Bored Gremlins Make The Sound Barrier Impenetrable

[SebastianP]

In the late 1940's, a pair of bored, old and very powerful invisible gremlins come to Earth looking for some fun. They decide to play a trick on mankind, forcing them to work around a couple of problems that no one has forseeeno...

One of the gremlins decides to tinker with any and all jet engines, making them impossible to operate faster than the speed of sound. It doesn't matter what the engineers and physcists come up with, transonic speeds will shake a jet engine apart, and if the pilot's unlucky, the aircraft too. For all intents and purposes, the sound barrier is a brick wall...

The other gremlin likes messing with the intelligentia, and decides that rocket scientists need someone to poke a hole in their egos. His idea is to blow out rocket engines as they leave the atmosphere, with the apparent cause being lack of oxygen. Any liquid-fuled rockets carrying their own air or oxygen inevitably leak, as liquid O2 turns out to be very corrosive.

Aside from the effects of their actions, the gremlins are undetectable, and even if they were detected, they're too powerful to be even scratched by anything humanity can throw at them. Now, how does aviation develop after WWII with these restrictions?

SP

[Hobbes]

Well, you could join the Piston Perfection GB and find out...