Once you've accepted that you can't land on normal runways, and that you're
infrastructure is going to be really expensive, all sorts of fun landing
techniques are possible. My favorite:
Have a very large field of pressurised gas cylinders of air. Vehicle falls
towards it at terminal velocity. Open the valves on all the cylinders, and
now terminal velocity in air is zero relative to ground!
;-)
It works better as a way to land an aircraft with guaranteed 0 ground
speed, so that you don't need much in the way of landing gear. Who here
hasn't hovered an RC plane over a fan?
-David Summers
On Wed, Mar 3, 2021 at 9:36 PM J Farmer <jfarmer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Yeah, the landing gear seems to be something that they have not been
happy with. Possibly why they floated the idea of landing the beast by
latching onto a stand with the fins. Wasn't there an experimental VTOL
aircraft that did that?
John
On 3/3/2021 11:07 PM, Thomas Janstrom wrote:
Several observations from the footage available:
Firstly the land legs didn't lock into position
That landing was HARD, there was at least a meter worth of bounce,
notice the transition from the nose to body crumpled.
There was likely quite a bit of impact related damage to the plumbing
given the forces involved
Pooling Lox+Lmethane in a confined space is always a bad thing, the
detonable range is just so huge and requires almost no input energy to
ignite, a warm rocket engine will do.
During flight one engine was running oxidiser rich (greenish flame)
and another fuel rich whether this was intentional or not we might
never know.
So yes it landed and thats a big success but they need to work on
those legs, they have been a potential issue since SN5.
Thomas.
On 4/03/2021 1:56 pm, roxanna Mason wrote:
Did they totally shut down all electrical systems that could be an
ignition source, or is it hopeless having oxygen and
methane intimately mixed?
Reminds me of the DCX when it blew up after a landing gear failure.
K