Comments by "James Neave" (@JamesNeave1978) on "China hypersonic missile" video.

Have you seen the photos of the damage done to a Chinese hypersonic missile that flew through rain? Took quite a lot of damage and that's just being hit by hypersonic water droplets. Imagine if you threw up a cloud of steel particles to fly through!
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@archer1133 Apologies for this being a bit wordy. Reaction Engines primary project is the SABRE engine. The aft section is a rocket engine, fairly normal in that it's a rocket bell fed by hydrogen and oxygen pumped by turbos. Hydrogen comes from the fuel tanks. The forward section is the fancy bit, there's a turbine compressing incoming air which is the oxygen source for the rocket, not onboard fuel tanks However, they melt at Mach 5. In front of that is the magic, the pre-cooler. It takes the 1000°C incoming air and knocks it down to -150°C in 1/20th of a second, without the water in the air freezing up the cooler. It uses the liquid hydrogen to do the cooling. That gets compressed and liquified by the turbine and the heat is used to run the rocket turbos. They also have an idea to use the pre-cooler with a regular jet engine, which will allow the jet engine to run at much higher speeds. Note that while SABRE does indeed get some compression from its forward motion it doesn't rely on it. Which means unlike a ram or scram jet it can ignite and create thrust from zero speed up to Mach 5. No need for a booster.
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@MGZetta Allow me to introduce to you the concept of Newton's Third Law of Motion: "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction" Combined with laws of equivalence, we get this: A Mach 9 missile colliding with a stationary depleted uranium ball bearing is equivalent to a stationary missile being hit by a depleted uranium ball bearing traveling at Mach 9. Anti tank kinetic rounds hit at Mach 5.0. This things hits an nearly double at Mach 9.0 At these velocities the missile may as well be made of water, it will splash as the DU passes through, igniting the warhead and fuel as it passes through. The missile will fragment, surface area increases exponentially and the whole device turns into a superheated expanding cloud of burning gasses, instantly trading velocity for heat. It'll look amazing briefly And that's the end of that. 😉
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The US DOD is working with Reaction engines to create air breathing jet and rocket engines. They're pre-cooler quenches 1000°C air in 1/20th of a second. It's going to power their air breathing rocket And I suspect when strapped to a regular jet engine they could make hypersonic jet fighters and cruise missiles. No scramjet needed.
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OK some fascinating information from the wiki. Regular jet engines, in order to not melt at high air speeds, "use heavy copper or nickel alloys, reduce pressure ratio and throttle back at higher air speeds to avoid melting" So strap on their pre-cooler and you have a jet engine that's lighter, had a higher pressure ratio and can run at full throttle at higher speeds and in denser air. That sounds useful.
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Nobody's talking about Reaction Engines working with the US DOD yet. They're going to strap their pre-cooler to a jet engine. This opens the very real possibility of hypersonic jet fighters or air breathing hypersonic cruise missiles without the need for a scramjet and booster stage, 0 to Mach 5 with a single engine "During the latest series of tests, Reaction Engines’ unique precooler successfully quenched airflow temperatures in excess of 1,000°C (~1,800°F) in less than 1/20th of a second. The tests demonstrated the precooler’s ability to successfully cool airflow at speeds significantly in excess of the operational limit of any jet-engine powered aircraft in history."
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@Xandros999 Āiyāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāā!!!
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@kennethng8346 No doubt it has some real science behind it. Doesn't sit well though, does it? Something that hot and fast just doesn't sound like a stealthy thing
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@kennethng8346 I mean, even if plasma deflects (really? How can it detect radar away from the transmitter when it's a blob? There's a reason stealth bombers are angular and very obviously designed) or absorbs radar energy. Does anybody really think dumping Mach 9.0s worth of energy into the atmosphere is in any way subtle. If it's shining like the sun then it's screaming across the entire EM spectrum. Sounds like the Russian Defense Industry noticed that there was a wiki page called Plasma Stealth (which nobody has made practical) and added it as a "feature" in their child like marketing material. When all they are really doing is turning Iskander upside down and strapping it to a Mig31.
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@archer1133 Ha! And MBDA (European missile consortium) is refining and testing the inlet shock cone thing that slows the incoming air and heats it to 1000C as a consequence. They are totally thinking about military allocations.
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It's a real shame STARStreak only hours Mach 4.5. Just so we could say we have hypersonic MANPADS herein the UK 😩🤣
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