Quote:
Originally Posted by Old Mechanic
Fast forward to 1999. I'm playing an online game called Red Baron 3D. A bunch of gamers meet at Old Rheinbeck Aerodrome in New York. Looking at a rotary aircraft engine from WW1 a spark of inspiration comes to me. Using the rotary engine as a power source, knowing the crankshaft is fixed, if you could adjust the displacement by changing the position of the connecting rod journal, while the engine is running, you could make the stroke nothing and the engine would become a fairly large flywheel, capable of storing energy and reapplying it for future acceleration events.
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Or you let the crankshaft float around a secondary axis like a variable hydraulic pump
(better non-hydraulic picture)
And let the expansion stroke be a multiple of the intake and compression to reduce pumping loses (Gnome style). This is much simpler and less friction than the honda etc designs.