Dammit, I don't NEED more plot bunnies!

[jeriendhal]

Now I've got a scenelet in my head of Reggie and Rolas from POW, now in their sixties, chatting with a much younger vixen from the MC's Aerocraft Technology Ministry as they watch a group of Gerwart boffins ready the first manned, er, Foxened, launch of an atmospheric rocket.

resonant will probably have to correct me on this, but I don't think alcohol would be able to power an engine powerful enough to get an airplane up in the air, or at least not one that can carry a significant amount of cargo, and Foxen noses wouldn't allow more powerful, and noxious fuel oils to be used to create gasoline.

So of course it would be perfectly logical in the race for Moar Speed to move immediately to hydrogen powered rockets...

Comments

[lilfluff.livejournal.com]

Yes, but they're plot *bunnies*. They're going to, um, you know, like bunnies.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Technically it could do the job, since it has an even better ratio of hydrogen to carbon than heptane, though the oxygen in the molecule reduces the total amount of combustion yet to occur. So you'd need more total mass of fuel. And you'd need an awfully-well-made engine; otherwise the thing would suffer the kind of damage to the piston rings that cars often do today from the ethanol added to gasoline. And knocking from spontaneous premature ignition may be tolerable in a car, but is a recipe for plane crashes. It would absolutely require fuel injection and a starter motor.

A better fuel would be diethyl ether, made by treating alcohol with sulfuric acid. More energy per gram, and it would have the added virtue of not absorbing water from the atmosphere. Still has a low flash point, but you're going to be using fuel injection anyway.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

There are aircraft being manufactured today that run on 100% ethanol (especially in Brazil, where it's cheaper than avgas):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_Ipanema

Ethanol has about the same density as avgas, but has 2/3 the energy per kilogram, so either your range or payload would be reduced accordingly. However, it'd still be perfectly adequate for the development of a Foxen aerospace program, and would generate fewer foul smells (both in fuel production, and in engine exhaust).

For rockets, the Redstone program used 150-proof alcohol and liquid oxygen. This would be probably be more comfortable for the Foxen ground crew. The alcohol could be generated by simple distillation (no need to add smelly benzene to get past ~95% purity), and you'd need far fewer noisy compressors to fuel your rocket.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redstone_%28rocket%29

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

nods nods. Okay, it might be alcohol and LOX in stead of hydrogen, I'll have ot look up how difficult hydrogen production is anyway.

[seawasp]

I find it hard to believe that Foxen can't simply ignore/adapt to smells as we do. There's VERY few smells so bad that you won't acclimate to them in relatively short time. You may not LIKE them and you may avoid them when you don't need to approach them, but if the benefit exceeds the annoyance? Human beings work in all sorts of environments we find incredibly foul when we must, and in general we eventually don't even NOTICE them after a while.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Well it was a plot point in POW that the Gerwart navy was interdicting Mother Country sugar exports for their alcohol fuel industry, so that's been already established. The Gerwart patrol boat in the story actually had a coal fired boiler, which Reggie and Rolas found extremely unsettling.

Basically while Foxen can use gasoline and coal as fuel sources, there's a strong tendency in the MC at least to avoid it. With their more sensitive noses it can make them physically ill, and it eventually kills their sensitivity to other smells, much as human smokers can lose much of their sense of taste. Never mind smelling coal and gasoline residue in other areas where the wind has blown it. It was that long ago that leaded fuel in cars in the real world killed plants along the highways.