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Reaction Engines Skylon

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This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because it has recently gone through a major revamp and the editors on this article are interested in getting some feedback.

Thanks,   Novus  Orator  12:19, 25 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Finetooth comments: This is quite interesting, and I hope the project succeeds. Most of my comments below have to do with prose or Manual of Style issues, although a few deal with other issues.

Infobox

  • Spell out as well as abbreviate HOTOL?

Lead

  • "In aerospace, Skylon is a design by the British company, Reaction Engines Limited, for an unpiloted, airbreathing single-stage to orbit, combined cycle jet engine based spaceplane." - Too many adjectives in front of "spaceplane". Suggestion: "Skylon is a design by the British company, Reaction Engines Limited, for an unpiloted spaceplane. It uses a combined-cycle, air-breathing jet engine to reach orbit in a single stage."
  • "are hoped to be below the current costs of launch" - Would it be helpful to include some numbers here? How much are those costs?
  • "including the costs of R&D" - Spell out R&D on first use; i.e., "including the costs of research and development (R&D)?
  • Spell out as well as abbreviate LOX on first use?
  • "Some research and development work is on the engines is proceeding under a small ESA grant." - Doesn't make sense as

written.

  • Spell out as well as abbreviate ESA?
  • "RES has submitted a proposal to the British Government" - What does RES refer to? If you mean REL (for Reaction Engines Limited), the abbreviation should be given in parentheses as "Reaction Engines Limited (REL)" in the first sentence of the lead so that the abbreviation later makes sense by itself.

Structure of the fuselage

  • WP:MOSBOLD generally advises against using bolding in the main text. For emphasis, italics is generally preferred. This advice against bolding would apply to C2 in this section and also to Skylon in the caption in the next section, to Skylon 2 in "Payload bay". For those, I'd recommend plain text.
  • "The propellant is intended to be kept at low pressure to minimise weight... " - This seems wrong to me. The total weight of the propellant needed would be a constant, wouldn't it? It could be fitted into a large container at low pressure or a small container at high pressure, but its mass (weight) would be the same in either case.

SABRE engines

  • "One of the significant features of the Skylon design is the engine, called SABRE." - Spell out and abbreviate as Synergistic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE) on first use in the text?
  • "26 km altitude" - Convert to imperial also; i.e., 26 kilometres (16 mi)?
  • "The air is then burnt much like in a conventional jet." - Maybe "used for combustion" would be more clear than "burnt"? Readers are probably used to thinking of the fuel as "burnt" rather than the oxidant.
  • "Because the engine uses the atmosphere as reaction mass at low altitude, it would have a high specific impulse (around 2800 seconds), and burns about one fifth of the propellant that would have been required by a conventional rocket." - Would it be better to stick to present tense throughout when discussing the Skylon? This particular sentence mixes present tense ("uses") with conditional verb forms ("would have"), instead of matching "has" to "uses".

Payload bay

  • "The payload bay of the Skylon C2 design is a cylinder 12.3 metres long and 4.6 metres in diameter" - Imperial conversions? Ditto for other measures in this section.

Current project status

  • "under an ESA grant of one million Euro" - Write as €1 million with a link?
  • Do you mean REL instead of RES?

Research and development programme

  • "They required heat exchangers far more advanced than what was available at the start of the project; having proved their design to be technologically feasible,[9] the greatest engineering challenge has been solved." - Sourcing claims like this to the manufacturer is a questionable practice since the claims are self-serving. Can you find a source with no apparent conflict of interest? WP:COI has details.
  • "The former UK Minister for Science and Innovation in 2009, Lord Drayson, commented on Skylon in a speech: "This is an example of a British company developing world-beating technology with exciting consequences for the future of space." - WP:MOSQUOTE suggests using the blockquote for quotations of four lines or more. This one is only one line. To make the appearance less choppy, I'd suggest turning the quotation into a regular in-text quote and merging the short paragraph and quote with the larger paragraph above it.

Specifications

  • Nothing should be double-bolded. Perhaps italics would be better if you want to include links (which add bolding automatically). For example, Wingspan would become Wingspan. If you use italics for Wingspan and some of the others, you should use italics for all.

References

  • The date formatting in the citations should be consistent.

Other

  • The dab checker in the toolbox at the top of this review page finds two links that go to disambiguation pages rather than their intended targets.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 19:14, 4 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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