![]() ![]() Rather than rail at the nonsense, we thought we'd talk sense instead, and see how that catches on. At these high altitudes, the atmospheric density is so low that aerodynamic control surfaces which go back to the Wrights and Glenn Curtiss don’t work, and you have to provide thrusters for stability and (attitude) control.Ī lot of nonsense is written about weapons, especially on the Net. Other nations as well as the USA experimented with aircraft that had duplex jet and rocket power for extreme altitudes, but none was ever operationalized. The engine was a turbojet in some flight regimes and a ramjet in others… pretty amazing for 1960. The A-12 and SR-71 were powered by an exotic engine that converted from using an axial compressor to a shock-body compressor at operational altitude and speed. A turbojet or turbofan has an axial (or in some early models, centrifugal) compressor built in to it. Above 10-15k feet you have to provide life support for the humans as well.Ī World War II airplane usually achieved stratospheric flight with a combination of mechanical and turbo supercharging. To go stratospheric or higher requires increasingly complex compressive technologies to keep the fuel/air mixture stoichiometric in the decreasingly dense atmosphere. The reason “to a point” exists in the airplane world is that airplanes are air-breathing and, unlike rockets, get their oxidant from the atmosphere. The classic example being the Breguet Range Equation of, IIRC, the 19-teens. Yep, both of these (declining weight due to fuel burn and better performance at altitude, to a point) are used in aviation speed and range calculations. ![]()
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