Chapter 728 Richard

"Tower, this is the Enterprise, we have a situation."

Meng Senlin held the intercom and found that Shelyov had no reaction to his behavior.

"Tower received, please speak."

"Uh... Chief Engineer Xie is also on the spacecraft, he is sitting in the flight engineer's seat, over."

"... Zi... Zi"

The voice of the tower was interrupted, and the sound of people talking could be heard vaguely. Meng Senlin greeted the other crew members to prepare, and at the same time tried to persuade Shelyov:

"Chief Engineer, this is still a test model, it is very dangerous."

Shelyov: "This is the tenth flight test. I have come up before. I do a good job in this position. I can fly this shuttle alone."

"..."

"Xiao Meng, do you know Richard Russell?"

"Sorry, Mr. Xie, I haven't heard of this name. Is he also an aircraft expert?"

"No, he is an ordinary person, a ground staff at an airport in Seattle. Two weeks ago, he stole an unmanned passenger plane from the airport and drove it in the sky for 75 minutes."

Meng Senlin: "Is he... a terrorist or revenge against society?"

Shelyov: "Neither , before that he only learned to fly in flight simulation games. He drove this civil airliner and did a backflip in the air, and finally crashed on an uninhabited island.

He did not take revenge on anyone, and his life was very happy. He was driven by the desire to do so, and he told the air traffic control that he would not land and did not intend to land. "

Meng Senlin: "..."

Shelyov: "The reason may be that he was blown by a gust of wind when he was about to get off work, but he thought it was worth exchanging his life for these 75 minutes.

Most of the time in life is spent in mediocrity, but the small part of adventure is what makes life meaningful. The career we do is a job full of adventures. If not, I would rather go to Siberia to dig potatoes. "

"..."

Although Meng Senlin did not know why Shelyov suddenly became a little excited, and did not know why he suddenly talked about Siberia, he was indeed convinced. In fact, with Xinyuan's strict engineering control system, important spacecraft have almost never had accidents.

"Okay, Chief Engineer Xie, then please do your job as a flight engineer."

...

"Wind speed 4.5 knots, air humidity 34%, takeoff allowed, takeoff allowed!"

"Enterprise understands."

Meng Senlin put his hands on both sides of the flight rudder and set the thrust to the first gear. The four nozzles on both sides of the Enterprise immediately started working, emitting slightly blue gas and suspended about 50cm above the ground.

The XN90 has a total of 6 reactors and 6 engines, but they are not independent of each other. Instead, they are connected through pipelines, and the output flow of each nozzle can be flexibly adjusted.

When vertical takeoff is required, the four NPAEs can actually output a maximum thrust of 270 tons (below 50,000 meters). After flying, the two horizontal nozzles at the tail work, and the maximum thrust can be 130 tons (below 50,000 meters).

The 20-ton thrust data is in a vacuum state, which is completely different in the atmosphere:

NPAE uses methane as fuel, and uses a nuclear reactor to heat it to ultra-high temperature in the atmosphere, so that it expands and sprays out at high speed in the pipe. This is the first thrust source and the only thrust source in a vacuum environment, with a thrust of 20 tons;

If in the atmosphere, the gaseous methane at high temperature will react with the oxygen in the atmosphere to become carbon dioxide and water vapor and continue to expand, which is equivalent to a traditional methane engine. Although the oxygen content in the atmosphere is not as high as liquid oxygen, the air density is higher under low-altitude conditions where the XN90 needs power the most. This channel can still provide about 40 tons of thrust;

The third thrust source is that after the flight speed exceeds the speed of sound, the Enterprise also has a narrow variable air inlet on the side. Using the principle of the ramjet engine, the air is compressed by the air inlet and heated and expanded by the heat emitted by the reactor, and then ejected through the Laval tube. One engine can also increase the thrust by about 7.5 tons.

The sum of the three thrusts, plus the advantage of the air-tip engine to adapt to different altitude conditions, makes the thrust peak of the NPAE in the atmosphere actually fluctuate between 50 and 68 tons.

Under supersonic conditions, the angular shape of the Enterprise will produce a large shock wave at the front, which will wrap the body and greatly reduce the overall resistance, which can reduce the air resistance by about one third.

The XB70 Valkyrie also adopts a similar principle, which is equivalent to using pneumatics to obtain more than 30% thrust. The faster it flies within a certain range, the more fuel it saves.

The biggest reason for limiting the Enterprise's capacity is the section between 50 kilometers and 100 kilometers. The thin atmosphere causes the thrust to drop sharply, so that the upward capacity has to be limited to 20 tons.

However, it makes the Enterprise's downward capacity very impressive, and it can reach a maximum of 100 tons within the safe range, which is about 5 times the upward capacity.

The completely different working conditions make the Enterprise's automation system extremely complex, and human control is completely wishful thinking. Only the sophisticated computing model and rich data support of SC09 can avoid the destruction of the machine and the death of people.

Including aerospace planes and traditional manned spacecraft, in fact, these high-tech equipment are always more reliable and safer than humans.

The conditions for the Enterprise to take off are not harsh. As a general-purpose shuttle designed to take off and land on Mars or even Titan, the Enterprise can take off and land in most land and non-corrosive active liquids. The current takeoff field is just a reinforced hardened cement floor.

Shelev, who was almost lying on the chair, quickly felt the acceleration from bottom to top, and then saw the tower in the side window quickly disappear, leaving only the light blue sky outside.

"Faster, I can feel that the air-spike engine is not producing much now!"

Meng Senlin heard his dissatisfied urging, and although he did not respond, he still slightly increased the pull rod amplitude.

As the speed increased, the Enterprise's posture gradually leaned back, so that the prism at the front of the cockpit coincided with the forward direction, and the vibration caused by its piercing the air became more and more intense, and then suddenly became stable, and the entire shuttle began to fly on the shock wave.

In the test a few days ago, the Enterprise should have exceeded 4,000 meters at this time, but now it is still climbing, with an increasing elevation angle, and accelerating along the tangent direction of the earth's rotation.

Most of the thrust of the six engines began to concentrate on the two nozzles at the tail to maintain the direction of the combined force.

When the color of the sky outside the porthole changed from light blue to dark blue, and finally deepened to an indistinguishable black, Meng Senlin knew that he had crossed the Karman line.

The first stage of acceleration ended here, the roaring engine stopped output, the vibration of the body also completely disappeared, and the force that had been binding him to the seat no longer existed.

The next acceleration will be in 40 minutes, and then the Enterprise will accelerate in the tangent direction of the target orbit for a while, and then it will enter the orbit.