| > Kratos Turbine Technologies has made turbopumps for liquid rockets so they're well placed to do this work. Liquid rocket turbopumps and jet engines are completely different things. And FTT was a designer of missile and UAV engines, according to Kratos' website they're developing 300lb thrust turbojets and 900lb thrust turbofans: https://www.kratosdefense.com/products/uav/air/turbines. Their KTT is 200lbf, targeted towards "cheap cruise missiles" and "attritable" (aka expendable) UAVs, and was developed in 18 months. But apparently they'll be able to develop an airliner engine with 175 times more thrust (without afterburner), in 2 years? Hell, the linked page boasts of their newly commissioned "X-58 test facility", able to accomodate engines "up to 3000-lb thrust". I'm not panning KTT here, I don't know if they were even involved in the press release, but things don't really make any sense. And remember, this is a project Rolls-Royce fucked away from 3 months ago, after two years of collaboration. So in 3 months Boom has supposedly found a company which is able to design an engine type which has basically never existed from scratch with no experience. |