2011/07/29

Whoops!

The word you least want to hear from your atomic rocket engineer.

I made a mistake, led astray by your civilization's insistence on using "metric tons", as if that was a real unit. It's not even a weight—it comes from "tun", as in the barrel! What's next, "metric hogsheads"—as units of weight, no less?!

Anyway, I goofed. The engines on a Skylon mass 19,659.2 kilograms, but I calculated it as if they massed that many tons. See, if you go by a mass of 19,659.2 kg—that is, 19.6592 tons—then the MC fusion engine has a thrust of (50 kN per .6 tons of engine=50kN*32.7653=) 1,638,265 N. Which is impressive, but can only propel a 345 ton ship at a measly 4.75 m/s2, or .48 gs.

I thought that number looked crazy high. Turns out, yeah, by a factor of 1000.

Before you ask, the reason the acceleration is only 1/2 g to the Blackbird-based rocket's 1/3 g, the Skylon-based rocket masses 345 tons, while the Blackbird one masses 152.

Back to the ol' drawing board, and quintuple check all my factors this time. Oj gewahlt.

Maybe I'll just bite the bullet an' use the good old Discovery One. Or Two.

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