So what would it take to get a Helicarrier flying?

[Crossroads Inc.]

Found this on Wired why doing some google searching about SHIELD. (quick not, the article itself has a lot of jpgs and is a bit too long to post here)
The article is quite old, so do forgive me if this has already made the rounds, but it goes into quite some detail about the energy requirements as well as the surface area needed to life something with the mass of an average aircraft carrier.

For anyone whole loves Big numbers, and overt the top calculations of totally fiction items, might get a kick out of this
LINK HERE

I will post some nice excerpts from the article that did make me laugh.

Just to make things easier, I will look at low level hovering. This means I can just use 1.2 kg/m3 for the density of air. Of course, at higher altitudes the density would be lower. Using the mass and rotor area from above, I get a thrust air speed of 642 m/s (1400 mph). Just to be clear, this is faster than the speed of sound. It is probably clear that I don’t know much about real helicopters or jet engines, but I would suspect that a thrust this high would add other calculation complications. I will (as usual) proceed anyway.

With the air speed, I can now calculate the power needed to hover. Again, I am not going to go over the (possibly bogus) derivation of this power for hovering, it was in my huma-copter post.


With my values from above, I get a power of 3.17 x 1011 Watts – quite a bit more than 1.21 giga watts. In horsepower, this would be 4.26 x 108 horsepower. That’s a lot of horses. Just for comparison, the Nimitz class carriers have a listed propulsion of 1.94 x 108 Watts. I assume this is the maximum power, so it wouldn’t be enough to lift the helicarrier. Obviously, the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier has a better power source. I would guess it would have to be at least around 2 x 109 Watts in order to operate. You don’t want to use your maximum power just to sit still.

Really, I am surprised with my rough calculations that it is even partially close to the power output of a real carrier.

[Grumman]

So the minimum power requirement is 1,500 times more than a supercarrier's maximum shaft output? Good thing they've got a weapons manufacturer who tinkers with ultra-powerful energy sources as a hobby.

It's also a good thing none of the terrorists were smart enough to ask why Stark built the 35th most powerful nuclear power plant in the world to replace a car battery.

[madd0ct0r]

Well, a caveat.

A huge amount depends on his assumption it weighs as much as a Nimitz carrier - but this thing was built to fly, not just float.

It might be more fun to start with the design and work out what it weighs.

[Simon_Jester]

So the minimum power requirement is 1,500 times more than a supercarrier's maximum shaft output? Good thing they've got a weapons manufacturer who tinkers with ultra-powerful energy sources as a hobby.

What's really impressive is that by scaling the calculation, it would take the power of a whole supercarrier to allow a much lighter object (say, 80-90 tons) to hover...

It's also a good thing none of the terrorists were smart enough to ask why Stark built the 35th most powerful nuclear power plant in the world to replace a car battery.

He may not have been forthright with them about its power output. Or he might have claimed he'd need a similar reactor to power the Jericho (or some needed piece of machinery), and that the one in his chest was a prototype. Or both.

[Ahriman238]

According to the IM novelization (and the comics when they introduce ARC technology following the movies) the ARC reactor is 100% viable fusion. It's been said before, but bears repeating.... Tony Stark built a palm-sized fusion reactor IN A CAVE!! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!!!

Mind that creates some minor problems, like why it took any work at all to make ARC tech viable for the Stark Tower. How Stane dismisses ARC tech as a toy made purely as a sop to environmentalists. Or how people are selling off Stark Industries stock and mocking how a weapons manufacturer that doesn't make weapons works and Tony doesn't point to the giant ARC reactor and say "Bitches, we invented fusion as a side project."

[Crossroads Inc.]

Yea that bugs me too.

For the most part, the Marvel movie universe has been "somewhat" good about being consistent with super tech in the various movies.
it is clear this universe has access to Tech FAR above what we have, and they actually use it.

The ARC Reactor is the one blind spot I feel, for the most part it doesn't seem to be use,d because Stark and others have fed this line about it being "too dangerous" in the wrong hands... Well it's got into the 'wrong hands' before, and turns out it isn't that big of a deal. It is JUST a power source, it does not magically make someone able to build a Stark Power Armor, only power it.

If Stark Really wanted to change the world, he would produce a commercial version of the ARC and start replacing Coal Power plants all across the world. Now, I would like to think that the reactor powering Stark Tower was a test for this.. maybe JUST Maybe in the next Movie or two, we might get a shout out about ARC Fusion reactors slowly starting a new Energy revolution.

[Batman]

Not to mention a fusion reactor needs something to, well, fuse, that something usually being some iteration of hydrogen. Using the three GW of IM, that'd amount to, well, pretty much ignorable amounts of hydrogen (at least if I've done my math right) but still leaves the question of why the health issue in IM2 was palladium blood poisoning instead of radiation damage from the reactor, and how inventing a new element fixed the problem.

[Eternal_Freedom]

He did mention to Rhodes that the palladium block was damaged by neutrons from the reactor, I imagined that the metal hollow in his chest is enough to shield him from the radiation.

[Kitsune]

Being that Tony's father had Anti-Grav fitted to a car in the 1940s, maybe there was some kind of Anti-Grav on the carrier that vastly reduced its weight? I think it makes a reasonable "In Universe" explanation?

[Crossroads Inc.]

Unfortunately, during the whole part with it crashing they make it quite clear that the failure if the turbines is causing the carrier to fall. No one ever said "with the turbines down our anti grav won't be enough to keep us airborn!" .
More to the point Daddy Stark didn't really have anti grav so much as a more primitive version of the "repulsors" that Tony created.

[Kitsune]

Unfortunately, during the whole part with it crashing they make it quite clear that the failure if the turbines is causing the carrier to fall. No one ever said "with the turbines down our anti grav won't be enough to keep us airborn!" .
More to the point Daddy Stark didn't really have anti grav so much as a more primitive version of the "repulsors" that Tony created.

Willing to accept that there lapses in dialog.
A good example, I was suppose to go sailing last week
My friend's sailboat has a generator but it is not working
The statement was that without the generator, the ship could not produce electricity
Now, the main engine (which is separate from the generator motor) can produce some electricity but is limited
The statement was not however that the boat could not produce enough electricity although was technically correct.

[Ted C]

It's also a good thing none of the terrorists were smart enough to ask why Stark built the 35th most powerful nuclear power plant in the world to replace a car battery.

It's not like he told the terrorists about the power output of that thing. For all they knew, it was comparable to a pacemaker battery.

[Marko Dash]

i think he may have the rotor area off, as there seemed to be multiple rotors in each duct 'tony's pinball impression' and there will also be a slight increase in efficiency for the rotors because of the duct itself. there were also IIRC multiple jet exhausts, mostly for forward thrust but they may have aided in lift as well.

[Dass.Kapital]

As for the motive power of the rotor system, I like to think they are using something akin to this.

http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/i ... pic=1938.0

There were some systems developed by Ryan where the vertical thrust was actually more powerful than that of the small jet spinning the rotor system.

Much cheers to all.