Xi Jinping announces Ace Combat themed 5 year plan
Xi Jinping announces Ace Combat themed 5 year plan
108 comments
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the answer to every infrastructure problem is high-speed rail
I hope they figure out how to do this with engineless commercial airliners (I know it'll never happen but it would be cool)
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Well, you could make a "train" to orbit but your rail would have to be hundreds of kilometers long, dozens of kilometers tall, held up with wires and particle accelerators, and the train would probably just be a single car
Btw this would just accelerate the space plane so it doesnt have to burn as much fuel as otherwise. It's not a literal train into space
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i hope this works and doesn't turn humans into mashed potatoes
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they could test it on billionaires
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It's probably not for humans
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Drones
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CPC Priorities
Mass Line Mass Driver -
...but gommunsiim no innovation!!1!11!111!!
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Its not a new idea, arthur c clarke wrote about a rail launcher in Prelude to Space (1947), he based most of that story on how the scientists at that time expected space travel to happen.
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"We have perfected instantaneous teleportation."
"Pfffft, Star Trek did it."
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bringing a science fiction concept into reality presents an engineering challenge that requires both research and innovation; research to find what the real life problems stopping you are, and innovation to solve them
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By this definition innovation only exists as fictional writings
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true, though putting it into practise would still be something else
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Mao Z.O.E.dong -
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China is building High Speed Rail To Space!!!
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but at what cost?
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I couldn't find the cost of this project specifically, but China's total space budget is $12 billion a year.
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Pittance we sent that much to Israel this year
Must be nice to have a good government
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Which Final Fantasy game am I about to be living in?
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VIII for sure. The cool futuristic society in that one launched stuff to space with a railgun.
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Yeah Esthar had a space gun that shot pods into space.
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FFX, the one where most of the world was flooded.
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This is some
tier shit (approving) -
incredible things are happening in China
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This sounds so sick
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Yup you can tell this is a railroad to space cause the reporting is just as awful as all the reporting on Chinese trains
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BUT HOW WILL IT TURN A PROFIT?!! 😭
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There are only two acceptable ways to write about Chinese trains. Either spin it to somehow be bad, or just don't provide necessary context and instead write falsities. And Chinese news often does the latter.
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I wonder how they plan to handle the heat generated? Maybe you don't need the same kind of acceleration for a rail launcher than with a rail gun.
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I mean... a gun would need a much shorter distance to launch a projectile to be useful. A rail launcher for spacecraft could be WAY longer and still be useful, maybe that will help keep heat under control?
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It’s not for people or it would be too long (?)
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The article says that the railgun part accelerates the plane to mach 1.7 and then the rocket on the plane fires and it accelerates further.
The Concorde was designed to cruise at mach 2, so that's a very survivable speed if the acceleration on the rail isn't too abrupt, like you said.
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I think the acceleration is the crucial part, the speed you are going at is irrelevant, just the change in speed
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It’s still would be like 1-2 km, if they aim at 10g. And they still need to find another 20 machs from rocket booster.
Doing full railgun with small rockets is more poggers (without humans obv )
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I don't think we know the payload specifications of the proposed vehicle that would use it
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There is no space race lol china is the only one actually doing anything
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Uhhh
Can someone tell me what velocity you need to launch an object at in order to reach orbit? And what accelerative forces you need in order to achieve that?
How big is this railgun? How are they handling heat from atmospheric friction? You have the same problem going up too quickly as you get coming down too quickly.
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NASAs version of this is called StarTram, it's feasible but there are some major technical hurdles.
In the prototype stage, the launch velocity at the end of the gun would not be anywhere near the 10 km/s you would need to achieve orbit. But you could reach a sizable fraction, say 3 km/s. Becuase the velocity gained during rocket flight is not linear with mass, having that 3 km/s inital boost would reduce your overall rocket mass by like 80%. The rocket would clear the atmosphere and then fire its motor to gain a stable orbit.
We can achieve 3 km/s with current technology, it would require like a 100 km long maglev in a very low pressure tube, likely built on the side of a mountain. It could probably reduce space flight costs by a factor of 10 if completed.
Building the proposed goal of a human rated version capable of reaching near 10 km/s at the end point would be much more difficult. The tube would have to span over 1,000 km and I don't believe we have the technology yet to maintain the vacuum or supply enough power quickly enough to power it.
China is likely proposing to build a testbed system to start researching the concept. Probably on a larger scale than NASA has but nowhere near a complete system.
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You'd still need engines and fuel onboard, or you couldn't circularize the orbit. The idea is more just get something out of the atmosphere with something that doesn't itself have to be dragged along for the ride, then do the rest of it once you don't have atmospheric drag and you aren't fighting directly against gravity anymore.
It's kind of the same as the idea of "what if the first stage was a big air-breathing plane that just, like, flew really high and really fast?" that keeps cropping up, just finding a way to make the first part of the process less absurdly expensive.
But no matter what you can't put something into orbit with a single input of velocity unless that was enough to remove it from the Earth's sphere of influence entirely, because you can't make the lowest point in an orbit higher than the point you're currently at.
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What if the interior of the railgun accelerator was all a vacuum and the exit point was really really really really tall? So that impact with atmosphere at the exit of the gun was lower.
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The Delta-V (change in velocity) to reach the ISS (400km) in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is 9.4km/s. This is the absolute minimum so it doesn't include things like drag or other inefficiencies. Getting to space takes only about 1.4km/s, just about all the rest of that delta-v is used to accelerate the spaceship to 7.6km/s. This is about the minimum speed, altitude, and delta-v to get into orbit and stay there. Going much lower than the ISS will have your orbit decay too much to stay in orbit for more than weeks or months. I think it would take about 8000m/s to orbit right at 100km but your orbit would decay really quickly at that altitude, you would only get a few hours of orbiting.
I think I answered you below about why you can't to orbit using only a railgun.
Edit: Going from earth orbit to other places doesn't take as much delta-v as you might think. Going from earth orbit to lunar orbit only takes about 3km/s and going from earth orbit to mars orbit takes 5.7km/s.
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Those
for FF8 - you got your remake baby!-
If the railgun doesn't have a giant revolver cylinder I will be highly disappointed.
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I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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Talk about a superpower
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They're building The Chandelier?
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high speed railgun
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Meanwhile in the west, Elon Musk is blowing up launch pads because he fancies himself to be a rocket engineer.
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Elon get fucked ...
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Elon BTFO
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YES YES YES YES YES YES OMG I'M GONNA BLOW!!! :WHALE
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Sure, “rockets”.
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+50 FICO score, thank you for defending democracy, Citizen
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SpinLaunch has been working on something like this for a few years.
108 comments
China completely invalidating SpaceX's business model would be hilarious.
NASA is banned from working with China, so it would be genuinely hilarious if they were the only group stuck paying $3k per kg.
I’m not sure what’s funnier. If China open sources the technology and NASA would have no choice but to switch to it, or they keep it proprietary and force the US to use spacex
The SpaceX rockets being reusable barely put a dent in the price of launches, they were already cheap. probably has something to do with them using RP-1 fuel wich is is cheaper and easier to store and creates greenhouse gasses vs. the clean burning liquid hydrogen that NASA and ESA use.