[Supers] A More Scientific Golden Age

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

Also, to be fair to the BIS (and Clarke himself), the black powder rockets were what was readily available at the time. .

I think they had progressed to smokeless powder solid rockets by the time. Those were not as common before WWII as they were after though.

To my understanding, the reason they discounted liquid fuel rockets was that there was no way to get enough fuel into large ones. You can see thsi even with small hybrid rockets that are fed by pressurized tanks of oxidizer. Those are good for a single digit's worth of seconds only before you've lost too muhc pressure.

They didn't know about modern turbo-pumps of course and those actually do look like mad science. The ones for the Shuttle's main engines weighed 750 lbs (half of the engine weight) but delivered 75,000 horsepower. An utterly ridiculous piece of technology.