M
mlorrey
Guest
I've been refining my Blackhorse/RASCAL class design built out of an F-106B airframe with image and data below.<br />What is important is that I know where to get some F-106 airframes for approximately $24,000.00. This alone is a huge savings. The F-106 airframe was built to handle 9+ G's, and its wing is a super thin hypersonic airfoil delta, already with a 60 degree sweep. Adding a carbon-carbon 75 degree strake and other stuff to it would be rather easy.<br /><br />For those who missed my commentary in another thread on this, here is the idea: take an F-106, dump the J75 engine. Using RASCAL-type MIPCC on it might be easily possible, as one group proposed, but is IMHO insufficiently ambitious for the degree of proven technology sitting on the shelf out there.<br /><br />Instead, put a composite LOX tank in most of the engine bay. Seal up the air intakes, front and back, with a streamlined plug in front, and fill them as additional fuel tanks. Mount in the bottom of the engine bay, behind the wheelwells, a ramjet capable of mach 5-6 operation, minimum, with active cooling. Mount a SpaceX Merlin engine in the upper rear engine bay. Former weapons bay will be an additional fuel tank, and the wing tanks will be converted to holding H2O2, hydrogen peroxide, to be used for cooling the ramjet and as coolant/oxidant in an MIPCC rig used to extend the flight regime of the ramjet up to mach 7-8. There will likely be no need of any supersonic combustion, but it might become a possibility.<br /><br />We are not going to screw around with LH2. It is a terrible fuel for any vehicle with any significant aerodynamic flight regime, as the Suntan project amply demonstrated. Given the limits of todays materials, we are not going to need to operate in air breathing mode above mach 8, so the use of LH2 to fly any extensive supersonic combustion at higher stagnation temperatures is not needed. At Mach 6, the Merlin will ignite at a low thrust level to augment the ramjet, and MIPCC cooling wi