Nuclear Powered Aircraft

Energize said:
What has been accomplished so far is not in question. The only thing I (along with everyone else reading this thread) fail to understand is why you keep bringing up irrelevancies to try to save face after making a blatantly false claim.
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What irrelevence:confused:


You are trying to claim that using current technology it is impossible to have a solar powered plane fly around the world.

This is blatantly false because a solar powered plane has been designed to fly around the world and has already been shown to fly for 24hrs straight which is proof enough that feasible with current technology.

You. Seem hung up on the idea that the human pilot needs practice and that there should be no testing when a human life is involved. Or that the human pilot who needs to land periodically somehow negates the around the world goal.

As I said, it would be much easier to remove the human and then let the plane circumnavigate without stoping but the project wants to realize the challenge of making it suitable for a human to travel.
 
The fact that you know people on the team etc is irrelevant to a discussion of aircraft capability.

And no I did not claim that it was impossible. I have not even mentioned the pilots training (I have no idea where you got that from). I am pointing out that it has not been demonstrated so your claim is unwarranted, though indeed if the airframe cannot withstand the flight as previously happened then it may not be possible using current aircraft technology.

And as dalin80 pointed out the usefulness is questionable, very slow speed, large profile, no payload and the enormous caveat that it must avoid cloud cover according to the projects website. An aircraft that cannot fly under clouds is useless for any practical purpose, it is merely a technology demonstration.
 
Energize said:
The fact that you know people on the team etc is irrelevant to a discussion of aircraft capability.

And no I did not claim that it was impossible. I have not even mentioned the pilots training (I have no idea where you got that from). I am pointing out that it has not been demonstrated so your claim is unwarranted, though indeed if the airframe cannot withstand the flight as previously happened then it may not be possible using current aircraft technology.

And as dalin80 pointed out the usefulness is questionable, very slow speed, large profile, no payload and the enormous caveat that it must avoid cloud cover according to the projects website. An aircraft that cannot fly under clouds is useless for any practical purpose, it is merely a technology demonstration.
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No, the fact that I know people on the team is entirely relevant because I know exactly what the design goals were and whether they have been accomplished.


Anyway this is going nowhere because you are insisting on arguing over pointless semantics rather than the holistic goals of the project. Your perverse logic would state the airbus A380 had not achieved it's design goals during testing before the first commercial flight and that the first commercial flight would be with a different technology to what the test flights were conducted with, despite the design and technology being created a decade earlier. It just makes no sense what you are trying to argue.


No one is staying it is a practical aircraft for everyday flight, but it is a technology demonstrator as a solar powered plane that has been designed to fly around the world using only solar power and has met and passed all design goals to this date.
 
D.P. said:
No, the fact that I know people on the team is entirely relevant because I know exactly what the design goals were and whether they have been accomplished.
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The design goals were never relevant to the discussion of capability and they are published so it's doubly irrelevant. You are right that the discussion is going no where, but that is because you have committed the entire taxonomy of fallacies.
 
D.P. said:
The goal of the project was quite simply to develop a plane that could circumnavigate the globe with a single pilot using only solar power.
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So basically its a pointless exercise that serves 0 purpose except for being a tech demo for what could be possible in the future (albeit not in our lifetime), cool.
 
VaderDSL said:
Plane crashes.
Spreads radioactive material over a large populated area.
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This, this and this... is it not completely obvious? :confused:

The risk of a plane causing a catastrophe with a nuclear reactor is much greater than any other type of craft.
 
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ubersonic said:
So basically its a pointless exercise that serves 0 purpose except for being a tech demo for what could be possible in the future (albeit not in our lifetime), cool.
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That's the story of solar powered aircraft really. Even if you had 100% efficient solar cells (which is impossible) you could never come close to the power output required to operate normal aeroplanes.
 
Energize said:
The design goals were never relevant to the discussion of capability and they are published so it's doubly irrelevant. You are right that the discussion is going no where, but that is because you have committed the entire taxonomy of fallacies.
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No, but the reason I brought the idea of a solar powered plane up (and this one in particular) was to point out we already have the technology to produce solar powered planes, we just need to refine it. There is no need to spend decades working out how to fit a reactor in a plane (the original point to the thread) when the reasons for it (unlimited flight timed etc) could be completed by solar power instead.

Yes, the current plane is big and slow but with a bit more research and design a drone that could circle for days over a target without having to refuel could easily be possible, within the next 10 years quite possibly.
 
subbytna said:
is the reason nuclear planes/idea of nuclear planes, were quickly binned :)
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Not really.

The aircraft in question would have been carrying about 40 megatons of nuclear explosives (Hydrogen bombs plus nuclear stand off missiles)

Any serious crash would have been pretty bad, The bombs probably wouldn't go off (There are safeties to prevent that...allegedly! ;) ) but the casings could split releasing the considerable quantities of Plutonium contained therein (50-100Kg/Aircraft perhaps depending on the number of nukes carried). the additional badness from a small amount of fission product wouldn't make that much difference in the big scheme of things.

I suspect the idea went out of fashion mainly because US rocket technology eventually caught up with the Soviets (:D!) and ICBM's were then considered a better option to strategic bombers, Nuclear powered or otherwise!
 
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