Published on: 25 Jul 20:27
The other day I discovered this little Quora doozy: https://deepthoughts.quora.com/Screenshot-which-de...
Oh wow. That is one hell of a concept-art image. We all hear tales of hilarious culture clashes between architects and civil engineers, don’t we: so many architects conjure up heady dreams of structural grandeur, of buildings radiant with grace and beauty and zero practicality whatsoever. Civil engineers then grumpily point out the ten thousand ways that the architects’ dreams are physically impossible and would explode horribly the instant anyone would attempt to build it. The architects then accuse the civil engineers of being miserable killjoys, and the circle of designer-vs-developer life continues forever.
Just look at this damn image. Above and beyond anything else, the landing gear is down. It’s flying at high altitude and the friggin’ landing gear is fully extended. It’s got a gazillion engines. This looks like the kind of hilarious bullshit I’d happily cobble together in Kerbal Space Program. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the propagation and championing of hilarious bullshit if everyone is already upfront and properly informed that this is in fact what’s happening; problem is, so often, these images’ authors actually believe their own bullshit, actually believe that crap like this might realistically take off, in both senses. Take it from me, harsh KSP experience has taught me that monstrosities like this seldom even make it to the other end of the runway without exploding and all aboard perishing horribly.
One commenter mused on how the hell you'd ever cool the damn thing. It got me wondering. Isn’t there some kind of airspeed threshold, whereby if you exceed it, this phenomenon actually reverses, and the plane starts heating up? It’s around Mach 2.5, I think. I heard that somewhere? I think?
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the obvious retort to my claim is “oh give me a break, there’s no way in hell that tourist crate would ever go supersonic, let alone >M2.5”, and yup I 100% agree … but … just look at that friggin’ concept-art image. How likely is it that its creator knows about supersonic flight, its physics, and its limitations? Chances are, if they’ve given anything more than zero thought to airspeed, that thought would be something like “Ooooohyeah we should totally make it go at Mach 10 or something, yeah make it happen — I’m getting sick of you questioning me, I’m the ideas guy, you’re the details guy, get on it! Wait come back! — Oh for God’s sake yet another engineer just quit on me, another couldn’t hack it, God, why is everyone but me such a loser?”
Original: https://deepthoughts.quora.com/Screenshot-which-de...
