Danish forum members building manned space rocket (and submarine)

forums.somethingawful.com

36 points·jasonwatkinspdx··6 comments

Cool stuff, but characterizing NOX as "safe" with respect to LOX is crazy, IMHO. Witness the Scaled Composites fatal accident, doing a "cold flow" test.

There's a poor safety culture around nitrous because many people have used it at small scales, or in the racing community, without too many problems.

In part, there's a scaling issue here. If your pipe full of nitrous is less than some (unknown) critical diameter, then spontaneous decomposition that happens in the pipe gets quenched. As you scale things up ... oh, you hit your pipe with a hammer on a hot day. Oops, you're dead.

OTOH, people know LOX can be dangerous, so they treat it with respect. Except for that barbecue quy on Youtube.

Automotive nitrous oxide systems are also fairly safe because they're well-tested mass-produced consumer products. Homemade, modified or improperly installed automotive nitrous systems can and do explode. There's a series of photos well-known on just about any car-related forum of a Nissan Maxima that had a nitrous bottle explode in a garage; the level of destruction is impressive.

Oxidizers are dangerous - in many cases far more dangerous than the fuel. Of course, most people are going to treat something labeled "rocket fuel" with respect.

They're a non-profit before they are Something Awful forum members. Not trying to disrespect goons here, I'm one also, but the priorities need to be straightened.

See RiderOfGiraffe's comment on this same page.

Would you write a headline saying "X HN member is Y" if I had an interesting project?

They have no affiliation with SA. It's not a small forum project that turned into extraterrestrial space flight.

The submarine is normally docked right outside my window.

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