cadaver
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While boasting about his Armadillo space project, John Carmack threw in some very interesting tidbits regarding their upcoming game. Slashdot reports:
For those of you that are underwhelmed by the 310 pound vehicle, do note that the big vehicle (1500 lbs) that can actually carry people is also flying. Look back in the Armadillo updates around April 19 for testing video. We have since reworked the propulsion system to follow what has worked so well on the subscale vehicle, and should be testing it this weekend. If it works well, we will be repeating the boosted hop with the big vehicle next week.
The flight time is currently limited by federal law to 15 seconds of rocket burn time. We have a waiver coming to extend that to 120 seconds, but beyond that we will need a full launch license.
The significance of all this is that the vehicles are intended to fly up, come back down and land right where they took off from, all without ablating, expending, or separating anything. It should be possible to have turn around times under one hour even for quite large vehicles.
BTW, Doom beta testing is going very well.
John Carmack
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=111496&threshold=1&commentsort=1&tid=160&mode=thread&cid=9461296
just so you know :smoking:
For those of you that are underwhelmed by the 310 pound vehicle, do note that the big vehicle (1500 lbs) that can actually carry people is also flying. Look back in the Armadillo updates around April 19 for testing video. We have since reworked the propulsion system to follow what has worked so well on the subscale vehicle, and should be testing it this weekend. If it works well, we will be repeating the boosted hop with the big vehicle next week.
The flight time is currently limited by federal law to 15 seconds of rocket burn time. We have a waiver coming to extend that to 120 seconds, but beyond that we will need a full launch license.
The significance of all this is that the vehicles are intended to fly up, come back down and land right where they took off from, all without ablating, expending, or separating anything. It should be possible to have turn around times under one hour even for quite large vehicles.
BTW, Doom beta testing is going very well.
John Carmack
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=111496&threshold=1&commentsort=1&tid=160&mode=thread&cid=9461296
just so you know :smoking:
