Quote:
Originally Posted by Rupert
That looks like the fuel is being both burned and heated and it's some awful hybrid of an MHD turbine and rocket. That's super-science right there.
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Normal hydroox engines use use more hydrogen than is consumed in the burning and the remaining is ejected as reaction mass.
That is pretty much as described in the description "When in thrust mode, large volumes of additional fuel are added to the re-ignition chamber, burned, and ejected as reaction mass."
Also any actual thrust from the MHD part is likely miniscule.
As example take the ship closest to a normal shuttle the Yinma-class Lander from the ships of the french arm. It has only a 0.5MW MHD reactor, that is really not much when compared to the energy you get even by burning that 1/6th of the mass as fuel. It uses thus 0.3 tons fuel/hour in the MHD engine. The total weight seems to be 175 tons base+225 cargo=400 tons loaded without fuel +25 tons fuel. So it is using 66 2/3 tons fuel for the landing/takeoff out of the 25 toms it has.. or more likely it has 25 tons for long term operation and 66 2/3 tons for interface work. Either way MHD uses 0.5% of the fuel/hour that the thruster uses.
So most of the thrust comes from magic, the next highest component is the burned hydrox in the camber as a rocket engine and the last really small part from the MHD turbine exhaust.
In case of the Yunma it is about
: 92.6% magic, 7.4% hydrox burning and maybe 0.01% from maybe 20 minutes of the MHD.