David Hingtgen

If it's simply "smokey", it's just a B-52 with old engines. If it looks like there's 8 coal-burning locomotives under the wings, then it's using water injection. Convair 880's are a good reference for how bad "old smokey jets" can be WITHOUT water injection: http://www.airliners.net/open.file/0004414/M/ http://www.airliners.net/open.file/0004413/M/ The Convair 990 was a bit cleaner: http://www.airliners.net/open.file/0138424/M/ For water injection, the extra-black smoke is simply because the water prevents complete combustion of the fuel, same as any old car or truck spewing out black exhaust. For other jet engines, same problem, just not as bad.

I'd certainly suspect it of using water to takeoff vertically as well, as that requires even more thrust than hovering. It's not some special ability that water lets it hover, nor that it requires water to hover (60 sec water supply, but can hover over 5 minutes)---it's just that water injection is so rare nowadays. Also, it's a sheer scale factor. The larger/more powerful the engine, the less water injection seems to be worth. The most powerful engine I know of that can use water injection only gets a 3% boost in power for most variants. It was primarily used in the 50's and 60's when any increase in thrust was worth it. And the Harrier certainly needs it, as it has such a tiny payload etc---as the thrust increase is about equal to a Harrier's typical bombload. Water injection adds power, in multiple ways. The exact method is tweaked for each engine.

Ok, part 2 of how water injection works. This is going mostly on memory, as the cooling function (as opposed to mass increasing) tends to be glossed over in most references I can find. The first part described how the water cooled the air to directly increase mass, thus increasing thrust. Now we get to the other way. (Water injection is a 2-for-1 deal) Jet engines are usually limited in their power by the turbine inlet temperature (TIT)--seriously. (it could also be considered the combustion chamber exhaust temp) The first stage of the turbine is where the blades will be the hottest, and is thus the limiting factor. Exhaust gas temperature is also a common limit, particularly when stating the engine. (Jet engines usually have multiple red-lines---different places and different numbers under different conditions) A jet's turbine exists to extract power from the heat of air passing through it, to turn the compressor. The more heat in the air, the more the turbine can get power to turn the compressor. You get more heat by burning more fuel, but jet engines at full power are operating at the absolute limit of the turbine blades' ability to withstand heat. Most of the air passing through a jet's core goes to cooling--not to be burned with fuel nor contribute to thrust. Jets are air-cooled, for obvious reasons. Combustion chambers and turbine blades have amazingly complex passages for cooling---but they can only cool the turbine so much. Assume that for "X" amount of air, "Y" amount of fuel can be added and burned, increasing the energy of the air. Note that due to sheer compression, the air entering the combustion chamber can easily be several hundred degrees hotter than ambient. However, if said air was cooled (say 100 degrees) before getting to the combustion chamber, you would "gain" 100 degrees that you could heat via the combustion chamber by adding more fuel. (since cool air is denser, there is effectively "more air", thus countering the loss of kinetic/heat energy in said air) More fuel being burned (without exceeding the TIT limit) results in a faster-spinning turbine, which turns the compressor faster, thus sucking in more air, faster---which is what makes thrust. Alternatively, you could just inject the water directly into the turbine, cooling it that way (which will also increase the mass, but at a later stage than injecting water into the compressor)---I believe this may be how the Harrier operates, as the Pegasus engine is quite unique in that it has 4 exhaust nozzles, with the forward two operating purely off bypass air, and the rear two purely off of core air. Adding water increases mass and cools, period---but where you add it will affect the ratio-----cool a lot and increase mass a little, or vice-versa. All depends on how the engine is designed, and what you need---pure cooling, more mass, etc. If nothing else, always remember that a jet engine makes thrust by MOVING AIR. Nothing more. It cares about how much air, and how fast the air is going. 10lbs of air moving 200mph produces the same amount of thrust as 2lbs of air moving 1000mph. Due to various factors (speed of the aircraft, altitude, etc) airliners tend to favor lots of air, slowly, and fighter jets prefer less air, quickly. Burning a lot more fuel results in spinning the blades faster, thus pumping the air faster----hotter air doesn't increase thrust by itself. It's easy to build a very, very cool-running jet engine--just use an electric motor to spin the compressor, instead of a combustion chamber and turbine---it's how many model jets fly.

5k each? Wasn't it going to be a 80/20 split, production-wise?

True, going for "realistic" white and black shuttle mode is kinda pointless, when you have bright purple train-halves on the wings.

Quick comment: "AV-8" is one of the "wrong" designations in the US military that really doesn't fit/conform. It's out of sequence and the letters are backwards, or both. It's often said it might actually be a joke---A V 8. Aviate.

Or the simple reason behind the original color scheme: Astrotrain was white and black. Space shuttles are white and black. Steam locomotives are black (often with white trim) He was realistically colored in both modes, which is pretty rare for any non-car TF. I always wanted a white Astrotrain, as it'd make for a "perfect" shuttle mode. Didn't Diaclone Blitzwing have grey and green for the same reasons?

The heat the engine makes has little direct influence on thrust. The most powerful jet engine ever built is among the coldest-running ever built. Heat=noise and fuel consumption, mainly. The goal is to make thrust, not heat the atmosphere. Heat coming out of the engine is basically "wasted fuel energy"---it would have been better for that heat to be converted to kinetic energy to increase the velocity of the exhaust. Jet engines have always preferred dense air, it directly influences thrust produced. Every jet in the world has a "engine performance based on density of the outside air" chart. Density of air is affected by temperature. Cold air=denser. Airliners were the main users of water injection, but no longer. If it was really cold out (below freezing or so) you could operate the engine at "water injected thrust levels" without actually using the water--because the air was so cold and dense anyways, water injection would be pointless (and it might freeze). Anyways, the water is injected in the compressor section, not the combustion section. The point is to increase the density of the airflow. Thrust is change of momentum, momentum=mass x velocity. (that is how a jet engine works, nothing more--mass and velocity of the air---not its temperature) Anyways, say you inject water into the airflow going into an engine. As the air is compressed, it heats up. It'll heat up enough to vaporize the water. The water didn't heat up by itself, the heat was transferred to the water from the air. So the air is cooled. Ideal gas law (chem 101): p=p/Rt or Density=pressure/(R*temp) If temp goes down, density goes up. Increased density means more mass per unit time. Since thrust only cares about mass and velocity, more mass at the same speed means more thrust. The short version has always been "the water fools the engine into thinking its sucking in more air than it really is". Cooling effects and reasons (and how the Harrier uses it and why) are another topic, I'll post that tomorrow. (Nitty-gritty jet physics are always taxing---I have to get my books out to get the formulas right, etc) PS--water injection often leads to black exhaust, a big reason it's no longer used. Not simply "smokey" like many old jets are, but BLACK, like this: http://www.airliners.net/open.file/0541868/M/

It has everything to do with weight. There is no "V/STOL system", it's simply water injection. Old and simple way to temporarily increase the thrust of jet engines. You get increased thrust for as long as you have water to inject. There's a zillion Harrier variants out there, and an equal number of engine variants, but here's an example: Harrier weighs 20,000lbs. Engine normally can put out 19,500lbs of thrust---not enough to takeoff or hover. But with water injection, thrust can be boosted to 20,700lbs. That's enough to take takeoff. But it only carries enough water to do that for 60 secs. But if the Harrier only weighed 18,000lbs, then the engine at 19,500lbs of thrust could easily lift it, without resorting to water injection--and it could keep it up for quite a while. 19,500lbs would probably be the 5 min takeoff limit, but if the Harrier was that light, you could probably have the engine set at max continuous thrust--which is exactly that, and the Harrier could hover indefinitely. Harriers use water injection for both power and cooling---but the more you overstress the engine, the more it's relied on for cooling. But it still comes down to weight--if the plane weight less, the increased thrust wouldn't be needed, and the engine wouldn't have to work as hard, and it'd have no cooling issues at all. Every little bit weight at the upper end makes the engine work a LOT harder to get that extra thrust to carry the weight. Weight=more power and fuel needed. (even in level flight) More power=more heat. Cooling issues are the result, not the cause.

Which technically isn't flying... (The wings make NO lift in battroid mode, extended or not---they're only spread out in battroid mode so the missiles have room) With the power valks have, there really shouldn't be any time limitation for hovering. If the Harrier could shed 2,000lbs it could hover for as long as it had the fuel to do so. GERWALK mode is far more interesting, for the feet are delivering vertical thrust, and all forward thrust is from the backpack, thus the wings also develop lift so long as you're moving forward. (so you should actually have the most lift in that mode) And as we see in M0, aerodynamic controls certainly play a big part.

Plus Hasegawa decals are the thickest in the industry. You want thin decals? Microscale. Nobody makes them thinner, nor can print finer. Cartograph is next. And there's a number of very good printers in Mexico and South America, which are often strangely 'anonymous'. Of course, thinness and conformity are quite separate. Hasegawa are thick but conform well, while Academy are thin but stiff as cardboard.

The VF-11B's gunpod is quite different from a C's (it's not just a C's with a bayonet), and with the B's gunpod being fairly heavily featured in Ep 1 of the OVA, there should certainly be some official artwork SOMEWHERE of it. I mean, there's multiple views of the door hinges for the connectors for the sound booster of Mylene's valk. Surely the VF-11B's gunpod deserves lineart.

We're ALL going to need YF-19 decals fairly soon, sure hope Takatoys or someone can deliver.

Kikaioh rocked. The more anime series you've seen, the more you'll get out of it. Still amazed it came to the US. Reason enough alone to never sell my Dreamcast. (though the final boss is CHEAP imho)

The mini-game for a PS3 wait should be Tekken 1.

The more translations of Famitsu reviews I see, the less credit I give the magazine. Nobody is more shallow/cares only about graphics than Famitsu. GamePro is better, and I realized GamePro really sucked when I was 11.

I'd argue more for "stylistic" drawing than lazy. Alternate universe Burkes or something.

Northrop jets have always been sleek as hell. The F-5 prototype could supercruise, the YF-17 could (yup, it's THAT much sleeker than a Hornet), and we all know about the YF-23. IIRC, the YF-22 design couldn't supercruise until they brought NASA on board to "tweak" about a zillion points on the airframe until it could slip through the mach. Whereas the YF-23 in mil power will easily out-accelerate a F-16 in burner.

Yup--clearly Burke-ish, but not a Burke. Nor the JASDF Kongo class (their version of the Burke). They're just far too "swept back" overall.

What's with all the people selling their PS2's? Yeesh, I still have my PSX. (you never know when a backwards incompatability may crop up--and the amazing fact that sometimes the fast-loading is actually slower)

Plus the little fact that MiG-29's that do have louvers have them closed most of the time, and they're very hard to see when they're closed. Why model opening louvers when you can just show them closed?

The F-22ish F-15 design is only a silhouette, but trust me, it's 99% accurate to an YF-22. It was one of those "history of the design charts", and there were basically two final choices after all the refinements: What we got, and one that looks like the NEXT fighter we got.

Huge FF fan (I like JRPG's, should be obvious by now), but I skipped 11. Saw 12 tonight when I was preordering CV: Portrait of Ruin. Will probably pick it up sometime in next 2 weeks. (Still have to finish Okami, which went on hold for Valk Profile 2).

Telekinesis=Jean Grey=able to do ANYTHING with enough practice/skill.

I'll let Nied handle this one. Accurate and correct Flanker info: http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/flanke...anker_home.html PS--wasn't the Su-37 officially called an Su-35-2 or something? I know Nato designated it a "Modified Flanker E" (with the Su-37/27M being the standard Flanker E) Note the use of past tense.