The trick may work because many people don’t understand that calories are a measure of energy.

And many consumers would also fervently deny that their body doesn’t care what form food energy comes in. They would instead explain that the normal kind of energy found in food is probably broken down further into good and bad kinds (fat=bad energy, complex carbs=good energy, “nutrient dense”=good, etc).

Also many people may think food has two types of energy: Vitalism-style stuff that makes you feel “energized” (like caffeine, maybe, or vitamins), and energy (normal kind, measured in calories or joules).

What am I missing here?

Now uploading works for some reason. Maybe it was a bug on WordPress’ end? I’m heavily leaning on that. It even mangled the png into something almost unreadable. That damned “crunching”.

It’s probably some font issue in Firefox – the edit window uses something that is not well behaving in Ubuntu Gnome. Probably smoothing yes. I have a crappy onboard Intel 3D accelerator and upgrading to 9.10 solved many opengl garbling problems in at least two applications so in that sense it’s a big win.
On the other hand some software seems a bit slower.

To make a ramjet work up to mach 8, you essentially need the inlet, combustor, and exhaust to use active cooling or some high temp materials like hafnium diboride (SHARP materials). You need inlet and exhaust to have variable geometry (not hard either), and you should use LOX based MIPCC. I prefer a design that cools the inlet with LOX and bleeds excess LOX into the airstream to cool and condense it at high speeds.

I would suggest a small rocket motor in addition to the ramjet, once you reach mach 6-7, I’d light the rocket and drop the ramjet (ramjets are simple, cheap, and easily mass produced) to get some ballistic boost, then skip glide the rest of the way to Britain. I built such a design in X-Plane simulator that could be skipped all the way around the planet.

A long shot but is the WordPress editing in any way reliant upon Java? Just asking as I’ve noticed Java (Sun version, haven’t tried IcedTea or whatever the f/oss alternative is called now) operations becoming increasingly (and ridiculously) slow on Xubuntu and Ubuntu during the last distributions. IIRC there have been found issues (some Java math operations I think it was) that have fixes but there’s probably more.

If that’s not related I wonder which Firefox and Opera version (not just version number but also static vs. dynamic for Opera) you’re using and how you installed Opera. Just before starting on this comment I found these two following pages that were of interest and which gives some information about these things with Opera. One of them seems to have tweaks that might be appropriate for your Opera issues on Ubuntu (Gnome desktop environment). Hopefully you might find something of help (they’re recently created or updated too):
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OperaBrowser
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-install-opera-web-browser-in-ubuntu-including-flashjava-plugins.html

Very strange that a png format image is making trouble in open source programs, it absolutely shouldn’t.

As for text being hard to read, do you experience that only within the WordPress editor? If it’s a general issue it might well be anti-aliasing issues within Ubuntu or Firefox/Opera or both (I’ve had anti-aliasing issues in old versions of Xubuntu before) or possibly compiz/beryl/stuff (I don’t know much about those programs yet, been a long time since I last used Gnome and those aren’t high on my list of things to get familiar with/sort out).

I hear that
My first assignment in the USAF was Eglin, test side in 1980. (Munitions
I got lucky a couple of times on-the-job and got to look over some of the Bomarc launch sites and other missile test stands that are (or were) still in-place. Everyone always seemed to “take-it-in-stride” while I was always struck by the fact I was walking through history.

>Ramjets: I was not aware of the runaway Ramjet, it
>may have happened after I departed.

That seems to be what EVERYONE says about this story
Heck I got more information, easier about the SNARK test launch site than I could get about most of the BOMARC program. (Including a look at the launch site for the SNARK we “lost” when the bird had a total communications failure and ended up flying down into South America before it ran out of fuel and crashed
{Google search: “The Day They Lost A Snark”}

>We routinely sent a dmg to blow the bird after the
>mission.

“dmg”? Destruct signal? My Acronym-Fu is not what it used to be

>The thumbnail tuning for that point in history was the
>Ramjets could take a frame to MACH 10. We knew when
>and what would fail before it reached 10.

Thanks, that jibes with information I’ve been able to get ahold of saying that in most cases the ramjets were capable of more thrust and acceleration than the air-frames of the day could handle.

Randy

If drag loss delta vee is very roughly inversely proportional to length, for the 110 m Saturn V it was 40 m/s, the 40 m Atlas I it was 120 m/s and for a 10 m rocket it should be 360 to 400 m/s…. This is of course a very very ugly simplification assuming constant configuration / shape (but proportion changes are allowed) and density but anyway…

The transonic c_d is quite large, John Carmack approximated it by just looking at the V-2 experimental data from Sutton.

Maybe you are right anyway.

Have to build a simulator again some day, had one written in Python on a memory stick that of course broke down.

I’ve never considered it important to see that figure separately, rather the estimate of performance. This will be verified in a number of test flights of 1st stage only, using the US amateur rocket regulations. The Reynolds number is in the calculation.

In any case, for rockets this small, the first stage is mainly to get the 2 upper stages to a vacuum, and nearly all the flight velocity is developed by the horizontal component of the upper stage thrust.

In a vacuum, rockets of 10-100 N thrust are nearly as efficient as larger ones.

The math has been checked enough for there to be confidence, so the next steps are to gather the means to build–the “Location-1 through 3″ as mentioned in the N Prize presentation in the site.