Launch

Completed 2018-02-20. Available releases:

Direct Link

DeviantArt

Discord

Google+ (Archived)

Launch of an SSTO (sc)ramjet. It takes off vertically using a rocket, then quickly engages the ramjets (on the sides, hard to see). Then it accelerates horizontally, also gaining altitude and transitioning eventually to scramjet mode. Once it ascends high enough to lack enough air, it switches back into rocket mode for the last kick, before dumping the payload into LEO. On return, the flat nose, under where the payload formerly sat, acts as an ablative heat shield, protecting the engines and most of the wings in the compression wave's shadow. The thing then glides to a high-speed landing.

The steam (from the fire suppression system on the pad) was a challenge to draw, and I'm not really satisfied with how it came out. Contributing to the problem was that I used gray paper instead of white paper, which made bright whites harder. This kind of paper also couldn't handle much charcoal either, so the darks suffered, too. Good to know.

There's not really a huge conceptual difference between a ramjet and a scramjet. For a ramjet, as you accelerate, you subtly change engine geometry so that the shock waves produce subsonic flow during combustion. For a scramjet, you're going fast enough that you can't do this anymore, so the geometry changes serve to provide ideal shocks for supersonic combustion. Scramjet and especially ramjet technology is more-or-less already here—perhaps with a decade of development it could be really mature. However, most research effort is not currently in this direction, with the exception of the long-suffering Skylon concept. Ramrockets are in the same boat. In the near future, I think the easiest way to start would be to add a ramjet booster to help in the lower atmosphere. This is simple- and light-enough that it could be either expendable or carried into orbit. It would increase payload capacity, though my intuition is that it wouldn't help enough to make an ordinary rocket an SSTO.

Return to visual art listing.