Henry Spencer wrote: > > On Sat, 1 Jun 2002, Randall Clague wrote: > > >There's one awkward issue with this design though- what stops the body > > >of the rocket turning with the engine? > > > > The bearing. Is it going to be 100% effective? No, nothing ever is. > > As with Roton, in principle all you need is an electric motor providing > just enough torque to cancel out bearing friction. The rotor is, after > all, self-powered, so bearing friction is the only torque on the body. > > Of course, if the thing is spinning at the sort of speed that has been > mentioned, you may need a somewhat unusual motor.
If you have more than one wheel, they can spin in opposite directions so that their torques and angular momenta cancel out. If you shut down engines to control acceleration, this requires shutting them down in pairs, so the total engine count needs to be at least six. > And of course, things will get exciting the moment you try to make a > turn. Yep. I put a fair amount of work back at RotRock into means for torquing that huge momentum wheel over during the ascent burn. Many are the ways to the true grail... and some are nearly massless. -- Doug Jones _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
