.

>>32037991
Tit

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>>32037991
The German Imperial Eagle

>>32039248
Yeah, im just spitballing here anyways...

Shit, lots of heat, right? Lightweight steam?

>>32039248
There's no reason you can't have some bypass, or just have a secondary intake elsewhere - both solutions work the same, the bypass flow is just more complex to develop.

As another idea though; you're already circulating fuel to regulate the airframe's temperature and vapourise fuel for better efficiency. When you vaporise the fuel, drive that high pressure vapour through a turbine.

>>32039467
Did you just steal my steam idea, fuccccccccccccboi?

>>32039467
You can have as many intakes as you want but again as to my knowledge (I'm not the arbiter of jets) scramjets operate on 0 bypass. So with that axiom then no there would be 0 bleed air. I'm not here to lecture anyone on how to design a scramjet jet as again I'm not entirly sure.

The secondary intake would work to intake air, sure but again you forget that it's still useless because nothing but insanly high compression jets or engines work at scramjet operating altitudes. Put as many intakes as you want it would be theoretically possible to intake enough air to fuel combustion in a turbofan but at that point the entire front face of a typical aircraft would be an intake. This is simply unresonable.

Your fuel vaporization idea is interesting but at first glance I'm concerned about the entropy of the system. But in terms of vaporized fuel are you talking in the injection or in the fuel tanks?

>>32038569
Lol, I make that as a low tier slave at a town highway department.

>>32037556
No if I had a million dollars I would buy land the equates to a million dollar or at least pay it off indefinitely. Turn it into a run way, traffic drugs in and out make it then maybe a small loan.

>>32039357
Or as every normal person calls it: the Golden Eagle.

>>32039544
You're correct that they don't have bypass, but adding one wouldn't make it not a scramjet; in a sense adding a bypass to a scramjet just makes the scramjet smaller.

>The secondary intake would work to intake air, sure but again you forget that it's still useless because nothing but insanly high compression jets or engines work at scramjet operating altitudes.

I don't think that'd be the case - sure if you go for a suborbital flight you're going to be 100% reliant on batteries, but I don't see that being a problem; it's not like your hydraulics are going to be doing much at that stage (avionics would use negligible power, cooling / thermal management might be a concern, but you don't need to be running at anywhere near the same pressures or flow rates as with hydraulics or fuel).

For running an air turbine generator though during scramjet operation, I think you'd be alright for the most part - I threw some numbers at Wolfram Alpha and Excel and for a hypothetical perfect-world scramjet with a 1m^2 flow cross-section (I'm not sure what that means for scramjet diameter; if that'd be the minimum internal cross-section, or the cross-section at the beginning of the intake), you'd get between 0.4kg/s and 51kg/s of air mass flow depending on speed and altitude (the former being for 200,000ft at Mach 5, the latter being 100,000ft at Mach 10). I'm no scramjet expert though, so I'll defer to anyone working in hypersonics.

As for the fuel vaporisation idea and your question; it'd probably be between the fuel tanks and injection, although you'd need to be able to re-circulate the vaporised fuel back to the fuel tank - maybe you'd have a header tank, with the fuel line between the main and header being heated / vaporised, with a return line to help with thermal management and prevention of overpressure.

>>32039930
Hang on, Diff Eq test right now can reply in like... Few hours.

I was saying batteries are probably the best solution as most other power sources are too heavy. You're correct about the control surfaces (obviously).

I'll read over the wolfram numbers and response to my q in a bit.

At this point we might as well be building damn spaceships.

Seriously.

Fuck atmospheric flight.

That's so last century.

>>32038599
You could hypothetically get power by sticking a magnetohydrodynamic generator in the exhaust cone.

>>32038541
>fuck stealth, who needs it when ur going 7,000mph

Your pilot, once someone makes 7500 mph SAMs. Or combat lasers. Given the likely 30+ years service life, it might be more important than you'd think now.

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>>32040487
>be going all the speed
>hull is already near max sustainable temperature
>when suddenly HEL

Pic related, it's whats left of the craft.

>>32039930
>adding a bypass to a scramjet just makes the scramjet smaller.

Ok not entirely true. A scramjet relies entirely on properly aligning shock boundaries in the shock train at a specific angle (what angle doesn't really matter) creating constructive interference in the shock cones allowing for super sonic compression to happen. Adding a bleed somewhere could potentially fuck up the cones angling to be incredibly inefficient or not possible or create such a complicated shock train that combustion may not necessarily be possible. The only time a ""bypass"" happens in a scramjet is with an MHD like
>>32040323
mentioned. This is what NASA is currently testing in order for flow control.

Like I said, I've seen a fair amount and no Scramjet (or even ramjet barring turboramjets) has physical air bypass tubes because they simply aren't needed and make the engine even more complicated.

1m^2 flow cross-section is the intake cross section, not the shock boundry diverter cross section (as this gradually decreases) or the shock train / combustion cross section.

Interesting numbers for flow rate.

F = [m dot * V]e - [m dot * V]0 + (pe - p0) * Ae , obviously straight out of NASA's website and my dynamics 2 textbook. This doesn't really help here since we don't care about thrust but it does let us picture what's going on.

m dot V e (exit) is the mass flow rate of fuel and air and the velocity it exits at.
m dot V 0 (drag) is the same thing but free stream mass flow rate and free steam velocity. This is RAM drag.
Pressure difference times the Nozzle exit area gives us pressure correction.

For reference the only real difference in terms of flow rate and compression between a ram and scramjet is that the flow exiting the inlet will be subsonic for a ramjet. Otherwise they're basically the same.

The vaporization is interesting but you're correct in saying multiple tanks would be needed. In a lossless system electricity generated would be used for recirculating fuel.

>>32041142
>adding a bypass to a scramjet just makes the scramjet sm

I see what you were trying to say.

The difference is in terminology. A "bypass" bleeds air from the engine itself, if you were to add a bypass at the front of a scramjet this doesn't really add a bypass (other than running air over the engine which has its uses, even if there's hardly any of it) it makes the intake smaller. But an actual bypass which sits after the inlet would absolutely fuck shock boundaries. I wouldn't even begin to try the math (because it would be insanely complex even in 2d) to see what would happen, but I have a few guesses:

a) huge shock loss happens and you completely defeat the point of a scramjet over a ramjet
b) shock train has to be very complex or long to compensate for air bleed

>>32041142
>>32041246
(these were both me)

I figured out what you were getting at after the fact.

>>32037602
can't be stealthy with that belly showing down, unless someone wants to explain some true space magic

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>>32037556
Just a small loan please goy we don't have the funds ourselves

>>32038483
I feel that at hypersonic speeds, the amount of thermal energy involved would make stealth irrelevant anyway. Even if you designed it to be stealthy RADAR wise, its still going to be a white hot spec against a sub zero sky. So IR based detection system will pick it up pretty quick. But honestly if you're in a situation that requires the use of mach 6+ reconnaissance drones, then you're probably already at war anyway so being detected over enemy territory wouldn't make any political difference and you're going so fast that nothing can catch it anyway.

>>32043272
stealth is also good when you want to announce your presence with the bombs exploding, not your fuckhuge thermal streaks across the sky. These things are not invincible, and neither was the SR71. That's why stealth is being considered too