When a seven-year old girl has a life-changing question in mind on a January evening she may exhibit wisdom far beyond her years. She will catch Dad in mellow mood in front of the fire, wriggle onto his lap, and light up the innocent blue eyes and the serious face.

“Daddy… is there really a Father Christmas?”

Daddies, even first-time Daddies, are at least half-ready for this. As well as more awkward questions to come in a remarkably few years time.

“Santa’s a lovely legend, darling”, I say.

Amy considers this. Then: “What’s a legend, Daddy?”

“Go and look it up in your dictionary, darling”.

Amy slides off my lap and goes to her room rather thoughtfully. And thus begins a psychological dance which will last at least the next 12 months. Amy knows perfectly well what ‘legend’ means – she doesn’t need to look it up. But on the other hand she gets a present from Santa every year plus other presents from Dad and Mum – so why blow Father Christmas out of the water and miss out on a present when Christmas comes again in eleven months time? And so the ever-so-tricky Santa question… just kind of evaporates.

BLOODHOUND is a little the same way. Every new year, acknowledged or not, those most involved take a quiet look-back to see how last year went and how this year needs to go.

Well, 2011 was a very good year. Oh, inevitably, with a few not-quite-so-good spots, like the Curate’s egg. Where they were depends on who you ask. Ask Richard Noble and you get a pressure-wave of positive vibes like being smacked in the kisser by a departing Orient Express – albeit that the Message Of Noble still ends the same way all Messages Of Noble end, to wit: “Make no mistake, folks – the next stage is going to be Hell’s Tough!”  Which epithet has long since ceased being a surprise to anyone on the BLOODHOUND Project.

That’s Richard. Every trailblazing outfit needs a Richard Noble at its head. And if you can get it, an Andy Green as well. An unbeatable duo.

So what did 2011 deliver?

My view might be a tad contrary. But to me the biggest single achievement happened late in the year with no fanfare whatsoever.

The aerodynamic shape of the fuselage and rear suspension was finally agreed, signed, sealed – and frozen. ‘Frozen’ in engineering design terms being a bit like a marriage vow – now the pacts are sealed, the uncertainly is over, and this is what we are going to do. Or in this case, this is what we are going to build. Now, detail design can be finally finally finalised, more Designs For Manufacture can be issued, and one and all are committed. Locked in.

It is called Design Freeze.

Don’t mistake me on this. Many aspects from on-board computers to the rear chassis space-frames had already been settled and are now under way. But the aerodynamic freeze was – the really final final vital breakthrough.

I first wrote about Aerodynamic Design Freeze in the late Summer of ’09. (see A Line in the Sand).  At the time I said:  “…if the design team really aren’t quite ready for Aero Solution on 30 Sept [‘09] they are most certainly capable of folding their arms and saying so…. following which the date might slide back a fortnight or so, but not by much more”.

Looking From Outside The Box I try my darndest to be completely and absolutely accurate. But – quite obviously – I can only be accurate at the time. BLOODHOUND is an organic, ongoing project, so this is an organic, ongoing journal of how matters are marching right now. If things change subsequently… then I won’t have been so accurate.

Well, things changed. It didn’t take two weeks to finally sort out the aerodynamics.

It took roughly two years.

This is in fact not wholly accurate – or rather, not quite the whole story. Aerodynamics didn’t suddenly come together with a bang on one particular day – of course they didn’t. Life isn’t that simple. There had to come a final day of freeze, yes, for obvious production reasons – but the team left their options open for as long as possible to allow scope for change. (Such as slightly increasing the front wheel track).

So came the freeze. Some aerodynamic things – winglets and rear wheel fairings particularly – are still not frozen, because there are only so many hours in the day and these items, vital as they are, don’t impinge on the manufacture of the main fuselage.

 

Hindsight being replete with wisdom…

With hindsight – hindsight always being remarkably replete with wisdom – the problems were no great surprise. Ron Ayers, Chief Aerodynamicist and archetypal British engineering guru, puts it better than I can.

“When we started the Project, I didn’t know what shape a Mach 1.4 car should have. How could I? There were [and are – yet] no Mach 1.4 cars to guide me. The supersonic drag had to be minimised, and at the same time the vertical forces had to be controlled throughout the Mach number range”.

Which, for a long time, they weren’t.

A design iteration which promised a reduction in drag could also, for instance, turn out to produce too much rear-end down-force at Mach 0.9 – and then, perversely and infuriatingly, further prove to be capable of creating 5 tonnes of up-force at Mach 1.4. To the hard-pressed design and CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) teams it was like trying to stuff ten cats into a bag – around about the time you were putting in the tenth you’d find the first five had jumped out again. The cussedness of supersonic – and if anything even more so, transonic – airflow has been causing aircraft aerodynamicists to repair to the pub or to the surgeons who remove wrinkles from foreheads for more than the past six decades. Want to add more complication on top of that?

Easy. Just try to do it at an altitude of a few centimetres off the deck, with four wheels firmly on said deck throughout. Then the pressure zones and shockwaves are affected by the deck and…

And complicate the problem by maybe 20-fold. Ron Ayers again:

“To overcome this it appeared that the winglets would have to be very large and very active. [Meaning controlled by a computer programme, a prospect which made almost all of the team wriggle uncomfortably]. Then we tried the Design of Experiments. This achieved something remarkable. It not only gave us acceptable drag and vertical forces at maximum Mach number – which is what we asked it to do – but also greatly reduced the sensitivity of vertical force at lower Mach numbers – which we had not asked it to do. Now the winglets could be much smaller and probably not even controlled. [Meaning not active – ground-adjustable only].  We had tried all our existing car and aircraft design tricks – boat-tailing, diffusers, etc – but these had misled us, and were precisely the features which made the aerodynamics so Mach number dependent”.

The result may not be the prettiest car in Land Speed Record history. But – it says here – the most efficient. 2013 will tell…

Anyway – as this breakthrough started to come together, as cat number ten was being enticed into the bag, cat number six or seven vamoosed again. This in the shape of a small not-so-good spot in the egg called Yaw Static Margin. (See A Tale of Two Centres).  Straight-line stability in any high speed vehicle inherently relies on the Centre of Gravity – the point of balance where you could shove an invisible fish-hook into it and lift it up without having it tilt in any direction – being ahead of the Centre of Pressure, which is the equivalent point for all the aerodynamic loads. If the C of G is ahead of the C of P you have positive stability, because the C of G always wishes to go straight on and is ‘towing’ the C of P so that any excursions sideways are naturally inclined to self-correct.  Let the C of P get ahead of the C of G and it’s like pushing the trailer instead of pulling it – it becomes unstable directionally.

And BLOODHOUND, when all the boxes were being finally ticked, turned out to have the C of P ahead of the C of G.

This discovery was of course an “Oh, f*** it!” moment.  (Oh, sorry, sorry, inadvertently lapsed into a technical engineering term there – what I really mean is an “Oh, bother it” moment). A bad spot in the egg. But not entirely unexpected. With all the heaviest bits – the jet and the rocket and most of their attendant systems – down the back, this was always a wolf waiting outside Grandma’s door. BLOODHOUND was planned for a positive Yaw Static Margin of 3% - in other words, the C of G being ahead of the C of P by at least 3% of the wheelbase. But ticking the boxes put it the other way round by a significant margin…

Well, that’s life in an engineering adventure. Can’t take a joke, shouldn’t have joined.

 

Can’t take a joke…

Answer – move the C of G forwards or the C of P back. Or a combination of both. My intelligent suggestion of shoving a couple of bags of cement into the front of the nose-cone (a solution resorted to by more than one major aircraft manufacturer in years past to strong-arm weight and balance into obedience) was for some reason greeted by kindly-weary smiles as the team looked at the village idiot. Add weight unnecessarily…?

Well, they’ve sorted that by a combination of solutions. A little bit of shifting weight forwards, but mainly shifting the C of P back by puffing out BLOODHOUND’s front cheeks slightly, enlarging the fin hugely and moving it backwards, and attending Satanic Masses aimed at enticing every possible molecule of airflow to react as far aft as it could manage.

That’s been achieved. It says here. The second big but quiet breakthrough of 2011.

And the third…?

Well, this is where I might be just a tad contrary. The rocket programme. The lead players in this are of course Daniel Jubb, founder and boss of the Falcon Project rocket company, and Dr John Davis, who has been working on the very major task of mating up the Cosworth F1 racing engine to drive the BLOODHOUND HTP oxidant pump for the rocket. Not – not – an easy matter. (See Life in a Test Cell).

BLOODHOUND has been waiting for this development so as to enable the first full-system Cosworth-powered 18in hybrid rocket firing. Cosworth, mindful that all the technology emanates from Britain, wish said firing to take place in Britain rather than in Falcon’s existing test facility in Mohave in the USA. But Britain is a small and crowded country, and quite apart from the possibility of pushing the whole island three feet to the left, firing up the Falcon rocket in hybrid mode – even in fairly low-powered hybrid mode – is going to make a very, very great deal of noise indeed, which factor alone severely limits the number of potential sites suitable for such a raucous celebration. Two possible test ranges dropped out of the running in 2011…

Not actually the end of the world. There is a third very strong possibility – a British location which, oddly enough, I used to know like the back of my hand. Watch this space.

So – good bits and some not-so-goods bits in the rocket programme. Both Jubb and Davis regard 2011 as a bit of a dog year for differing reasons.

 

I beg to disagree

Well… I beg to disagree.

I think 2011 pulled the rocket programme hugely forwards. Whatever the programme snags – and there are snags – the vital rocket pump is at last up and running. All involved are not the happiest of bears yet – but the system is up and running.

We shall see. Next step is that full hybrid trial…

Turning elsewhere, the 1K Club is closing in on 5,000 members, and has raised more than £200,000 by the end of 2011. Names on the fin sales are approaching 10,000 and £100,000 income to the Project. Plus merchandise sales of something over another £100,000. Ian Glover, the allegedly retired White Hat Hacker who runs the 1K Club, has answered 25,000 emails from 1K Club members over the last year, raising him to deity status in my mind because this is more than 70 a day while I frequently have difficulty answering seven a week.

I shall come back to that in future.

I shall also come back to the Education side of the Project in the future. I have this vision of a pointy-nosed projectile pulling behind it a five-mile long train of coaches labelled Education. No – better make that ten miles long, bearing in mind that nearly 5,000 schools and getting on for two million kids are involved. Or even 6,000 miles long, since the BLOODHOUND education message is now rolling out big-time in South Africa.

I confess to understanding the workings of the education side the least of all – having not suffered education very much myself in my younger years – but have made a New Year Resolution to get my head round it. (Part of said resolution being to attempt to understand the acronyms used in the education world. Organisations such as BEEA, MOSI, DCFS, PTC, DATA, NPE, EPSRC, HEA, DTA, SSAT, TDA, CREST, BSA, RAE, SMS, NEBPN, SEAs, EDT, IET are all I’m sure very worthy, but could equally well be a side-order to go with a Big Mac for all I know).

So what of the 2012 resolutions? Well…

My resolution list:

My name is BLOODHOUND. I’m five years old but not really born yet. My Daddy is Richard Noble and my Godfathers and Uncles are Andy Green, Ron Ayers, Mark Chapman, Brian Coombs, Dan Jubb, Conor La Grue, and a whole lot of others. In fact I seem to have an amazing number of Godfathers, and also of Aunties and Godmothers. All of whom seem to expect me to go very fast indeed when I grow up.

Well, my first resolution is a fin. Uncle Andy tells me this is a fairly straightforward design-and-manufacture package for a Product Sponsor – but I sort of worry about it.  I’d really, really like a fin. And also winglets and rear wheel fairings, although they’re not quite so urgent.

The second resolution is about wheels. I don’t want to seem picky, but I would also sort of appreciate some wheels. I know all the big work, the huge design work, has been done, but it would be nice to actually see the wheels in production. I admit I may be a bit sensitive about this, but any car feels a bit uncomfortable without wheels. It’s sort of traditional for a car to have wheels…

Oh, and also brakes. I’m very resolved about brakes. So far the brake research has mainly proved what doesn’t work – and yes, that is an essential part of the process. But my third resolution is to ask Uncle Brian Coombs if he can possibly come up with a couple of brake units which will (a) absorb seven tonnes of energy at 200 mph, and (b) not fly apart at 10,000 rpm, which is the speed my wheels will be going round at 1,000 mph. When I get the wheels, that is.

And then there’s the monocoque where Uncle Andy will sit, and also the nose section. I’d really feel naked without the nose section. Uncle Pete Watt at Umeco tells me it’s all do-able, but the timescale is a bit challenging. Uncle Dan Johns says the Team must hit milestone development points. I said I don’t want to hit any stones, let alone milestones, but he said that wasn’t what he meant, that anyway the Hakskeen Pan is nearing full clearance, and that his milestones were achievable. Almost certainly.

Daddy Noble said that EVERYTHING is a bit challenging, and it’s going to be Hell’s Tough.

So my last resolution is to slip a packet of Hell’s Tough pills to Daddy next time he’s down here in the Doghouse.

He may need them.