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John Carmack (identifiable due to his well-known email address) sent the following email to the arocket distribution list when asked whether it was ok to use pictures from www.armadilloaerospace.com
"Just an idea, what were the general specs for these vehicles? If you specify them, we can get them added to the Wikipedia and/or Encyclopedia Astronautica... Have the Pixel and Texel vehicles got a family name? Also, are any of the pictures of Pixel or Texel (or any other images from Armadillo) releaseable under GPL?"
Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2006 20:46:27 -0600
To: [email protected]
From: John Carmack <[email protected]>
I hate to fill in a form, because there are so many variables in
specification, but here are most of the details:
Pictures from the Armadillo website can be used.
The family is "quads". Pixel and Texel have only very minor
differences between them.
We have done over 30 tethered test flights, but the 3.1 flights at
the cup are the only free flights so far.
We have never taken exact dimension measurements, but the spheres are
36" diameter, and everything can be estimated from that. The dry
mass is 650 pounds. Official payload for the Lunar Lander Challenge
is 55 pounds, obviously we could carry much more if we don't need to
fly for 180 seconds.
The injector for XPC-06 is, in Armadillo speak,
"FOF-twisted-squished-extraFilm-aluminum", the chamber is a 20" long
x 8" OD carbon fiber reinforced graphite piece from Cesaroni
Aerospace. The throat is 3.25" diameter. The nozzle expansion is
only 2:1, optimizing for around 150 psi chamber pressure, avoiding
massive overexpansion at the end of the run.
For level 1 flights, we load 360 pounds of 90% ethanol (one 55 gallon
drum) and around 500 pounds of lox. We still have about 140 pounds
of propellant remaining after 100 seconds in the air. For level 2,
we load twice as much propellant. The Isp is higher at the higher
chamber pressures required for hover with the extra weight, so it
should make 180 seconds, but we haven't demonstrated that yet.
Initial blowdown tank pressurization is 320 psi for level 1 and 400
psi for level 2. Each spherical tank is about 100 gallons, so the
pressure drops by more than half over a fully loaded run just to
expel the propellants. The roll thrusters also draw from tank
ullage, which causes additional pressure drop during flight.
Chamber pressure ranges from about 80 psi during hover when almost depleted, up to about 300 psi when climbing with a full propellant
load. Thrust is pretty close to 10 lb / chamber psi.
We don't have accurate Isp numbers for the current engine, but it
probably varies from about 140 to 200 seconds across the chamber
pressure range. Note that the decrease at low pressures is due much
more to low pressure drop across the injectors and resulting poorer
mixing / atomization than due to nozzle effects.
John Carmack
_______________________________________________
[email protected]http://exrocketry.net/mailman/listinfo/arocket
I take this to mean that pictures relating to Pixel and Texel are released under GFDL.
This just appeared on the Armadillo Aerospace website: Rocket Time flies, and so does Armadillo!, 2010-01-27. It is a summary of events at AA over the past year, from the company perspective -- sort of a year's worth of press releases rolled into one. N2e (talk) 11:24, 29 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Update "Staff and funding"
Carmack released new staff and funding figures during his talk at QuakeCon 2010 on 12 August 2010. I've marked the section to be updated pending the incorporation of these new figures. --Credema (talk) 00:23, 13 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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