Originally Posted By: A_Harman
Originally Posted By: Trav
No comment on the Veyron?
Sure, why not? The Veyron is a very limited edition, very high performance car. The few people that can afford to buy and operate it don't care one snap about getting a few percent better fuel economy that DI can provide.
If you're trying to make an inference that DI is not good for high performance applications, I would refer you to Audi's LeMans winning cars of the early 2000's. These were all DI turbo V8's, and won the race I think 4 years in a row. (One of those years was with a closed car badged as a Bentley, but still powered by the same FSI engine.) Audi replaced them with their TDI racecars and continued winning LeMans year after year.
Totally irrelevant! Those are race cars and will be torn down right after they race.
So now DI is just about fuel economy so they feel no need to use in the Veyron because the customer have enough money to buy the gas? Thats beyond laughable man!
VW who also owns Audi you are using as an example built the engine and didn't bother with DI or did you just happen to forget that?
Your irrelevant history lessons are all well and good but the bottom line is they didn't use it because they didn't need to use it. It brought nothing to the project that was deemed beneficial. Its that simple.
This thing with the space you are dead wrong! SRB had problems for many years and NASA was well aware of the design issues and used them anyway. The Shuttle was a potential flying bomb right from the drawing board. That is a design flaw no matter how you want to spin it! The proof? The thing exploded in mid air.
So what if it was cold, if the SRB didn't have a design flaw nothing would have happened.
Quote:
As early as 1972, problems began to develop in solid rocket field joints on other boosters similar to those proposed for the SRBs. Under some circumstances, the putty and O-rings did not function properly and the O-rings were subjected to hot combustion products which rapidly eroded the O-rings
The use of this flawed design was at best irresponsible.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-03l.html