Something old, something new.
There is something else that the Mirage 2000 shares with the older Mirages -an outdated engine.
Jet engines produce thrust by compressing air, mixing fuel with the air and igniting the mixture. The resulting high pressure, high temperature gas is expelled rearward. The air is compressed by forcing it through progressively smaller stages. Americans refer to the low pressure stage as the fan stage. The first stages of the fan are fairly large, the individual blades often being 40 cm or longer. The last stages of the high pressure compressor have blades that often are barely larger than a credit card. The large fan-stage blades are quite heavy compared with the high pressure-stage blades and as such cannot be driven at high rotational speed because the resulting centrifigul force would tear the blades off the disc that carries them. The small high pressure blades, on the other hand, can be rotated at much higher speed. As such almost all turbine engines use two or more shafts.

 

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