I guess it might depend upon your destination…
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It’s also kind of hard to watch and really “plotty”: a HG Wells thing I think (everyone remembers the central idea, but all the cruft he surrounds it with…). I remember doing some web stuff ages ago with loads of graphics stolen from it. Being, as I may have mentioned, kind of into retrofuturism.
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It’s a valid issue. When an aircraft banks, it does so around a center axis, whether it’s a conventional airframe or a V. The farther you move away from that center rotational axis, the more you’ll travel up or down, depending on whether it’s a left or right bank. People sitting near the V’s wingtips will get a spirited up or down ride in banking. This effect is much less pronounced in a conventional airframe, in which all seats are concentrated near the center of the bank axis of rotation.
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My stupid KSP brain: why don’t they just yaw?
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Like theater, the airline business is nothing but bums on seats.
After they fill the wings, they’ll pack the cheap seats in the Gods, up in the tail.
Wow, that’s some deep geek right there. I would have never remembered that 6MDM crashed a flying wing.
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Even more depressing thing is that it will be only due to the lack of political will, and not technology. There are already catalysts allowing synthesis of jet fuel directly from captured atmospheric carbon and water that would allow completely carbon neutral and way less polluting air travel (such synthetic fuel burns cleaner).
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Sadly, they used footage of an actual fatal crash.
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Apparently he didn’t die in the crash - he died of natural causes much later.
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Ah! I did not know that. All this time I thought that using that footage was in bad taste.
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This is a rather old concept, I’ll believe it when I see it, many years of talking about this. I remember one reason the airlines did not want this was they thought people would not want to sit in the middle with no windows, foolish though since people already do that.
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That was before the invention of tablets and smartphones. Now people barely look out the windows even when they’re in the window seat. Plus we’re much more used to being treated like cattle. Coming from those days, being stuck in the middle and being thrown a bag of pretzels would have been quite a shock;
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Should fit neatly into the slots for the A380; by the time the Flying-V hits the airports they should be available.
Also, the Flying V is an electric guitar, for crying out loud.
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Whoops, missed that.
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But by now we have the technology to build lifting bodies faster, stronger, better than then!
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I’d seen this wing-shaped airliner concept in a book, Commercial Aircraft, dating from the late 1970s (I got my copy in 1983). The concept would’ve used a nuclear-powered engine and I guess it remained very much on the drawing boards. It also mentioned the earlier Junkers G.38 which had (part of) the cabin in its wing roots.
In the same section of the book it mentioned hydrogen-fueled airliners (I also remember this from industry magazines at the time; my dad worked for AA), for example a stretched TriStar with (larger by necessity) fuel tanks in the fuselage, fore and aft of the pax cabin.
Anyway, as to your comment, 40 years ago I was under the assumption that we would’ve run out of petroleum years before now; that we’d have monorails (non-dependent upon fossil fuels); and that we’d be inundated by killer bees. (Also figured that Carter would win a 2nd term and things would be very different thereafter, anyway.)
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Moreover, we need to go to net negative CO2 equivalents emissions.
Those 2.5% need to go as well unless we get really bright new idea about carbon sinks.
Nope - rush job. They screwed the pooch. The aircraft is a dud.Fundamentally compromised.
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I think we could. Jet fuel was developed that was more like jelly - not so combustible in an accident as it doesn’t atomise on impact (like diesel - it’s explosive when in a fine mist).
Hydrogen just needs management - eg fuel cell cars. They’re pretty much safe!
I was bbq’ing big mushrooms the other day, and for the first (perhaps dumb) time, noticed just how resistant they are to eat. I cooked them twice as long as the burgers, which were well done, and they shrank a bit, but the middles stayed uncooked and cold, and firm too.
The slow ingress of heat made the insides of the mushroom safe.
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Monorails are real.
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