Wingnuts and FlyboysFollow

What you are describing, Deb, is a perpetual motion machine. While we can theoretically get close to such a device, the nearest mankind has come to a flying device is one of those extremely efficient glider-type UAVs where the surface is covered in solar cells and powers the props when it wasn't riding thermals to remain aloft.

Obviously such an aircraft cannot carry any useful payload, such as deadly lasers or bombs to kill Arabs-- a truly useful enterprise.
/sigh
Maybe some day in the future perhaps.

Totem

Edited, Oct 29th 2008 10:54pm by Totem

Just duct tape a sailboat to an airplane. Walla!

Walla? Really?

Its voila.

Well Shadowrelm you are not technically wrong on any point, but it seems you are missing the main ideas.

The basic principle of a ramjet is that it scoops up a fuel source as it moves. It burns the oxygen it scoops up with something such as hydrogen to create thrust. It is akin to driving your car along a street flooded with gasoline and sucking some into the engine as you go. It doesn't power itself with mechanical airflow.

Solar fusion doesn't work like a battery and superconductor, it works like fusion. The potential energy from the strong nuclear force is converted into kinetic. Although it does create more energy than used to power the chain reaction this is nothing new, the wording of that sentence is poor. We already do this with nuclear fission, we already do this gasoline, and we already do this with campfires. Fusion just releases a lot more energy per mass than the other techniques. Fusion still runs out of fuel, stars still die.

Edited, Oct 30th 2008 4:01pm by Allegory

This is not accurate. Even fully loaded with fuel the SR71 had more than enough thrust to get up to speed without requiring a dive. Please cite your source on this.


Anyways they apperently recently released the actual engine diagram of the SR-71. Remember that hyred ramjet engine I was babbling on about up there? yeah, it has one...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:SR71J58.png