On Tue, 2004-05-04 at 12:19, Henry Spencer wrote:
> Any pressurized tank, *especially* one pressurized to the point needed for
> pressure-fed engines, typically makes excellent structure with little or
> no added stiffening. (Witness the classical Atlas, whose tanks are just
> sheet-metal balloons, with essentially no strength of their own.)
Or, for a more familiar example, a soda can. An empty one has no
strength to speak of -- most people can readily destroy one with their
bare hands. But, when closed and pressurized, they can support very tall
stacks of themselves w/o any noticeable problems. If you are going with
substantial ullage pressure in your rocket, as for pressure feeding or
just to get a large NPSH into your pump, you can size the structure for
handling loads only.
-p-
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