David Hingtgen

I've been holding off on buying the GBA remakes of the NES/SNES Super Mario games, hoping they'd be on the Wii. But since none are in the first batch(es), now I'm thinking they're not going to be (at least for a while) so as not to hurt sales of the GBA versions. What we really need is Mario All Stars 2-- 1 through 4, and Yoshi's Island. For GC/Wii.

The YF-19 was accepted as-is for the VF-19A, then heavily redesigned for the later VF-19F and VF-19S. Kind of like how the F-18A/B/C/D Hornet had about 90% of its structure changed to become the F-18E/F Super Hornet. Same basic name and designation, but actually only "looks similar" and doesn't share many parts.

I thought I read the PS3 is actually transparent black, but so "barely" transparent it's almost impossible to tell from opaque black.

Basically---yup. Painting is done last. Think about all the aircraft models with camoflage--the camoflage doesn't follow panel lines or subassemblies at all. Mask mask mask... And Tamiya masking tape is worth the price.

Nani--the VF-19A Excalibur is identical to the YF-19. It's the VF-19F and S Blazer valks, and VF-19Kai Fire valk that are so different.

Half of Yamato's VF-1's are non-canon repaints, do you really think they wouldn't make the best-known canon repaint? We'll probably also get low-vis, stealth, and Roy VF-19's...

"- Engadget has revealed some technical details on PlayStation 3. The PS3 BluRay drive is quieter than the DVD Drive on Xbox 360 " I should hope so!

Anyone see the additional Virtual Console games? (unconfirmed, but the ESRB just rated them, as they're too old to have been rated earlier) * Duck Hunt (E for Everyone) * Hogan’s Alley (E for Everyone) * Kid Icarus (E for Everyone) * Kirby’s Adventure (E for Everyone) * Pilot Wings (E for Everyone) * Pro Wrestling (E for Everyone) * Punch-Out (E for Everyone) * Wild Gunman (E for Everyone) * Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (Super NES; rated E for Everyone) * Kirby’s Super Star (Super NES; rated E for Everyone) * Mario Kart 64 (Nintendo 64; rated E for Everyone) * Starfox 64 (Nintendo 64; rated E for Everyone) * Super Metroid (Super NES; rated E for Everyone) * Kirby’s Dream Land 3 (Super NES; rated E for Everyone) * The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (Nintendo 64; rated E for Everyone) * Excitebike (NES; rated E for Everyone) * Ice Climber (NES; rated E for Everyone) * Dr. Mario (NES; rated E for Everyone) * Mario Brothers (NES; rated E for Everyone) * Ice Hockey (NES; rated E for Everyone) * Soccer (NES; rated E for Everyone)

Haven't checked ARC today, have to go see. That'd be the best thing ever---I always figured they'd might be back as a Super Hornet squadron, or even F-35.

Now to see what UPS will do. My bet is cancelling the A380 for 747AdvF's.

A JT3C-6's water injection rate (707-120 engine) is 667lbs/min with a 5,913lb tank in the plane. KC-135 and B-52 engines are similar. Presumably that's so it can make multiple takeoffs without refilling----they only accept distilled water, and there's plenty of places that wouldn't be available. Fill it up at New York, then fly around the world (literally) and end up back at New York. Water injection is limited to 2.5 minutes per takeoff. I'm guessing the main reason for not having an afterburner is nozzle maintenance and fuel burn. A "low" setting for an afterburner is quite possible. Plus it's kind of a waste to have such a system installed but only ever operated at low power--water injection is certainly easier and cheaper.

The incomplete(wasted) fuel is far, far less than an afterburner would impose. Full afterburner can easily triple fuel burn. The black smoke is caused by "imperfectly" burnt fuel--it was still burnt and providing energy, just not as ecologically-friendly as normal, and wasting a bit of it. Afterburners add a lot of weight and complexity--mainly the nozzle. You're hauling around that extra weight and paying to maintain it constantly. Water injection weighs almost nothing when it's not being used, and requires little maintenance. Basically--water injection is a simple way to occasionally get a little boost. Afterburners are a complex way to frequently get a big boost. I posted this pic earlier in the thread, it's a 707 using water injection: http://www.airliners.net/open.file/0541868/M/

FedEx cancelled all their A380 orders, I believe they're the launch customer for the freighter version. Ironically, the contract to build A380 hangars at FedEx's main hub in Memphis was just signed. Also, FedEx ordered 15 777-200F's from Boeing. 787 is 5,000lbs overweight currently.

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.