TAB 35

L-1011 TriStar

The Lockheed Tristar has been in commercial use for over thirty years. There are still close to a hundred of them in regular operation - as passenger jects, airborne research labs, cargo jets, and even as mobile hospitals. Orbital Scientific has even configured one to launch a Pegasus missile into space, to insert satellites into low Earth orbit.

Orbital Scientific's specially outfitted Tristar

 

The Tristar has three Rolls-Royce jet engines, one on each wing and a third in the fuselage in the tail assembly. The air intake for this third engine is ahead of the tail on top of the main body of the aircraft, ducting air to the engine itself which is in the tail assembly aligned along the centerline of the aircraft.

Fuselage/Wing Structural Integrity

 

Applying the Three Body Problem ideas developed so far, you can overlay the zero velocity curves, with L4 and L5 points at the engine thrust points and the two primary masses along the centerline (approximately where cargo bays are located in commercial passenger jets). You will recall that in the 3BP, stable orbits are possible around L4 and L5, and quasi stable orbits around L3. ( 31 ) This means that if all the mass of the aircraft is carefully balanced, then at high altitudes the gravity configuration will make small orbits at these Lagrange points very energy efficient - i.e. the turbine blades of the jet engines will operate very efficiently, and for all three main engines.

Naturally, this is easier said than done - the mass balance will need to be exact, and since it changes during flight as fuel is used up, the mass balance point will need to change too. Hence, the two "primary masses" in the cargo bays will need to move on tracks, for a continuous computer balance of weight. Not to mention that the zero velocity curves, and the Lagrange points, exist only in a rotating system - and the aircraft moves along a straight line. This is where the nature of gravity developed at length in the Theory (i.e. Sections 0 through 5) comes into play.

Gravity Sonde Installation and Deployment

The idea of using "gravity strings" near Earth's surface to facilitate travel is akin to using the jet stream, which may in fact be a side effect of the overall gravity scheme near Earth. Having the aircraft carefully balanced will minimize any spurious readings of local gravity (or at least be able to eliminate it from the readings easily) by a tandem arrangement of gravity sensors similar to the Topex-Poseidon array used to map the Earth's gravity from orbit in space. (Two satellites are attached together along a length of cable, and GPS monitors measure their relative position constantly, enabling gravitational anomalies on the Earth surface of sizes as small as large oil fields.) Two configurations are possible; parallel and in-line, each tube being a gravity sensor with integral instrumentation.

Theoretical Operation of the Gravity Sonde

 

This same configuration may be used to seek gravity strings, perhaps concentrated along the lines dividing the tesseral/sectoral harmonics used to model Earth's gravity field. The figures below show how the Earth's gravity is modeled by a system of quadratures, at several levels. There are thousands of terms, with smaller and smaller segments; which all together allow the Earth's gravity field to be modeled more and more accurately. The mathematics of these huge matrices (which require the largest computers in the world to solve - over five hundred massively paralleled computers, all together) are based on the lines between segments, which typically follow lines of longitude and latitude. Theoretically, these lines are themselves gravity strings, and comprise the overall gravity matrix encompassing the Earth.

Zonal Harmonics

 

Sectorial Harmonics

 

Tesseral Harmonics

 

The Tristar design modifications, then, are intended to reduce the gravity profile of the aircraft - the way stealth technology reduces the radar profile of aircraft - so that it can study the gravity field more closely. Ultimately, once the jet can be exactly aligned to a single gravity string, then the three phase nature of this phenomena postulated in the Theory, can be used to power the jet engines.

Rolls-Royce Turbo Jet Engine

 

Typically, jet engines have a three phase turbine - for low, medium, and high pressure - and the whole thing rotates because of a fan at the intake - like a turbo charged automobile engine. The Theory shows that the gravity strings have an electromagnetic carrier wave or envelope, and this can be tracked by a proper static charge to the turbine blades. In the context of the 3BP, the following figure shows a periodic orbit around the L4 Lagrange point, which is not unlike the blades of a turbine. Interlacing this with the gravity carrier wave could theoretically allow power to be delivered to the turbines directly from the gravity matrix. ( 14 )

A Complex Periodic Orbit at L4

 

A final compelling illustration, of a particular solution to the "N Body Problem" of Celestial Mechanics, shows a configuration of space very much like what has been talked about here. This particular case is studied toward the end of the Theory, and is a very exciting concept.

A final comment in favor of this Tristar configuration for a deep space aircraft is that it would be capable of atmospheric flight in other worlds, not to mention the notion of space behaving just like a fluid (e.g. air) at velocities at a high percentage of the speed of light - at which time the jet's control surfaces would be needed, and the jet engines would again track gravity strings and speed the aircraft to its destination.

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© 2004 WH Clark