Hey Awesome, Thank you guys so much for the welcome's! I'm glad to be here! =D
(I'm the sole member of Grape Juice)
pauldear:
Thank you!
Jay:
Thanks!
Simple really, I'm not much of a coffee or beer drinker, and pop can be expensive. so I often drink juice when I'm programming. so for one of my programs I used 'Grape juice' as a project name, since it was right beside me. and the name just kind of stuck.
SANEAlex:
Thank you aswell!
Glad to see there are more people still active, looking around the forum/web it looked like most of the interest had died off. I hope you guys get approved for the patent(s)
Innovation is always good
and I'm going for something a bit more exotic, though I have 2 idea's bouncing around in my head, here's a summary:
1) air/vacuum cannon using the pressure of the ocean through ~km long tube with a kink in it (I'll explain the kink in a later post) wich should bring it up to (at least) mach 2-5. without using any on board fuel, after which I plan to use a hybrid engine to bring it up to mach 20-25 and enter orbit. fairly simple in principle, but will need a boat load of math (I've mainly just scratch built model airplanes that focused on slow+lots of lift for rubber power, so this is way outside my experience zone but I feel confident I can calculate it, and if the numbers look promising then I'll build it)
2) Orbital airship, I thought I was the first to come up with this Idea, but when I started doing some crude research I found that it's a real thing, and JP Aerospace's design is eerily similar to what I had in mind. and what I had in mind:
Delta shape, Hydrogen filled + partial vacuum and instead letting the internal gas expand, I'll just increase the vacuum as I go up.and I would use 3 solar powered ion thrusters for thrust.
I'll give further details in another post.
my biggest issue with this is weight (power conversion for ion thrusters) + expense (leading wing edge I plan to use tungsten to deal with the hypersonic friction heat), so I might use this Idea for when I attempt the Lunar X challenge instead, unless i find out to make this feasible for cheap. then I'll try doing both challenges at once :p
anyways, I have a lot of math to do, so hopefully in a few days I'll make a larger post with diagrams + pictures describing my thoughts/Idea's.