As you might have guessed, a standard front engine avoids the afterburner setting cars on fire when the Frictionator hits the streets. [Frictionator via Jalopnik]

Our eyes sufficiently rolled, we can continue. The video is a demo of SoundRacer, which promises to sync up with your car’s actual RPMs and engine sounds and mask them — via your speakers — with the engine sounds of real V8 and V10-powered vehicles.

Sure, it’s the tinfoil-wrapped cucumber in the jeans of the auto-tuning community, but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t slightly impressed with the SoundRacer demo. It almost had a video game quality to it, and tricked me a bit into thinking the car was going a bit faster than it actually was.

It could very well be doctored or enhanced, sure, but the buy-in is $US40. I may bite. [SoundRacer via OhGizmo]

A world with ejection seat chairs, airplane piston engine tables and a mirror bed made of wings, with a big-boobed blonde always by the side, preferably in a stewardess costume and semi-transparent yellow lace lingerie. [Motoart via BornRich]

These beautifully stunning videos show the formidable power of the Ad Astra’s VASIMR VX-200, the most powerful space engine in existence. Running at 1,000,000 degrees Celsius, it looks like Satan opened the peephole of the doors of hell.

The plama engine was tested on September 30, breaking the 200kW maximum power milestone. According to the company, the design has exceeded the predicted performance by 25%. The engine has two electromagnetic stages: The first one runs at 32kW and generate plasma from Argon gas, while the second one boosts the output an additional 168kW.

The plasma engine cuts the need for massive amounts of fuel, taking down the current 7.5 tons of propellant per year used in the shuttle and other spaceships down to 0.3 tons. It will also be extremely fast, cutting down the travel to Mars from six months to just 39 days.

It will be tested in late 2013 at the International Space Station. Hopefully those guys will pull the handbrake before they find themselves halfway to Saturn. [Universe Today]

Considering the first-gen Prius was launched in 1997 in Japan, that’s one hell of a long journey for hybrid engines to make it into a mainstream car. It does make you think about the long-term possibilities for alternative car fuels, doesn’t it?

Remember the Boeing 787 Dreamliner? You know, the eternally-delayed wonderplane? Well, rejoice because it has started the engines in a huge puff of smoke. All on its own, which is a first according to Boing:

The occasion marks the first all-electric start of a commercial jetliner engine on a twin-aisle commercial jetliner; the engines had been started electronically in test facilities earlier.

OK, Boeing, if you say so, I believe you. They used the Auxiliary Power System to power the start of its two Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engines. Now, what I really want to know is when are they testing the orgy room. [Flight Global]

The application, scooped up by our buddy Todd at TechFlash, describes a machine that would have pistons, and would even burn some kind of fuel (a “reactant” ignited by sparkplug), but would be aided by electromagnets to speed up the recovery process, and do away with the need for alternating pistons. Basically, the piston would fire, then be rapidly slammed back into closed position by the magnetic force. Theoretically, the piston could operate entirely without fuel, using magnetism on both ends to rapidly repel and attract.

Gates & Co. even introduced a sketch of a piston engine with spark plugs on both sides, for rapidly firing the thing back and forth, or alternately using magnetism to slide the piston back and forth. (This is presumably how some motors work already—engineers?)

The neatest configuration, to me, is the one with two pistons, end to end, with a single combustion chamber and sparkplug. The fuel burns shoving both outward, and the electromagnetic mechanism slams them back together.

It’s actually a great patent to read, especially if you’re mechanically minded. I am sure there’s plenty I missed here, so have a look. [TechFlash]

The plane will be designed to carry 12 tons of payload into orbit and return safely, without having wasted $US100 million worth of throwaway rocket. The company behind this hybrid shuttle is Reaction Engines, which just got a million euros in funding to prove that its “air breathing” Sabre engine can work.

According to the BBC, the key to this engine is a super-cooler, which takes gasses entering the intake at 1000 degrees celsius, and drops them to -130 degrees C in 1/100th of a second, thanks to “arrays of extremely fine piping.” God knows those rocketeers love their piping.

Though not much more is known about Skylon at this point, it’s safe to say we’ll hear more about it and other non-wasteful spaceships in the future. I just hope they keep that Hotblack-Desiato-meets-Naboo-cruiser look. [BBC News]

Update: Sacha, a reader expert in the matter, has wrote to me saying this is not a simulation of a bird striking into a turbo fan, but a simulation of a blade coming loose, which may happen as a result of fatigue or a crack.

…is not a bird test, it’s what’s called a “blade out” test. Explosive charges are placed on a blade to simulate a blade coming loose — this could happen as a result of fatigue, an unchecked, unseen crack in an engine blade. What you’re seeing is essentially “diamond cutting diamond” — and that’s why they do the test. Turbo fan blades are extremely strong, and at that speed, they’ll chain reaction and destroy each other. You can’t really prevent that. But what we don’t want is a flying fan blade to hit the fuselage, enter the wing (where fuel is kept), or otherwise leave the engine cowling in any way. That’s what this test is for — you want to contain the explosion.

I can hear your confusion: “B-b-b-but, the engine didn’t blow up!” — that’s because it’s not supposed to. We do testing for bird strikes, the engines are built to handle it. They’re even designed to continue running, up until a certain size and number of bird ingestions, and beyond that, shut down safely. But they’re *never*, ever fragile or brittle enough to be seriously damaged by a hollow-boned soft-bodied bird.

Probably what happened in the US Airways Airbus’ engines before its Hudsonlanding.

Actually, here a bird hits the engine in slow motion:

Allegedly, a lot of birds is what caused the US Airways flight to waterland on the Hudson.

The CECE–developed by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne and NASA–is fuelled by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. All the engine components are super-cooled, so when vapour comes out of the burning of the oxygen and the hydrogen and touches the rim of the cryogenic engine, it transforms into ice instantly.

The engine architecture allows it to smoothly throttle from top power levels–it was tested up to 108 percent–down to very-low power: 8 percent, which apparently is a new record in these kind of engines. Its performance allows it to smoothly land on the Moon while carrying a bigger load. [Pratt & Whitney via Universe Today]