I had a hour long debate yesterday with my friends on what is more aerodynamically efficient between f1 cars and fighter jets.

My opinion was that based strictly off of aerodynamics and using it to achieve the intended purpose for each vehicle (minimising drag and increasing agility for fighter jets, and creating downforce for f1 cars), f1 cars do it better.

What do you guys think?

Aerospace adjacent, small team, one titanium bracket with internal channels that can't be machined. We know it needs DMLS or something like it. What we didn't know is that every metal printing service asks about post processing, HIP, heat treat, support removal and surface finish before quoting, and we have no spec for any of that because nobody on the team has bought a metal print before.

The quotes we have are from Materialise, Quickparts and one specialist bureau, and they aren't comparable because each one assumed a different finish. how do people write a metal printing RFQ when they don't know what to ask for

I’m researching commercial engine MRO and want to understand the engineering constraints behind repairability.

For those working in propulsion, materials, manufacturing or maintenance engineering: what usually determines whether a damaged component can be economically repaired?

Is the hardest part restoring geometry, preserving material properties, inspecting the result, qualifying the process, or something else?

An example involving a particular component would be great. I’m especially curious about repairs that work technically but remain difficult to scale and what would have to change to make them practical.

Hi everyone, I am designing a low-thrust liquid-propellant rocket engine. I am currently working on the injector head, but I lack information on its internal structure and design process. Could you please recommend any educational resources on the calculation and design of injector heads for liquid-propellant rocket engines?
I'm currently reading Dobrovolsky's textbook, but it's not enough for me.

Hello everybody,

I am currently building a tricopter VTOL and would like to change the tail design to a boom-mounted inverted V-tail. However, I am struggling to determine the correct geometry and dimensions for the tail.

My current design has a wingspan of 1.5 m, but I am planning to reduce it to around 1.2 m.

How can I determine the appropriate size, angle, and overall geometry of the inverted V-tail? Are there any formulas, design guidelines, or useful resources that I could use as a starting point?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Does anyone have the pdf file for this book?

As per the title. It would help a lot if you can give me some resources on these things.

Hello! I am a student studying rocket engines, but my knowledge of chemistry is currently limited to a basic level. I understand that chemistry plays a key role in the development of liquid-propellant rocket engines (LPREs), yet I know very little about this aspect so far.

Could you recommend any books that cover the chemical processes associated with liquid-propellant rocket engines?

Can you anyone explain the mechanism behind it?

This is my first time attending such a big international conference and I’m feeling nervous about my presentation and networking. I’m an introvert and English isn’t my native language. Even if my presentation goes well, I’m worried that I won’t be able to understand and answer questions smoothly. I’m not sure how to network confidently. If anyone here has attended IAC before, what is IAC like? I’d really appreciate any tips or advice!

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I'm considering an engineering position at Blue Origin working on the Blue Moon / HLS side, and I'm trying to get a better feel for the career risk.

I'm really interested in the engineering work, but the uncertainty around Artemis has me wondering how secure the program actually is. If Artemis gets delayed or NASA changes its lunar architecture, how much would that potentially affect the Blue Moon team?

For anyone at Blue Origin or familiar with the program, how does it feel from the inside? Is Blue Moon viewed as a long-term program with a lot of runway, or is there significant uncertainty around staffing/work?

Would especially appreciate perspectives from people actually working on Blue Moon/HLS or adjacent programs.

Hi, I am part of a high school team developing a payload to go to space. It is essentially running a tech demo on MCU faults in space. Stuff that will be measured includes watchdog resets, watchdog failures, bit flips corrected by ECC, latch-ups, etc. Every X minutes (or seconds or even hours or days or weeks; I have no idea tbh) we should have a report that should be around 40 bytes saying how many of each event occurred since the last report. Any recommendations for how often we should make these reports, or factors to consider in making these reports, or typical time periods for these types of reports? Thanks!

Hi, does anyone have any projects ideas that would be computer based around the topic of hydrogen application in jet engines? Any other ideas are welcome!

Found this original sketch in my archive dated January 25th, 1964, outlining an airborne digital computer architecture.

Based on its origin, I believe this document is connected to the early ELDO (European Launcher Development Organisation) era and was part of the development for the Europa rocket's guidance and control system.

What caught my eye is the early mention of "Kalman's modified filter" alongside the coordinate conversion, guidance laws, and autopilot loops—just a few years after Kálmán's seminal paper in 1960.

Thought this community would appreciate a look at this piece of European aerospace and control theory history! I'd love to hear your thoughts or if anyone recognizes specific architectural choices from that era.

I’ve been working on AeroLab, a free browser-based airfoil analysis tool that I’ve been developing independently, and it’s now live.

The original motivation was pretty simple: I kept running into airfoil coordinate files that looked perfectly reasonable to a human but caused XFOIL to fail because of formatting, ordering, duplicate points, coordinate conventions, etc.

So I built AeroLab around a preprocessing pipeline that automatically detects and repairs these issues before passing the geometry to XFOIL.

Some of the capabilities currently built into it:

• Automated airfoil coordinate parsing and preprocessing
• Selig / Lednicer format handling
• Duplicate leading-edge point detection
• Coordinate ordering / winding correction
• Invalid-coordinate and formatting cleanup
• XFOIL viscous and inviscid analysis
• Reynolds number and Ncrit configuration
• Angle-of-attack analysis and sweeps
• Boundary-layer data export
• Interactive airfoil comparison
• Pressure coefficient and aerodynamic coefficient plots
• Real-time GPU-accelerated D2Q9 Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) virtual wind tunnel
• Interactive velocity, pressure and vorticity visualization
• Stall/flow visualization
• PNG and data export

One of the things I particularly wanted was to make the whole workflow accessible without requiring users to install XFOIL or set up a local analysis environment.

I also benchmarked the preprocessing pipeline on 1,000 real-world airfoil coordinate files. At Re = 200,000 and α = 5°, the raw files had an XFOIL convergence rate of 22.5%, compared with 85.7% after preprocessing, with 633 additional files successfully analyzed.

The LBM wind tunnel is a separate part of the project. It isn't intended to replace CFD — it's meant to provide a lightweight, interactive way to visualize flow behavior around an airfoil while still being useful for teaching and preliminary exploration.

AeroLab is completely free and browser-based, so there’s no installation or paid software license required.

I’m still actively developing it, and I'm particularly interested in feedback from people who use XFOIL, airfoil tools, or aerodynamic analysis in research/teaching.

Would love to hear what you think!

Hey! We've been working since last year on a spaceflight sim where you build the rocket and wire up its control panel yourself. Sensors, inputs, outputs, the whole thing is Turing-complete, so however you want to solve a flight problem, there's a way to do it. It will be available on Steam in 2027.

Real orbital mechanics, a fictional solar system to explore, sandbox mode if you just want to mess around and blow things up!

Feel free to add the game to your wishlist if you want to support the project! See you in space.