Aerospace Design Thinking

For more than a year I am developing aerospace related ideas. Recently, I started using AI to verify and perfect my ideas. Unfortunately, and thankfully, AI is really poor on visualizing and perfecting out of the box ideas. As a result, I am at the driving seat of the idea development process. If you don’t know what you are doing or have weak background on the fundamentals, AI can easily approve a design even though it is not feasible. With a proper foundation and understanding you can rapidly perfect ideas like in my case. Here are some design elements that I have perfected.

The major idea that forms the basis of all my aerospace ideas is the use of low-pressure unified rocket engines instead of turbofans or complex and very high-pressure rocket engines. All my engines utilized liquid methane or LNG as the fuel and LOX as the oxidizer. Using LOX even worked for aircrafts as well, where air breathing engines are the undisputable norm. Majority of my aerospace ideas utilized the Earth’s atmosphere for better fuel efficiency other than the ones that operated in space where there is no air. By perfecting the designs by eliminating most of the dead weight, drag inducing parts, better aerodynamic lifting and utilizing the augmented air enabled the success of my ideas. Even aircrafts carrying LOX on board were feasible against the air breathing planes.

Low pressure unified rocket engines are comparatively easy to manufacture and they produce immense thrust for their weight and volume. I opted for 3d printed unified engines for fast and reliable manufacturability. This approach reduced the weight, assembly and maintenance times as well. Less part meant less point of failure as well. This setup allowed dedicated engines for dedicated tasks such as dedicated VTOL engines and horizontal thrusters. No need to rotate the engines during flight transition. Simple reliable solution with minimal dead weight. Removal of the landing gears and other horizontal takeoff and landing related parts counterbalanced the dedicated VTOL engines and the landing legs. I could even utilize some augmented air for the VTOL engine as well. In my design thinking; if there is a rocket engine that consumes LOX, the overall design should utilize some form of augmented air and afterburner effect to increase the low Iₛₚ value.

The removal of bulky and drag inducing turbofan engines in all my aircraft designs allowed me to utilize higher aspect ratio tandem bi-planes. I try to increase the lift surface without increasing the drag too much. I like bi-planes while they are structurally strong, can be very thin while they are supported from several points, they have less horizontal cross section for efficient VTOL. Placing the upper wing slightly forward allows self-stabilizing design (it is actually more than that).  Tandem design allows more even lifting compared to a central single set of wings. It also lowers the total wingspan to make the plane more compact.

My most critical design approach is double purposing. It dilutes the cons and turns them into pros. Gradient hexagonal cascaded fuel tanks double as wing attachment point and create the chassis of the plane. If you double or triple purpose a dead weight, then it wouldn’t be a dead weight anymore.

With all these fundamentals in mind; I develop subsonic VTOL planes that have certain wing profiles and ducted engines, hypersonic VTOL planes with trailing edge integrated engines and different wing profiles, single stage to orbit Blade rocket. On a smart eye they have many things in common and a single source of origin.