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Beta and Higher Notice for 01/03/2020

🕑 Added 2020-01-04 00:59:10 +0000 UTC

Comments

Nyrath

Yikes! that is a recipe for disaster. I know a designer can angle the exhaust nozzles but then you start having cosine losses.

Rob

It also bugs me when they're not standardized within a setting. Air freight manages with about two dozen custom sizes, but they have a lot of infrastructure involved for that and the containers aren't intermodal--as I understand it, they break bulk and load into other containers a lot of the time just before/after shipping by air.

Rob

I wonder about the engines mounted just "above"/"below" or "beside" long trains of containers in the cargo trains or space trucks. NASA AMES did an analysis of the Skylon vehicle in 2015 and found that due to how far forward the engines are (attempting to avoid C.G. problems as the vehicle burns propellant by moving the heavy engines to the center of mass of the prop tanks, keeping consistent CG throughout burn), the SABRE plumes expand enough as the vehicle gets above Mach 12 and into low enough ambient air that the plumes would directly impinge on the aft end of the fuselage and tail, resulting in temperatures of 2250 C and above--pretty scary numbers. See page 14 or 15 of the linked PDF. I'd hate to see what the temperature from any plume impingement looks like if you get a little of a torchship's thrust hitting your thin-skinned cargo boxes the same way... https://www.nas.nasa.gov/assets/pdf/papers/Mehta_Unmeel_Skylon2015.pdf

John

Whenever I see cargo containers with beveled edges or octagonal cross sections, I go "Why? You can't stack them, and when it comes to packing them, you can't beat rectangles." We use rectangular cross sectional containers because they have the densest packing, and they are the size they are as the containers are designed for the lowest common denominator transport: A truck. They have to fit on a standard flatbed and be no wider than the smallest vehicle that can carry them.