Got the idea hearing a jet fly overhead at the same time as a Harley drove by under full throttle. The sound was nothing short of amazing. Only thing missing was the impressive chugga-chugga sound of an old steam engine running balls out.
The turbojet would blow through the boiler providing steam for your steam engine and the whole thing would be augmented by an internal combustion engine. Not sure how many GPM (gallons per mile) this would get, but I'm assuming it would be a lot.
Or maybe not. Either way that wouldn't be the point. The sound this baby would make would be amazing.-- doctorremulac3, Jul 26 2015 Noise generator https://web.archive...m2002/acoustic.html [goldbb, Jul 27 2015] Argus pulse-jet ...-- 8th of 7, Jul 26 2015 Yes!
Now THAT would be loud! Of course you're talking in addition to, not in place of the turbojet.
The think would be to have these all contained in one chassis. I'm picturing a radial piston on the outside perimeter, a turbofan inside that and the pulse jet in the middle. Then I guess you could have the steam pistons on the outside of the radial engine.
Call it the Omni-engine.-- doctorremulac3, Jul 26 2015 Roar of a radial.-- FlyingToaster, Jul 26 2015 //They’re orders of magnitude different in sound volume for the same distance.//
You raise a good point. They'd have to be sound balanced by matching their size appropriately.
I would assume an 6 foot tall 5,000 hp radial engine would be about the same volume as two foot long pulse jet. The steam engine would have to be massive to get over the roar of this and the turbine engine.
That of course would relegate the noisy little pulse jet to noisemaker status since it would add very little thrust to the contraption. In other words, their noise to thrust ratios would be wildly off. But we're not concerned with a logical design here.
Of course nobody's mentioned the obvious missing piece here, the mighty Goddard engine. (as it should be called) Kerosene and liquid oxygen slammed together in a combustion chamber is going to be louder than all these things combined unless you make it pretty darn small.
This would end up being a very loud, powerful, fast moving sculpture more than an actual mode of transportation.-- doctorremulac3, Jul 26 2015 If you make your pulse jet too short, would it not produce an unpleasantly high pitched noise?
Also, Goddard's engine used gasoline, not kerosene.
Perhaps what you want to do is take an regular internal combustion engine, add a turbocharger to it, then connect the wastegate to a pneumatic noise generator.-- goldbb, Jul 27 2015 No, that would be just silly.-- doctorremulac3, Jul 28 2015 random, halfbakery