True enough, Jerry, but there are very, very few rocket engines that are square -- and if you need more than one engine to make roll control work, you're back to the complications of multi-engine plumbing and so forth.
Hmm. I wonder if you could make an engine as simple as a single chamber, but shaped like two crossed linear aerospikes? Then you could use eight paddles (which are much simpler than fluid injection, if only because you can test them cold and be sure they'll do what you want hot) to get pitch/yaw/roll from a single engine. Of course, then you still have five times the complication of a single set of four vanes in the exhaust of a single engine... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jerry Durand" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Donald Qualls" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "ERPS list" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 8:49 AM Subject: Re: [ERPS] Steering > At 09:34 PM 5/3/2004, Donald Qualls wrote: > > >Fluid injection amounts to non-solid jet paddles; same class as the > >Jetavator (a ring around the nozzle that can be impinged on the exhaust > >stream to divert it) and paddles that do the same thing with a > >non-continuous actuator -- no roll control. > > > If you put TWO paddles on each side of a square (each paddle is 1/2 the > width of the side, 8 total), you now have roll control as well as > redundancy in paddles. > > > > ---------- > Jerry Durand > Durand Interstellar, Inc. > 219 Oak Wood Way > Los Gatos, California 95032-2523 USA > tel: +1 408 356-3886 > fax: +1 408 356-4659 > web: www.interstellar.com > > > _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
