The company building a rotating detonation engine is pushing the tech forward
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Not a bad goal, but the thin vernier of 'passenger flight' leaves a bad taste in my mouth. This tech is for munitions delivery first, the meatbag ferry is squarely a side hustle, and I wish they'd be honest about it.
My understanding is that mach ~5 is when ramjets hit their limit and you have to transition to scramjets if you want to go faster.
These RDEs are especially neat because the exhaust mass is moving supersonically but they're very choosy about the mix in the combustion chamber, so and air-breathing RDE will be doing some sort of voodoo in that department. If they riddle it out they might get a single engine that functions throughout the airspeed regime.
Commercial tech is vulnerable to all sorts of disruptions, regulations, and setbacks. If you make something that will make killing a whole bunch of people easier, rest assured theres a global market for it.
They mention that goal a couple of places, and state that hypersonic is defined as Mach 5 or more.
I also think to some extent there are employees who know but semi-appreciate the cover. In a prior life, I worked on some stuff that's, unfortunately, currently being used to murder people in the middle east. That just doesn't make good small talk at parties.
Also, I took one look at the SF86 and said F that, no government deserves that information, so I didn't get screwed in the Department of State OPM hack like all the other suckers.
Weapons doesn’t pay as well as making people click ads. The people working on this stuff are usually doing so because they believe it’s the right thing.
1) The pay is pretty good. It's not FAANG-level pay, but it's generally better than non-FAANG pay, without so much competition.
2) The work-life balance is excellent, as long as it's in a place you want to live. No 80-hour weeks, as overtime is generally prohibited unless approved by the customer (and then you get overtime pay). Time is tracked and paid by the government on an hourly basis, so they don't allow overtime unless necessary. No unpaid "exempt" overtime.
3) Generally stable employment. It's hard to find people with a security clearance, so it's hard to get fired unless you're a really poor performer. You probably don't have to worry about dealing with stack ranking unlike many regular jobs.
This is not true.
It's just TC being too low
Plenty of us are happy, even pleased, to make weapons.
Certainly I get the sense that a lot of Ukrainians have reconsidered their own views. There's people I know who I doubt would have ever involved themselves in weapons development, who have gotten into it and related things.
Also, some weapons are less useful for bad purposes than others: a missile-defense or air-defense system, for instance, isn't terribly useful for bombing civilian populations, and it's kinda hard to criticize someone for wanting to shoot down incoming missiles. Dumb bombs, on the other hand, are great for bombing ground targets, which could be either Russian invaders or cities with trapped civilians.
However, if you're a SWE as many people here probably are, and you get into the business of building weapons for war, a lot of the stuff you'd work on probably isn't that useful for killing Gazans. To kill lots of Gazans, you just need things like dumb bombs, artillery shells, etc. Those things don't use software; they've been using those weapons since WWI or before. The "smart" weapons the expensive SWEs work on aren't so useful for indiscriminate killing of civilian populations: they're much more accurate, but also much more expensive, so if your goal is just to kill civilians, they're not a very good way to spend your money. It's much easier to just get lots of artillery shells and shoot them in the general direction, just like Russian troops do.
Engineers in many different industries can be blamed for enabling awful things. Facebook engineers, for instance, I think have a lot to answer for, for being instrumental in destabilizing society and increasing radicalism. Engineers in the petrochemical industry have worked to cause climate change and pollution.
It's a good thing that Israel has the capability to defend itself. Which means killing a lot of Gazans.
Thin vernier -> thin veneer btw
As a rule of thumb, when you hear boost-glide vehicle, the speed is close to Mach 20. If it’s air breathing (ramjet or scramjet) the speed is slightly higher than Mach 5, but probably less than Mach 10.
Likewise this case. As an OTL civvie I'd expect that this tech under discussion lags whatever .mil is up to. Out to launch!
If you develop state-of-the-art data infrastructure software, novel data processing capabilities, or some other advanced software tech, it is routine to have an org under the US DoD as one of the earliest pilot customers. It is an open secret but many startups pretend like this isn't a standard part of that kind of business. The US DoD is a sophisticated early adopter of a lot of tech at a stage before most commercial enterprises are willing to engage.
The average person on the street may be a bit naive about this but the majority of deep tech startups are de facto "dual use" and none of this should be a surprise to someone that works in deep tech.
The X-15 did Mach 6 in the 60s. What materials and components are you referring to as cliffing us at Mach 5? Isn’t the simpler explanation that hypersonic flight is defined at Mach 5?
In terms of materials, most of the newmake ultra fast aircraft are using inconel, which is more viable than it was back in the day. Some are using ceramic coatings of various sorts in hopes that they'll be able to develop something strong enough to be reused.
And that's not to say that they won't be able to come up with something, just that nobody has done it yet, or, has done it and has talked about it.
Dammit, I'm still working with computer "programs", you crazy kids!
You're going to have to invent time travel, go back over a century, and murder all of the people who started calling drones "drones" if you want to win this battle.
The mass media put its thumb on the scale, lambasting phenomena by reforging certain words to create a culture of fear and taboo using such example words as "hacker", "terrorist", and "drone".
And while a Unabomber approach to language use is unlikely to influence anyone, it's important to know the history of multiple meaning of words because those are additional meanings because a single word means different things to different people based on situational factors. To suggest one meaning is more "right" than another is to champion some people's experiences and invalid others'.
As anyone who's played D&D knows, an arrow shot from a bow, or a rock shot from a slingshot, is a "missile".