• AnIndefiniteArticle
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    1 year ago

    From the wiki page linked here, this looks like a toroidal spike. I wonder what sort of gas they use for the base bleed.

    Several versions of the design exist, differentiated by their shapes. In the toroidal aerospike the spike is bowl-shaped with the exhaust exiting in a ring around the outer rim. In theory this requires an infinitely long spike for best efficiency, but by blowing a small amount of gas out of the center of a shorter truncated spike (like base bleed in an artillery shell), something similar can be achieved.

    • nyoooom@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Pretty sure those are several small distinct engines, but at high altitude with a large expansion ratio it will kind of work like an aerospike