 | |
| |
|
|
| |
| Nukes, lockpicks, scramjets, and attack sites | Jul 06, 2010 7:43 AM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 2 new A* pages:Yep it was a national holiday--or day off for a Sunday holiday, anyway--today (well, Monday) in the States but why take a holiday when you could be making webcomics, amirightorwhathahahaherr... So anyway we finally we catch back up to what was happening right at the end of episode 9! Darn this non-linearity!
Hey you can also check out the latest page of my Sunday fairy tale comic, "The Princess and the Giant," hot off the presses as it were, by clicking this spiffy preview banner:
~~~~~~~~
I came across a Time article on the NASA / US Military hypersonic research craft, the X-51A Waverider; after six years and $250 million, this unmanned drone with a scramjet engine completed its first independent flight in late May, flying for 200 seconds and reaching Mach 5. It was supposed to fly for 300 seconds, so I guess they've still got a lot of work to do. The speed record for this type of "air-eating" craft is "Mach 9.8 (12,144 km/h, 7,546 mph)," set by an earlier prototype, the X-43. (The "X," by the way, stands for "eXperimental.")
These things have scramjet ("Supersonic Combustion RAMJET") engines, where somewhere around Mach 4.5, they can start combusting the atmospheric oxygen, moving at supersonic speeds through their engines, after combining it with their on-board hydrogen. The X-51 used only about 1 kg of hydrogen fuel in its flight to Mach 5, which is pretty decent fuel economy I guess, even for a slim little 7.9 meter craft. Oh yeah here's a fancy Air Force render of an X-51 model:
image by USAF (source)
It's called "Waverider" because its sharp nose and winglet surfaces "ride" on the atmospheric shockwave it generates as it rips through the air, using it for lift. At the speeds they get up to in atmosphere, those leading metal parts can get hot enough to melt, so they're cooled with liquid circulating under the skin; in the X-51 it's been water, but there's talk of using the craft's own fuel to do it, on its way to the engine, so you don't have to waste space on additional coolant.
Well isn't that all nifty. The military of course wants to use the technology to drop missiles on people faster. ;P
~~~~~~~~~
Relatively speaking, it was a crazy day in my little webcomic neck of the woods! One site I mirror A* on was ruled an "attack site" by Google, so Firefox doesn't want to go there... Guess I'll wait and see if they can clean up their act before posting more comics there! And a site that tracks updates to my and many other comics, WebcomicZ, had its domain registration expire, so it was down for a while with a nasty GoDaddy expiration page showing. My heart! What else... Oh yeah, I found and reported some bugs I encountered while putting comics up on another mirror site, Comic Fury, and also I PM'd a fellow webcomic author about some little bugs I found on their site... Hmm... And The Webcomic List's forum scared me when I hit 1000 posts on it. Phew.
Oh! And I fixed the proportions of Selenis' gun arm back on episode 10's page 13. It was a little too long, but at first I overdid things and made it a little too short, so then I had to readjust it again to just right. Crisis...averted.
And I have more stuff too! But I'll save it for the next day or two's blog posts I guess (Oh god this *is* a blog, isn't it? shameful, just shameful).
|
·····
|
|
|
