  We provide a characterization of the radii minimal projections of polytopes
onto $j$-dimensional subspaces in Euclidean space $\E^n$. Applied on simplices
this characterization allows to reduce the computation of an outer radius to a
computation in the circumscribing case or to the computation of an outer radius
of a lower-dimensional simplex. In the second part of the paper, we use this
characterization to determine the sequence of outer $(n-1)$-radii of regular
simplices (which are the radii of smallest enclosing cylinders). This settles a
question which arose from the incidence that a paper by Wei{\ss}bach (1983) on
this determination was erroneous. In the proof, we first reduce the problem to
a constrained optimization problem of symmetric polynomials and then to an
optimization problem in a fixed number of variables with additional integer
constraints.
