Land Speed Record Broken: 0-6,400 in Six Seconds

linuxwrangler writes "Researchers at Holloman AFB have broken their own two decades old land speed record for rail vehicles. The rocket powered sled covered the 3 mile track in roughly 6 seconds. Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at mach 8.6 or about 6,400 mph - it covered the last 1.8 miles in just 1.3 seconds. The previous record of 6,122 mph was set on Oct. 5, 1982. Other accounts are at the Alamogordo Daily News, the Denver Post, and CNN."

Comments

Re:meep-meep

[ccbaxter]

I see the first post speed record hasn't been broken...

In Britain ..

[ethnocidal]

We had something like this running during the mid 1990s. The speeds were incredible; it used the three decade old mothballed British launch vehicle rocket motors, which were abandoned after our nuclear deterrent moved onto submarine launched ballistics.

The record would have been held by the land on which the rain never stops, but for the fact there were some irritating leaves on the line during summer and autumn months. Winter was ruled out by that pesky light dusting of snow, and after unfortunate incidents with hypersonic sparrows in spring, the whole project was abandoned in favour of the 'wobbly train' approach to high speed cornering.

Re:In Britain ..

[Munra]

Apparently First Great Western trains (that's a UK train company, for those not in the know) have begun trialling this technology for their mainline service between Bristol and London.

Theoretically the time for this journey could be cut to just over a minute, but taking into account the breaking zone needed, and the areas of 'slow track' where the train runs at 30Mph maximum, the estimated time for this journey would be somewhere in the region of 2 hours; a marked 5 minute saving in time.

Re:In Britain ..

[IamNotWitchboy]

I can't even imagine the kind of aceleration this thing experiences. Are there even human beings "driving" it? By the hints of the article, I doubt it. I think it's like shooting a "wheeled" rocket. It must be an amazing display.

Re:In Britain ..

[sheean.nl]

that might be true, but now the train company would have all the right to make their trains look like rockets :)

Re:In Britain ..

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Unfortunately there was a 3 hour delay caused by the "wrong type of rockets".

Rich.

Re:In Britain ..

[fyonn]

Are there even human beings "driving" it?

I think it's safe to say "no"

if there were humans driving it at the start then there wouldn't have been at the end. apart from the fact that the sled stopped yb hitting an immobile object, the humans would have been but a red paint job at the back of the cabin by then anyways

dave

Re:In Britain ..

[Anonymous Coward]

did someone say "rocket motors",..6,400 mph... whats escape velocity again? maybe they should point it up and go for the x-prize.

Re:In Britain ..

[The Dobber]

I remeber hearing a story about a guy who got hold of some JATO rockets (the kind they use for getting big jets to takeoff faster) and strapped them to the side of his car. He took it out into..........

Oh, err, nevermind

Re:In Britain ..

[Anonymous Coward]

the british missile test track is in Wales I think.
I've seen footage of the carriage being accelerated at 50g, and then retro-rocket decelerated at 25g with backwards facing rockets.

The best classic was when a bird decided to land on the track just before they hit the "go" button. It got smeared around the front of this thing going mach [high number] before being toasted to a crisp by the retro rockets. poor little birdy :-)

Re:In Britain ..

[GigsVT]

Then really, how is this different from just firing a bullet and saying that it is just as fast? I know some standard rifles shoot around mach2-3, so it wouldn't be too hard to make one souped up for extra speed.

Re:In Britain ..

[BriSTO(V)L]

Are there even human beings "driving" it? No: My bet is on 6th generation space worms driving it...

Re:In Britain ..

[MindStalker]

11100 m/s or 40200 km/h or 25000 mi/h

Re:In Britain ..

[delphi125]

Ok, I'll bite....

First of all, a (rifle) bullet would not be able to break the land speed record - it would be travelling through the air.

Secondly, a (long-range) rifle may have a high exit velocity (muzzle? I am not an expert), but this will only decrease after being shot - the bullet will be slowed down by air resistance.

Finally, I know that laser pointers shout around 1c (speed of light), so it wouldn't be too hard to... oh wait, perhaps it IS hard? Perhaps that is why this is a record 20 years old being rebroken?

Please feel free to think before you next post.

Re:In Britain ..

[arivanov]

That is before correcting for the wrong kind of meters used by the British Rail companies. Ask anyone british they will explain you the idea of wrong leaves, wrong snow and wrong jet engines when it comes to rail service. Very popular concept around here;-)

Re:In Britain ..

[gilesjuk]

Then it got stuck behind a freight train :)

Re:In Britain ..

[GroovBird]

That story received a Darwin Award in 1995.

Dave

Re:In Britain ..

[Anonymous Coward]

(Score:5, Interesting)?

Somehow I think the moderators missed the UK humour.

It *should* be (Score:5, Funny)

Re:In Britain ..

[Black Copter Control]

1995 my ass... I first saw that story in the 1980s... It's an ancient one.

Then, of course, there's the Toronto lawyer who liked to make new articling students more comfortable about the safety of high-rise floor-to-ceiling windows by bouncing himself off the window .... until the day a window finally came loose.

He was awarded a second honorary Darwin award.... One for his stupidity and one for taking a lawyer out of the gene pool.

(Unix types were far more ornery about lawyers back then, but that's a different story).

Re:In Britain ..

[morcheeba]

In america, they do it right. Last year, I checked out the fastest train in the US, (the acela). But, due to all same kind of factors (like even though it went from washington to boston, it could only go fast in a certain section of NJ), it was generally a wash. In fact, due to scheduling, it was actually 5 minutes slower from washington to NYC! It is a comfy train, though: nice seats, tables, and quiet. The loudest noise was the rattling of tray tables against seat backs. For $10k, I'll go through their trains and put in foam tape on all of these and cut the noise of their trains in half!

Re:In Britain ..

[mooman]

Are there even human beings "driving" it?

I think it's safe to say "no"

if there were humans driving it at the start then there wouldn't have been at the end. apart from the fact that the sled stopped yb hitting an immobile object, the humans would have been but a red paint job at the back of the cabin by then anyways


Not this time, anyway. Although over at the International Space Hall of Fame, only about 15 miles from where the above test occured, is the rocket sled ("Sonic Wind 1") that John Stapp rode in 1954 at the same testing grounds when he earned the title "Fastest Man Alive". Granted that was only 632 mph, but he did sustain a deceleration of around 40 Gs that reportly forced his eyes partially out of their sockets.

The forces on this particular test would have easily killed a human, so it's safe to assume that this one was riderless. ;)

[I'm a former Space Hall tour guide, just sharing some trivia..]

Re:In Britain ..

[duckyd]

1) moderators, get a clue, this is vaguely amusing

2) it wouldn't matter, the coffee wouldn't spill unless the train was accelerating or decelerating

Re:In Britain ..

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

Damn, how come I never had mod points when I really need them! +1 FUNNY!

Re:In Britain ..

[Slime-dogg]

the humans would have been but a red paint job at the back of the cabin by then anyways

No. It's the Front of the cabin. I doubt the cabin would face the opposite direction of travel.

I don't know how much energy is required for vaporization, but maybe the kinetic energy conversion would be enough? If that were the case, the cabin would be crumpled, but cleaen.

Re:In Britain ..

[uigrad_2000]

Some quick calculations here (all calculations assume the acceleration was constant).

6400 mph = 33,792,000 ft/hr = 9386.66 ft/sec.

9386.66 ft/sec divided by 6 seconds gives 1564.44 ft/sec/sec.

1G = 32 ft/sec/sec.

The acceleration felt by any passenger would have been 49G. No human could come close to surviving this.

If the "UK has been experimenting with trains using this technology", then I think such trains are unsafe. Maybe they are working on trains based upon rocket technology, or even working on trains based upon ideas from a similair experiment, but saying that they are working on "trains using this technology" makes no sense at all.

Re:In Britain ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Wired had a story on this a few years ago (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/rocketcar .html ). Apparently the truth (if it is the truth) is a litle different...

Re:In Britain ..

[stinky wizzleteats]

I know some standard rifles shoot around mach2-3, so it wouldn't be too hard to make one souped up for extra speed.

Yeah, because a 300% performance improvement in a device which nearly explodes every time it is used poses no engineering challenge whatsoever.

Tell you what. If you want to fire triple loaded cartidges (you'd need more to go three times as fast, but we'll give you that as a safety margin) through a chronometer to see how easily this could be accomplished, I'll personally load up the shells for you. Just be sure and film the attempt.

Re:In Britain ..

[Anonymous Coward]

feel free to spell check before you post.

Re:In Britain ..

[mpe]

Apparently First Great Western trains (that's a UK train company, for those not in the know) have begun trialling this technology for their mainline service between Bristol and London.

The real irony is that some of the current trains First Great Western run actually take longer than when the service was run by GWR using steam powered trains.

Re:In Britain ..

[mpe]

In america, they do it right. Last year, I checked out the fastest train in the US, (the acela) [acela.com]. But, due to all same kind of factors (like even though it went from washington to boston, it could only go fast in a certain section of NJ), it was generally a wash.

Most likely track and/or signaling. At above a certain speed signalling by the driver looking out of a window at a trackside light just dosn't work.
IIRC track owners in the US tend to give priority to freight over passenger trains.

Re:In Britain ..

[GigsVT]

That's not what I meant. I meant out of something like a rifle. I'm just not very impressed that they just shot this sled into a wall, it seems kinda pointless.

Speaking of which:
I read something years ago about some scientists who were launching artillery shells out of a device, the rounds were slightly smaller than the barrel and had a sort of sabot. The barrel was filled with hydrogen and oxygen IIRC. Their trick was to fire the round, and then have the explosive mix in the barrel explode exactly behind the round, causing the round to "surf" on the shock wave of the exploding gasses.

Don't remember any specific numbers on muzzle velocities, but apparently it was pretty powerful.

Re:In Britain ..

[xorbe]

[ No. It's the Front of the cabin. I doubt the cabin would face the opposite direction of travel. ]

No, the back of the cabin. After acceleration, duh.

Re:In Britain ..

[bugnuts]

No... he meant the rear of the cabin. They would've been a red paint job in the back due to the extreme acceleration. And if they survived that, THEN they'd be a grease spot in the front due to the instant deceleration at the end of the track.

Re:In Britain ..

[g00set]

Well god dam...We have caught the Incredible Mr. Limpet.

As you implied you are not an expert. The bullet will not be slowed down signifigantl by air resistance. The bullet will stop once it meets the earth surface due to gravity attracting the two toghther. The force of 32 ft/sec^2 (g) is much greater than that of friction (f) of the fluid in which it is passing.

Please feel free to think before you hang your weak physics knowledge and snotty attitude out in front of a few million people.

Re:In Britain ..

[morcheeba]

IIRC track owners in the US tend to give priority to freight over passenger trains.

I forgot to tell the rest of the story. I went up to NY on the acela, but went back on the regular train ($50 cheaper or so). We didn't leave NYC until after our "arrival time" back home in DC. It turns out that some freight train with a too-tall car had run on or near our tracks and knocked the overhead electric wires down. How hard is it to put some equipment in to automatically detect this? It was my first train ride in the US, and all I could keep thinking was ... "if the federal government really wants amtrack to survive (and not keep bailing it out), and if amtrack wants to compete with airplanes, then they'd better have their own passenger tracks". I think you're exactly right - freight was the priority.

Re:In Britain ..

[stinky wizzleteats]

Yeah, it was. Multiple combustion guns were experimented with during WWII, as a way to get flak shells high enough to affect increasingly high-flying bombers. The results were generally disastrous. They found it basically impossible to predict how the multiple explosive shock waves would interact, and explosions were common. (Pardon the pun)

I don't doubt that this could be done successfully with modern equipment, but the operative factor isn't the action of the shockwave against the projectile, but the application of constant gas pressure while it's travelling down the barrel. Under normal firing conditions, gas pressure reduces as the projectile moves down the barrel.

Re:In Britain ..

[Anonymous Coward]

[John Stapp].. did sustain a deceleration of around 40 Gs that reportly forced his eyes partially out of their sockets.

By my calculations, this thing accelerated at 26 Gs.

Re:In Britain ..

[Inspector Lopez]

Hmmm. It's not obvious to me that the force of gravity will exceed the aero decelleration force on a bullet.

consider a bullet with a front cross section of 1cm by 1cm (10^-4 m^2), travelling at 800 m/s, with a total mass of 5 grams. The gravitational force will be about 9.8*0.005 = 50 mN (milli Newtons).

In one second the bullet will displace a column of air that is 800 m by 10^(-4) m = about 0.1 m^3 or
about 100 liters, which is about 4 moles, or about 120 grams. Because the bullet is supersonic it
cannot slip perfectly smoothly through the air.

so M(bullet) dv(bullet) = M(air) dv(air)
dv(bullet) = 0.05 * 350m/s
= about 20 m/s

I've assumed that the displaced air can be accelerated up to about the speed of sound 350 m/s...

At any rate, if the bullet is slowed by 20 m/s by air friction, that exceeds the 5 m/s change in velocity due to gravity by a factor of four.

So ... anyway. Like I said. It's not obvious to me that the acceleration due to gravity exceeds the acceleration due to air friction.

-----

Try this: drop a bullet out of a car at highway speed (30 m/s). When the bullet hits the ground, how far back has it drifted do to wind pressure? Quite a bit, actually, and that's a the low speed of 30 m/s, not 800 m/s for a high velocity rifle bullet; recall that (roughly speaking) air resistance scales as the cube of the velocity.

But I don't really know anything about guns and bullets.

Re:In Britain ..

[delphi125]

All I said in my 'secondly' point was that the velocity could only decrease, i.e. not increase.

As to bullet speed and air resistance, the force of gravity is pretty negligable (and also, a constant). On the other hand drag increases proportionally to the velocity squared. Now admittedly a bullet has efficient balistic characteristics, and it has been a long time since I have done any serious physics or applied mathematics, but I do have a vague idea what I am talking about.

Re:In Britain ..

[Stonent1]

I'll personally load up the shells for you. Just be sure and film the attempt.

Next on Fox's "Darwin Awards: Live!"

Re:In Britain ..

[njan]

Even the fastest (armour piercing) ammunition has a comparatively low muzzle velocity (something like 2000 fps), although you're right; under most circumstances, bullet velocity decreases relatively quickly on account of air resistance and no form of propulsion besides the initial explosion in the breech of the rifle.

If you're interested, zvis.com, the personal homepage of a software programmer in the US, has some excellent java ballistics tools, which allow you to calculate the velocity of the projectile from a firearm given different bullet mass &c. Obviously the smaller the bullet the higher the velocity, but even at muzzle velocity, an armour piercing sabot round travelling at 2000fps (which is exceptionally high, for a smallarm) only makes 3000kph, as far as I can calculate off the top of my head, which is slower than this record attempt (I say, opening another copy of the article to check that I'm not sticking my foot in a large hole.)

Re:In Britain ..

[GigsVT]

. Now admittedly a bullet has efficient balistic characteristics

Sometimes. It depends on the bullet. Obviously something like a wadcutter or a shotgun slug has terrible aerodynamics, those things often tumble through the air. Of course they also have muzzle velocities below 1000fps normally.

Hollowpoints also trade a little resistance for greater expansion on impact.

fun

[UniverseIsADoughnut]

"Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at mach 8.6 or about 6,400 mph - it covered the last 1.8 miles in just 1.3 seconds."

Weeeeeeee!!!!

Re:fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Have my arithmetic skills failed so badly in 20 years, or am I missing something?

1 mile per second = 3,600MPH
thus, at 3600MPH, you traverse 3 miles in 3 seconds.
So, if it takes 6 seconds to go 3 miles, the sled went an average of 1,800MPH.

Even when it went 1.8 miles in 1.3 seconds, that's
1.8/1.3*3600 = 4984.6MPH.

So was the 6,400 MPH only for a split second towards the end of the run?

Re:fun

[AyeRoxor!]

So, if it takes 6 seconds to go 3 miles, the sled went an average of 1,800MPH. Even when it went 1.8 miles in 1.3 seconds, that's
1.8/1.3*3600 = 4984.6MPH. So was the 6,400 MPH only for a split second towards the end of the run?

In any race/speed trial, the average speed will be significantly lower than the final speed.
Extreme example. First speed:0, speed at target:1000. Average speed: 500.

Yes, it made a speed jump at the end. This was detailed in the article.

You know it's coming....

RTFA :-P

YOU FAIL IT !

[mirko]

perhaps you should have used the above mentioned land rocket to get to your computer ?
BTW, how hot was the rocket, after it broke the record ?
And did they have to liquid-nitrogenize it before the "race" ?

Re:meep-meep

[heymjo]

i cannot possibly see how this guy could've typed in a 50 line reply in under 10 seconds.. Furthermore, he could've selected a better reply from his cut_and_paste_replies library for this topic

Hmm...

[Asterax]

...And yet I'm still late to class almost every day...

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is relevant how? Shut up.

Re:Well Rounded Education

[Anonymous Coward]

[But knowitall engineers use
trensastors with inferious sound quality just to save a few bucks]

Size, reliability, long life, no need to heat, reduced power use, sound quality virtually identical, unbreakable. I could go on, but obviously it would be irrelevant to a Humanities student :) :) :)

Re:Well Rounded Education

[RyatNrrd]

This could be side-splittingly funny, if only I could be sure that it was meant as a joke...

Don't talk to me about the trains

[JohnCC]

You wait all morning for a train, then two come along at once! Pah! Thats my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Re:Don't talk to me about the trains

[Anonymous Coward]

In this case: you wait all day for a train, and two come along at 8.6 times the speed of sound.

The problem is catching them.

Metric Conversion

[asciimonster]

For the non-US people in the world:

"Researchers at Holloman AFB have broken their own two decades old land speed record for rail vehicles. The rocket powered sled covered the 4.8 km track in roughly 6 seconds. Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at mach 8.6 or about 10300 km/h - it covered the last 2.9 km in just 1.3 seconds. The previous record of 9851 km/h was set on Oct. 5, 1982. Other accounts are at the Alamogordo Daily News, the Denver Post, and CNN."

Maybe we should make a rule that say you always have to supply metric and imperial units... It would make my job so much easier...

Re:Metric Conversion

[black mariah]

Yes, because people can't do simple conversions in their head. One kilometer is approximately 1.6 miles. Round off to 1.5 times and you have a good generalization.

Re:Metric Conversion

[Alan Partridge]

1Km is approximately 1.6 Miles? In what universe would THAT be?

Re:Metric Conversion

[betat]

"Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at mach 8.6 or about 10300 km/h"

bah..you and your metric and imperial units.

What we really want to know is...how fast is that in Libraries of Congress(LOC)/second.

Re:Metric Conversion

[PARENA]

Except that... 1 mile is approximately 1.6 kilometers

Re:Metric Conversion

[Snotboble_]

Who in the World would use METRICS? Such a complicated system where you have to *add* and *remove* 0's to convert?

No, it's _way_ easier to remember that there's 5280 feet on the mile and 202 US gallons on the cubic yard. Who can remember that there's 1000 meters on the kilometer? Or 1000 liters on the cubic meter? How non-standard is that?

Besides, who else than the rest of the World uses metric anyway?

Re:Metric Conversion

[kahei]

Actually, some of us use real units not because we are from the US, but because they are more comfortable and intuitive, having evolved through use rather than being arbitrarily dictated by pompous French people.

Re:Metric Conversion

[black mariah]

Yes, sorry. Wrote it down wrong. 1 mile is approximately 1.6 kilometers. It's too damned early for unit conversion.

Re:Metric Conversion

[your_mother_sews_soc]

I'm sure we could take care of this using XML (or maybe not - I am ingorant in the area of XML). But if the W3C had included some "weights and measures" tags in the HTML standard then we could leave it up to the browser and/or client OS to apply localization rules and perform the proper conversions.

Just a thought, but does anyone know of this was ever suggested?

Re:Metric Conversion

[cheesyfru]

My rocket sled gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!

Re:Metric Conversion

[4of12]

Damn straight.

That's why I always quote my gasoline mileage in inverse acres.

Re:Metric Conversion

[Ralph Wiggam]

Mr. Cheney told me that only terrorists use the metric system.

-W

Re:Metric Conversion

[b_pretender]

If you're going to make it INTERnational friendly, you have to go ALL THE WAY. Refer to european articles and get the time right.

Specifically, change the last sentence from:

The previous record of 9851 km/h was set on Oct. 5, 1982. Other accounts are at the Alamogordo Daily News, the Denver Post, and CNN.

to...

The previous record of 9851 km/h was set on 5 Oct 1982. Other accounts are at the London Daily News, the Paris Examinoir, and EuroDisney Reporter.

Re:Metric Conversion

[olman]

Hey, thanks. I was just wondering if it was fast or not.

Re:Metric Conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

What's interesting is that the research is being done by the military and they do metric.
So we get fed converted numbers, which then are converted back again and result in terrible accuracy.

Re:Metric Conversion

[Saltine]

Good start, but you haven't converted all the way, for those of us who don't want to think in crazy units based on mulitples of twelve, or non-absolute scales with arbitrary datum points:

"Researchers at Holloman AFB have broken their own 631 megaseconds old land speed record for rail vehicles. The rocket powered sled covered the 4.8 kilometer track in roughly 6 seconds. Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at Mach 8.6 or about 2.86 kilometers per second - it covered the last 2.9 kilometers in just 1.3 seconds. The previous record of 2.74 kilometers per second was set at 432 petaseconds. Other accounts are at the Alamogordo 86400-Secondly News, the Denver Post, and CNN."

(My apologies to those outside the US, for not using "kilometres" or "432 billiard seconds" and whatnot.)

--Saltine

Re:Metric Conversion

[pmz]

Q: How does a Unix guru have sex? A: unzip;strip;touch;finger;mount;fsck;more;yes;umoun t;sleep

A real UNIX guru would put that into a script run by a cron task that pages him (obviously a him writing scripts like this) upon successful execution.

Re:Metric Conversion

[egreB]

It's too damned early for unit conversion.

And still you think that the rest of us should do it in our heads? Quoting you:
Yes, because people can't do simple conversions in their head.

There are three (3) countries in the world that still uses the imperial system: Liberia, Burma and the US. Every other contry implements the metric system.. Look here if you're interested.

There's a certain "American Tunnel Vision Syndrome" around Slashdot, it seems..

Re:Metric Conversion

[Palshife]

...in roughly 6 seconds.

What the hell? No metric time?

Allow me to assist, assuming that the earth's rotation yields 10 kilodeconds (or "Kil's", as in "What Kil is it?") a day, where 1 decond = 0.1157407 seconds (407 repeating).

So, once again the article in full metric glory.

"Researchers at Holloman AFB have broken their own two decades old land speed record for rail vehicles. The rocket powered sled covered the 4.8 km track in roughly .694 deconds. Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at mach 8.6 or about 24720 km/kilodecond - it covered the last 2.9 km in just 0.150 deconds. The previous record of 23642.4 km/kilodecond was set on Oct. 5, 1982. Other accounts are at the Alamogordo Daily News, the Denver Post, and CNN."

Re:Metric Conversion

[FroMan]

Karma whoring for europeans is now a job?

Re:Metric Conversion

[EMDischarge]

This is one of the funniest comments I have read in a while.

MOD PARENT UP!

Re:Metric Conversion

[mav[LAG]]

Heh - those who use a Vegetable-oil powered vehicle which can run on sunflower oil do exactly that :)

Re:Metric Conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

Why in my day we just converted that to Rod-lenghts per fortnight.

Re:Metric Conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful?? BAH!!! I shake my fist at moderators!

Who in there right mind thinks that using imperial units is "comfortable and intuitive"???

Re:Metric Conversion

[joelhayhurst]

I think by your numbers that would be 6 / 0.1157407 = 51.84 deconds :)

Re:Metric Conversion

[JWW]

The metric equivilent to seconds it the centon.

Get it right!!! ;-)

Re:Metric Conversion

[Snar Bloot]

I was thinking about conducting experiments exactly like this in my back yard, but I could never decide what measurement system I should use. After all, that IS the most important part of it, isn't it?

Otherwise, I have no doubt I'd have a rocket sled that could go...well....fast.

Re:Metric Conversion

[mhesseltine]

Maybe we should make a rule that say you always have to supply metric and imperial units... It would make my job so much easier...

Yes, we could. But then, how would you karma whore?

Re:Metric Conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to convert the time to metric also.

Re:Metric Conversion

[Noren]

Close, but this clearly should be in scientific notation, for those of us who don't want to use and remember all those prefixes.

"Researchers at Holloman AFB have broken their own 6.49 x 10^8 seconds old land speed record for rail vehicles. The rocket powered sled covered the 4.8 x 10^3 meter track in roughly 6 seconds. Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at Mach 8.6 or about 2.86 x 10^3 meters per second - it covered the last 2.9 x 10^3 meters in just 1.3 seconds. The previous record of 2.74 x 10^3 meters per second was set at 1982-10-05 . Other accounts are at the Alamogordo 8.64 x 10^4 secondly News, the Denver Post, and CNN."

There, that's much better, right?

Re:Metric Conversion

[Tired_Blood]

Sounds good, but considering that the bulk of all browsers are not strictly compliant with HTML standards, I'd expect IE to round the conversion differently than NS, differently than Opera, diff...

Then there may be differences in approach, like with the year. Is it "2003" or "1900 + 103"? To be honest, I don't know how the approach would differ, but since some examples already exist - you can't omit the possibility.

Re:Metric Conversion

[black mariah]

Probably because, if I dare to be so presumptious, the majority of people here are American. The site's run by Americans. It's like accusing the Register of being too biased towards stories from England.

And yes, everyone should be able to easily convert miles and kilometers to a certain degree. It's not like the labyrinth that is Fahrenheit/Celcius calculations, at least.

Re:Metric Conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

it's called approximation, not generalization, beatch

Re:Metric Conversion

[Smallpond]

What do you mean, "on Oct. 5, 1982". If you're converting to metric then you need to write "6.5 x 10^8 seconds ago". Days, months and years aren't metric.

Re:Metric Conversion

[Guppy06]

"Maybe we should make a rule that say you always have to supply metric and imperial units... It would make my job so much easier..."

Let's not jump to mandating the use of one arbitrary measuring system or another.

Re:Metric Conversion

[ncc74656]

if the W3C had included some "weights and measures" tags in the HTML standard then we could leave it up to the browser and/or client OS to apply localization rules and perform the proper conversions.

Just make sure NASA doesn't have a hand in the conversion algorithms if you're going to do that...

Re:Metric Conversion

[Rick.C]

That's mighty thoughty of ya, but y'all forgot to convert those pesky sexagecimal bits.

Those hours-minutes-seconds (and days-weeks-months, for that matter) have just got to go. Using a conversion factor of 1 second = 31.7 nano-years (nY), let's re-translate that:

"The rocket powered sled covered the 4.8 km track in roughly 6 seconds (190 nY). Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at mach 8.6 or about 10300 km/h (90.29 km/mY [milli-years]) - it covered the last 2.9 km in just 1.3 seconds (41.2 nY). The previous record of 9851 km/h (86.35 km/mY) was set on Oct. 5, 1982 ([Unhandled Decimal Overflow Exception at offset x'007E84'] ...)"

Re:Metric Conversion

[sgups]

wow. US in some esteemed company there...

Re:Metric Conversion

[Saltine]

You're right, of course. Dang, I wish I had thought of that 1.00 x 10^0st.

--Saltine

Re:Metric Conversion

[tompaulco]

What do you mean by "use"? Do you perhaps mean the official measurement system (if such a thing exists)? Many countries that ship goods to the U.S. use imperial measurements for the parts. All of the Japanese cars I have owned have used imperial units on all of the nuts and bolts. However, I did have to break down and buy a set of metric socket wrenches when I bought a GMC Safari. Most of our textbooks contain metric units.

Re:Metric Conversion

[mpe]

Yes, because people can't do simple conversions in their head. One kilometer is approximately 1.6 miles. Round off to 1.5 times and you have a good generalization.

Poster manages to prove their own point since 1 mile is approx 1.6 km, 1 km being approx 0.625 miles.

Re:Metric Conversion

[mpe]

There are three (3) countries in the world that still uses the imperial system: Liberia, Burma and the US.

Actually the US uses the "English" system. Which differs from the Imperial system, especially when it comes to units of volume.
Both the English and Imperial inch ended up being made the same in WWII. Now the Inch is "soft metric" of 25.4mm

Every other contry implements the metric system..

Sort of the UK is still doing odd things like selling most liquids in metric but others in multiples of 568ml (which happens to be the Imperial pint).

Re:Metric Conversion

[tompaulco]

I'm confused. Can you please express this in terms of football fields per second, or at least Empire State Buildings per second? Paul

Re:Metric Conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the real problem for UNIX gurus is the scheduling of it. It just never seems to need to be executed...

Re:Metric Conversion

[Palshife]

That's backwards. Seconds to deconds would be a multiplication by the conversion factor. For example,

10,000 deconds in one day
86,400 seconds in one day

86,400 seconds * 0.1157407 = ~10,000 deconds

Voila!

Re:Metric Conversion

[GnarlyNome]

The Babalonians used a base 60 numeric system tried to run som conversions but, my trash-80 died

Re:Metric Conversion

[egreB]

Probably because, if I dare to be so presumptious, the majority of people here are American.

Do you have any facts to back up this claim? The whole metric/imperial-thing isn't that big a thing, but I'm actually interested in where the majority of the /. readers come from. I know for sure that quite a lot norwegians read slashdot.

And from a brain-processing point of view, it would spare the world a lot of time if the editors (or story submitter) would do the conversion than if each and every non-US-reader would do it in their heads. And we wouldn't have had this discussion (-:

Re:Metric Conversion

[black mariah]

No, I don't have any facts to back it up. Like I said, I presume that most of the visitors are American due to the fact that this is a website run by Americans largely catering to the American IT crowd. Much as I wouldn't expect the Register to convert metric measurements into imperial, I wouldn't expect /. to do the reverse, especially on articles that they only link to.

This is going to sound really really pompous, but it's a lot easier to just KNOW the difference in the measurements than it is to convert between them. My previous job involved a lot of measuring stuff in millimeters, so I'm fairly familiar with the small end of the metric system now. Couldn't say the same before then though.

Re:Metric Conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

In construction you need to do halves and thirds a lot. if you have a 2m plank you'd have to measure out 66.67cm. how annoying. If I have a 2yd wall I measure out 2ft. how simple is that. yes. thirds are useful. like if you're doing stair steps or a truss. You'd normally want to do a 3:4:5 triangle.

Re:Metric Conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer engineering notation over scientific notation...

649e6
4.8e3
2.86e3
2.9e3
2.74e3
86.4e3

the trick is you always use an 10^n where n is a multiple of 3. then you can flip between mega, pico, nano, etc without actually having to think about it. Often you say things like: 4.7k 47k 470k 4.7M .. (which are very common resistor values).

Re:Metric Conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw the rest of the world...this is an American record, so therefore, it will be expressed as Imperial units!

Re:Metric Conversion

[EddWo]

why don't we all just use "arns" and "microts"?

Re:Metric Conversion

[jimstone]

Surely you're only jealous because the French made a better attempt at DEMOCRACY than America?

Re:Metric Conversion

[Repton]

[offtopic]

For those of you who haven't seen this, check out The Usenet Oracle's response when he was asked about the imperial system vs the metric system ...

Re:Metric Conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

The labyrinth? Subtract 30 from the fahrenheit figure and divide by 2 to get approximate celsius figure. (32f = 1c, 100f = 35c - close enough)

Re:Metric Conversion

[weighn]

Read the FAQ -- Slashdot is US-centric, blah blah blah blah.

Re:Metric Conversion

[Jason1729]

This is exactly why the US is lagging in technical innovation. The Japanese engineer instantly knows there are a million milimeters in a kilometer and a million grams in a tonne.

When the American engineer wants to know how many 16ths of an inch in a mile or ounces in a ton, he has to pull out his Japanese made calculator.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Re:Metric Conversion

[akadruid]

I buy 2.272 litres of milk in Tescos every week. I haven't used pints for years.

Now I'm off down the pub for a 568ml. Anyone joining me?

Driver not Available for Comment

[Renegade Lisp]

I was wondering what the driver had to say after he got out of this thing, but then I did the maths...

Not sure if I interpret the numbers correctly, but for the acceleration I get 207 m/s^2 on the first, 4.65 sec stage, and 755 m/s^2 on the second, 1.3 sec stage, which is about 21g and 76g, respectively.

No, there wasn't a driver in this thing :-)

Re:Driver not Available for Comment

[Renegade Lisp]

Those numbers... I actually mixed up two numbers in the parent post. It should actually be 2052 m/s^2 on the second stage, which would be a about 200g.

Re:Driver not Available for Comment

[CvD]

Well, maybe there *was* a driver. There certainly is no longer a driver now, though. :-)

Re:Driver not Available for Comment

[black mariah]

To give you a clue how high that is, Dave Purley survived a crash where he pulled 179 G's. He suffered 29 fractures, six dislocations, and six heart stoppages. It was the result of a near-instantaneous stop while hitting a wall at 108MPH (about 160kph, I think). IIRC, the Guinness book puts the time he sustained that g-force at a couple of thousandths of a second.

As another perspective, Top Fuel drivers in the NHRA cover a quarter of a mile in roughly 4.4 seconds, from a standing start, reaching speeds of over 320MPH. The 0-100 times are generally in the .10 second area. The max sustained g-force is about 7. If you've ever seen a dragster accelerate up close, you can extrapolate the violence yourself. :D

Re:Driver not Available for Comment

[TopShelf]

Either that or they got him out with a mop and bucket afterwards...

Re:Driver not Available for Comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Please note that the correct application of Newton's laws will reveal an acceleration of 21.2 G's in stage 1, with a final velocity of mach 2.9. This leads to a 198 G's in stage 2, with a final velocity of mach 10.5.

However, they only quoted Mach 8.6, so if we solve for the length of the second stage using a final velocity of mach 8.6, we get 1.55 miles (instead of 1.8 miles). This corresponds to a constant acceleration of 148.5 G's. Note that they reported the track is as 3 miles (not 3.2 miles), and the lengths add up to 2.95 miles.

Conclusion: I think we're making a mistake to model the sled's motion as two constant accelerations lasting 4.65 and 1.3 seconds, respectively. Rocket fuel has mass, so it's very likely that the acceleration increased as the fuel was spent. Second, it's fairly likely that the acceleration curve had a nice discontinuity around mach 1.0.

Any rocket scientists out there? :)

Re:Driver not Available for Comment

[pio!pio!]

Did anyone see the reports of the Brazilian Formula 1 race? When that Renault got into an accident, the accelerometers in his car recorded 2 lateral hits at about 20G, followed by a third longitudinal hit at 60G. He walked away with only sore muscles.

Of course these were instantaneous and not sustained accelerations

Re:Driver not Available for Comment

[Alizarin Erythrosin]

If you've ever seen a dragster accelerate up close, you can extrapolate the violence yourself

Make sure you wear earplugs or some other kind of ear protection device, or the violence on your ears will be experienced first hand...

And on a side note, when those things launch off the line, the earth shakes... no exageration

Darwin award winner did it first?

[petej]

I think the Darwin award winner from a few years back did this first -- you know, the guy who strapped a JATO unit to his Pinto.

Re:Darwin award winner did it first?

[trikberg]

That is an urban legend. This story started it. Or rather, the events portrayed in the story led to the urban legend; the story was written long after the urban legend started flourishing.

Re:Darwin award winner did it first?

[some guy I know]

the guy who strapped a JATO unit to his Pinto

Rocket Car - the "true" story

Re:Darwin award winner did it first?

[Alsee]

the guy who strapped a JATO unit to his Pinto.

No need to strap one on, all Pintos come with a JATO built in, it's that gas tank attached to the rear bumper.

-

Re:Darwin award winner did it first?

[Chicane-UK]

Now *that* was a fascinating read.. thanks for that link!

Re:Darwin award winner did it first?

[Muad'Dave]

JATO on the Pinto stands for "Jet(fuel) Assisted Torch Off". Or "Just Add a Touch of Oxidizer".

Re:Darwin award winner did it first?

[plastik55]

The account you linked is probably fictional (where's the name of the town? Pictures of the wreckage? How come it's written just like a short story?), and even if it isn't the author certainly wasn't the first guy to attach a JATO to his car-- Motor Trend published phographs 20 years before the date he claims.

Re:Darwin award winner did it first?

[jargonCCNA]

Well, the Darwin tale is certainly a fake (I've heard innumerable different versions) and while the linked story from the parent possesses the earmarks, it's a more amusing read altogether. The Motor Trend link was pretty cool and probably inspired some remarkable idiocy, but I don't think anyone was killed doing it. At least, not in a "sublimely idiotic fashion" worthy of the Darwin Awards.

In soviet russia

[CrazyJim0]

Guess.

Faster than..

[rf0]

..a curry through you on a Friday night

Rus

Re:Well Rounded Education

[dduardo]

Ok, i'll bite. First off, you can't even spell the acronym correctly. It's MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) Secondly, about every 2 year old can get one.

I wonder ...

[Currawong]

From Newsday.com's article:

The sled was designed to cover the first 1.4 miles in 4.65 seconds, then speed up in the final stages and cover 1.8 miles in 1.3 seconds, Kurtz said. At the end, bolts were detonated to allow the missile to detach from the sled and successfully hit its target.

I wonder if this has military implications?

Re: I wonder ...

[Black Parrot]

> > The sled was designed to cover the first 1.4 miles in 4.65 seconds, then speed up in the final stages and cover 1.8 miles in 1.3 seconds, Kurtz said. At the end, bolts were detonated to allow the missile to detach from the sled and successfully hit its target.

> I wonder if this has military implications?

General Franks might be interested in the "successfully hit its target" part.

Re:I wonder ...

[Rolo Tomasi]

I wonder if this has military implications?

No, the military never tests technology which might have military implications.

Re:I wonder ...

[Timesprout]

Am I the only person to have visions of Gromit frantically laying track in front of this new train missile as it heads towards it target ??

Re:I wonder ...

[Alsee]

Often the civilian spin-offs turn out to have far greater implications than the original military purpose. Dominoe's Pizza is reportedly watching this project very closely.

-

Re:I wonder ...

[Mr Reaney]

I can see it now: 1. CIA discover location of Saddam/Osama. 2. Engineers build railway track. 3. BOOM!

Re:I wonder ...

[BigBadBri]

With a terminal velocity of around 7500-8000 fps, you could probably get quite a nice range out of this baby.

Unfortunately, 3.2 miles of narrow gauge track probably isn't going to be that easy to aim!

It may be useful for testing deep penetration type warheads, or they might just b ehaving fun at the taxpayers expense.

Re:I wonder ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Close, but not quite.
This is for testing of the effects of high-speed impacts.
Unfortunately, we're interested in stuff closing at a lot faster than 2.2 km/s. That's pokey!

Re:I wonder ...

[Zork the Almighty]

Yes, appearently their driving isn't dangerous enough...

Re:Aww.

[RyatNrrd]

Why stick to a car-like design when you can improve on it? Cars are a lazy, Victorian, inefficient idea.

Re:Wow...

[SamBeckett]

You mean like... a plane?

Michigan rules anyway... Why would you ever want to leave?

Re:Well Rounded Education

[mothrathegreat]

I honestly cant tell if this is a serious post or not. If it is, it has to be the most poorly thought out post ever. Yes engineering and science students do joke about arts students - its fun and they take it with a pinch of salt. We all know there are clever arts students Valve amplifiers were abandoned for good reasons - They require the replacement of valves when they burn out -They are expensive -transistors dont break when you knock them You CAN buy valve amplifiers still so stop complaining Your improved spelling skills aren't helping you spell "grammar" correctly I guess my well rounded engineering based education isn't so bad after all!

Stopping

[rf0]

Looking over the links can't see anything about how you stop this sort of thing. Do they just let it crash into a wall of have some sort of parachute after the rockets have burnt out

Rus

Re:Stopping

[fyonn]

ended in a spray of sparks when a missile carried by the sled slammed into an immobile target.

I'm guessing it didn;t make it through the test in one peice... maybe it made it through in a cloud of dust though

dave

Re:Stopping

[maharg]

from the first link at http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/a/20 03/05/01/national1355EDT0644.DTL

The test, in a remote area of the base, started with a brilliant, multihued blaze of rocket engines and ended in a spray of sparks when a missile carried by the sled slammed into an immobile target. There was silence until a split second before the end, when earsplitting bursts rolled across the desert floor.

Seems like they have a fairly effective braking system. I wonder what the immobile target was ?

Re:Stopping

[Zog The Undeniable]

Syria?

Re:Stopping

[maharg]

Quick, Mobilise ! There's a sled comi *THUD*

Re:Stopping

[scharkalvin]

Bin Laden sitting in a Bently?

Re:Stopping

[Olmy's Jart]

Seems like they have a fairly effective braking system. I wonder what the immobile target was ?

Uh... History?

Re:Stopping

[hoofie]

How about tons of concrete twenty feet thick reinforced with steel rod ?

There's a video of a reactor wall test at Sandia in 1993 where they strapped a F-4 Phantom to a track unit and shot it down the track with 35 rockets into this 'wall' at 475mph or so - the jet just turned to dust and all that was left was a black spot on the wall...(the weirdest thing on the video is plane was about two feet or wider than the wall, so the wingtips kept going after being sheared oh-so-neatly off. (can't find a picture, sorry)

Re:Stopping

[Anonymous Coward]

The Edwards AFB track used a water trough brake. The tracks drops slightly in elevation, and in the braking zone a scoop dips below water level and applies the drag to slow the sled down. Friction also helps, the sleds ran metal-on-metal against the track. Once its slows down enough so the sled's shoes aren't melting anymore, the friction went up and helped the deceleration. Yes, molten metal as a high-speed lubricant...

HA! That's nothing....

[gr8fulnded]

Anyone who's ever seen 95, N.VA, in the middle of rush hour isn't impressed.

I've seen 80 yr old ladies flying faster then that.

--Dave

Re:HA! That's nothing....

[LucidityZero]

Hell with 95, it's 270 right after the split off of 495 (also NoVa area - I guess we're talking MD now.) 495 is always packed as hell, and then suddenly glorious 270 with 6 lanes and no traffic opens up...

Re:HA! That's nothing....

[Overzeetop]

I think that's the normal flow of traffic on the 210 west of Pasadena, also.

Of course, in MD the folks on the roller coaster (Ga to Conn ave on the beltay) only seem to do about half this speed, but what makes it impressive is how they do it while eating and talking on the phone while still averaging a dozen lane changes per mile!

Re:HA! That's nothing....

[BradleyUffner]

" glorious 270 with 6 lanes and no traffic opens up..."

What, what part of 270 is this? I drive it every day from Frederick to Rockville, and I can say with confidance that there is nothing glorious about 270 at rush hour... And I even get off before the really bad stuff starts at Shady Grove Rd.

Re:HA! That's nothing....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Well we rolled up Interstate 44
Like a rocket sled on rails
We tore up all of our swindle sheets
And left 'em settin' on the scales
By the time we hit that Chi-Town
Them bears was a gettin' smart
They'd brought up some reinforcements
From the Illinois National Guard
There was armored cars, and tanks, and Jeeps
And rigs of every size
Yeah them chicken coops was full of bears
And choppers filled the skies
Well we shot the line, we went for broke
With a thousand screaming trucks
And eleven long-haired friends of Jesus
In a chartreuse microbus"

(This unpaid-for excerpt completely unapproved by the RIAA.)

Re:HA! That's nothing....

[Anonymous Coward]

-- CW McCall, "Convoy".

Re:HA! That's nothing....

[LucidityZero]

You travel south in the morning, and north in the evening. You're going with traffic. I live in Sterling and travel to Germantown (Department of Energy - Exit 15), so I get to travel north on 270 in the morning, and south in the evening. It's normally pretty damn quiet in my direction... (on 270 that is - 495 is always shit)

Re:HA! That's nothing....

[BradleyUffner]

ohh, so your one of those happy people on the other side of the wall laughing at everyone on my side? :)

Re: Well Rounded Education

[Black Parrot]

> > But knowitall engineers use trensastors with inferious sound quality just to save a few bucks

> Size, reliability, long life, no need to heat, reduced power use, sound quality virtually identical, unbreakable. I could go on, but obviously it would be irrelevant to a Humanities student :) :) :)

If he were a humanities student he would have known how to spell his post right.

In other forums he probably whinges about how humanities students lord it over the phys ed majors.

isn't that enough

[SHEENmaster]

to detach a human retina!?

How can the driver code w/out his eyes!? Oh, forgot that others put national fame above coding. What nerds.

Re:Well Rounded Education

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a lot of work, but the upshot is improved grammer and spelling skills that are lacking in the technical.

Perhaps you should consider a technical career then - I counted 31 spelling errors in your post. This does not include grammatical errors, just misspelled words.

Damn clueless liberal arts fuckwits...

Re:Aww.

[kyrre]

And how would they keep the thing from taking off? Impossible.

Thank you for your conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

We only use imperial units for maths puzzles where I live ;)

You get larger numbers with metric for speed and smaller numbers for weighing yourself.

The poor train conductors

[Timesprout]

This is going to exhaust the train conductors here in the Netherlands trying to check tickets when the train is travelling that fast between stations.

Wrong goal.

[EasyTarget]

Wouldn't it be nice if humanity could do this super cool stuff without the ultimate aim being to find more efficient ways of killing people.

The arms industry often shocks me, rarely awe's me.

Re:Wrong goal.

[CausticWindow]

Sorry matey. There's no such thing as the "humanity". There's the US of A and then there is the rest of the world.

Incidently, it's the US that are developing (and using) most of the weapons.

Re:Wrong goal.

[Ben Hutchings]

While Britain, France, Germany and Russia are busy making money selling lower-tech weapons to dictatorships.

Re:Wrong goal.

[Moschaef]

Actually, this is part of an effort to save lives. It's being developed by the Missile Defense Agency and if used operationally, it will probably save millions of lives. Just existing provides monumental deterrence to rogue countries like North Korea or some billionaire terrorist who has purchased an old soviet missile.

For those who think it will instigate an arms race, do you really think they can build more ICBMs than we can build ABMs? One former super power, The USSR, tried to match our military industry and had to declare bankruptcy; so I don't think China or North Korea has a prayer.

Re:Wrong goal.

[joehoya]

According to the article, this test was carried out for the Missile Defense Agency, so even though it was a military test, the ultimate goal is not to kill people but to protect them from ballistic missiles meant to kill them.

Re:Wrong goal.

[EasyTarget]

Yeah! that right!!! The good 'ole US of A never does that..

What was it that a certain D Rumsfeld sold to Saddam many moons ago, when he was a 'good' dictator, begins with an 'A', almost rhymes with 'Tampax'..

Re:Wrong goal.

[EasyTarget]

This is true..

So MDA will give this technology away to the rest of the world so we can be safe too? (sorry, I meant 'sell', since pure altruism is not often found in the arms industry).

And of course the research is 'ringfenced' so that it cannot also be used in developing better offensive weapons..?

The best use of arms is for hugging.

Re:Wrong goal.

[SphynxSR]

Right and the rest of the world still believes Saddam wasn't developing NBC weapons with dual use technologies. But I guess that is just a US trait, according to the rest of the world.

Re:Wrong goal.

[Citizen of Earth]

It's too bad that Mr. Hussein didn't manage to defeat the Islamic radicals that took over Iran like Mr. bin Laden defeated the Soviet Union.

Re:Wrong goal.

[CausticWindow]

I wonder, now that Iraq is liberated from Hussein, will they use their newfound democratic power to deploy Sharia-law and and make Iraq into another fundamentalist islamic state?

Or will the us fix the elections?

Re:Wrong goal.

[thrillseeker]

Which would you prefer?

Re:Wrong goal.

[FroMan]

Crazy idea here. Sometimes a superior offense is the true defense for human life. If we fought in Iraq with the same weapons that the Iraqis had access to, we'd be there much longer and a lot more poeple would have died.

Technical superiority has proven itself in the last two years twice over where we have been able to keep two wars (not really full scale wars) go less time with fewer civilian causualties and combatant causualties so low.

The main point is that sometimes you need an overpowering offense to keep the peace. Research into that field is not wasted until you can say without a doubt that noone will ever attack anyone else. It only takes one side to instigate war, you might as well be prepared to end it as quick as possible.

I'll probably get modded offtopic cause some prick doesn't like what I have to say here, because they are so antiwar.

Re:Wrong goal.

[SpinyNorman]

The US is only financially kept afloat due to loans from the rest of the world - $6.4T and increasing. The world next war is going to be an undeclared economic one, and the main weapon won't be a rocket powered sled - it'll be the Euro.

Re:Wrong goal.

[protohiro1]

Or the billionaire terrorist might grow a brain and just stick a hydrogen bomb in a shipping container and dentonate it in the port of long beach. Cheaper, easier and much more likely to succeed. Terrorists don't use ICBMS.

Re:Wrong goal.

[Citizen of Earth]

I wonder, now that Iraq is liberated from Hussein, will they use their newfound democratic power to deploy Sharia-law and and make Iraq into another fundamentalist islamic state?

That's the open question: Are the Iraqi people stupid enough to elect a dictatorship, one that's very likely to bring another U.S. invasion?

Re:Wrong goal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Begins with A, kind of rhymes with Tampax...

Ampax...
Abax...
Acax...
Adax...
Afax...
Af ac...
AFLAC!

You mean that Donald Rumsfeld convinced Saddam Hussein to buy supplemental life insurance? I'm sure this came in handy if his primary policy didn't cover vaporization by four bunker-busters!

Re:Wrong goal.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll probably get modded offtopic cause some prick doesn't like what I have to say here, because they are so antiwar.

Or perhaps because of your annoying "look what a martyr I am" attitude?

Or the fact that having an "overpowering offense to keep the peace" is called Totalitarianism?

Or that your argument that we should keep pouring money into developing arms "until you can say without a doubt that noone will ever attack anyone else" not only ignores the fact that the same money could save lives in other ways (e.g. medical research) but also ignores the possibility that a certain nation already has such a military advantage that there is the ROI of continued research is quite low. When you already have an overwhelming advantage, having more of an overwhelming advantage seems pointless (and in the meantime, AIDS is still killing people).

You don't suppose that you might be modded offtopic because there's no "-1, Not Very Well Thought Out" mod?

Re:Wrong goal.

[FroMan]

Well, if you are not the obvious anonymous coward. Try logging in.

Anyways.

Or the fact that having an "overpowering offense to keep the peace" is called Totalitarianism?

Bzzt, wrong.

Totalitarianism is when a goverment oppresses its own people with absolute power. I am not suggesting that we oppress our own people, more protect them from other governments which desire harm to our people. Hence, saving our lives. Little difference there.

Or that your argument that we should keep pouring money into developing arms "until you can say without a doubt that noone will ever attack anyone else" not only ignores the fact that the same money could save lives in other ways (e.g. medical research) but also ignores the possibility that a certain nation already has such a military advantage that there is the ROI of continued research is quite low. When you already have an overwhelming advantage, having more of an overwhelming advantage seems pointless (and in the meantime, AIDS is still killing people).

Good point, its not like we are not allocating resources elseware though. So, -1 for thinking we can only do one thing at a time. You probably also think we should send food and humanitarian supplies to Iraq and not give work on setting up phone systems and training folks there to be self sufficient. Well, we are sending humanitarian supplies and also working on setting up phone systems along with a ton of other infrastructure.

Tell me does not this ROI also level off with money spent in other research areas? So, as you argue that ROI in military spending you also get the same thing in other research areas.

There is no such thing as a invincible military. As more countries gain nuclear arsenals the better we need to be prepared against it. The problem with research is that once the original is done, copying it is considerabley easier. When we were the only country to have nukes, it didn't take russia long to have them. Especially with weapons that have a low acuracey requirement and relatively high yeild (nukes and other wmd) that can be build for relatively low costs there is no such thing currently as overpowering force.

And, yes, until you can prove that N. Korea wouldn't try to go to war with S. Korea or anyone; Prove that China wouldn't want to go to war with Tiawan to reintegrate them into China; Prove that Jordan/Lybia/Egypt/etc wouldn't want to exterminate Isreal just cause they exist; Prove that every country would not go to war for any reason, military spending makes sense.

Re:Wrong goal.

[Moschaef]

Actually the bulk of the nations deficit is owed to American Citizens and American Financial Institutions. Those vested in US Gov't financial instruments have simply chosen to benefity themselves by investing in America's relatively absolute security.

Re:Wrong goal.

[Abcd1234]

Actually, I believe the US administration already said something to the effect of "You are free! Elect your government, people of Iraq! Oh, but don't elect an islamic goverment, 'cuz we won't like that very much". Although, what the consequences are if they do elect such a government is an interesting question...

Re:Wrong goal.

[Abcd1234]

Good point, its not like we are not allocating resources elseware though. So, -1 for thinking we can only do one thing at a time.

Umm, I think you're missing the point that the US spends an unbelievable amount of money on it's military, and military research, each year. On the order of hundreds of billions! Can you imagine the good that money could do if it was re-directed toward, say, researching AIDS or cancer, or providing aid to other nations? Hell, forget other nations, how 'bout providing decent schools for it's own population? Or assistance for the homeless... okay, my liberal streak is coming out, but you get the idea. :)

You probably also think we should send food and humanitarian supplies to Iraq and not give work on setting up phone systems and training folks there to be self sufficient. Well, we are sending humanitarian supplies and also working on setting up phone systems along with a ton of other infrastructure.

This is just silly. The point is that you could provide even more aid (to Iraq and other nations, including the US) if so much money wasn't blown each year on researching new ways of turning humans into piles of smoldering carbon.


Tell me does not this ROI also level off with money spent in other research areas? So, as you argue that ROI in military spending you also get the same thing in other research areas.

No, because the point is that weaponry has reached such a point in the US that it's pointless to waste more resources developing even more advanced ways of destroying other people. What they have now is already FAR more than sufficient to utterly obliterate any upcoming enemies for decades to come.

I would compare this, to, say, spending billions a year trying to develop a new, more advanced zipper. Yes, we already have excellent, well-functioning zippers that get the job done. But we need to come up with an even MORE advanced zipper! That's the attitude of the US weapons industry, IMHO.


There is no such thing as a invincible military. As more countries gain nuclear arsenals the better we need to be prepared against it. The problem with research is that once the original is done, copying it is considerabley easier. When we were the only country to have nukes, it didn't take russia long to have them. Especially with weapons that have a low acuracey requirement and relatively high yeild (nukes and other wmd) that can be build for relatively low costs there is no such thing currently as overpowering force.

Yeah, except that a super-powerful military is still relatively powerless to nuclear weapons, simply because they are so devastating, and there's no decent defense against them (and don't start on Bush's revived Star Wars program, which is a load of crap).

The best defense against nuclear arms is preventing nations from WANTING to use them in the first place. This usually starts with a decent foreign policy (oops, the US is already screwed). After that, your best line of defense (much like with terrorism) is good intelligence. If you can discover that a nation is developing nuclear weapons, or is attempting to acquire them, you can approach them and try to deter them. If that doesn't work, you can threaten them with the already formiddable might of the US.

Notice how none of this requires blowing ridiculous amounts of cash on researching new weapons?


And, yes, until you can prove that N. Korea wouldn't try to go to war with S. Korea or anyone; Prove that China wouldn't want to go to war with Tiawan to reintegrate them into China; Prove that Jordan/Lybia/Egypt/etc wouldn't want to exterminate Isreal just cause they exist; Prove that every country would not go to war for any reason, military spending makes sense.

Until you realize that the US military is suffiently powerful to handle all those cases, and so spending more cash to develop new, more deadly weapons, or to enlarge an already ridiculously large military, is pointless.

Re:Wrong goal.

[Abcd1234]

You know, calling the Iraqi people "stupid" because they might elect a form of government that they know and understand is more than a little closed minded and condescending. Trying to force democracy on a culture which isn't ready for it is not, necessarily, a good thing. Look how it turned out in Russia... there is a certain social mindset necessary to make a democracy work, without which it becomes a total disaster. And the change to this mindset is not a rapid one, as it requires social reform. So get down off your high horse. You look like an idiot up there.

Re:Wrong goal.

[SpinyNorman]

What will kill the dollar will be Euro-denominated oil sales, as Iraq was engaging in pre-war and others such as Iran and Venezuela are considering. The UK when it eventually switches will also be a Euro oil seller. OPEC may even switch or support both Euro and Dollar sales either due to demand or due to fighting the US either over politics or any US attempt to bust OPEC via flooding the market with Iraqi oil.

Euro-denominated oil sales will subtract from dollar demand and petro-dollar reserves.

Re:Wrong goal.

[EasyTarget]

Nearly right, actually I was thinking of AMTRAK

Re:Wrong goal.

[Noel]

What will they do? Why, they'll arrest them for "exercising authority which was not [theirs]."

Re:Wrong goal.

[Galvatron]

Actually, it's not loans, it's the stock market. America has 1/3rd of the world's economy, but fully 1/2 the total market capitalization. Yes, the Euro may make Europe a moderately more attractive investment market, but it's not going to destroy the US. Besides, given all the infighting about tax rates and the like, I'm honestly not convinced that Europe will be able to hold it together in the long run.

Re:Wrong goal.

[Citizen of Earth]

You know, calling the Iraqi people "stupid" because they might elect a form of government that they know and understand is more than a little closed minded and condescending.

If they choose the same form of government that has made them miserable for the past 30 years, I think that would qualify as being 'stupid'.

Look how it turned out in Russia... there is a certain social mindset necessary to make a democracy work

Such as enforcing laws.

Re:Wrong goal.

[Anonymous Coward]

but its not sufficiently large to handle all those cases at the same time.

Re:Wrong goal.

[k3v0]

as they say, War Is Peace....

Re:Wrong goal.

[FroMan]

Only takes one to start a fight. Or do you suggest appeasment? Heil Fuhrer? Is that truely peace?

Peace is a nice goal, don't get me wrong, I am not for creating wars. However, I am for ending them fast and decisively. I am for liberating the oppressed.

Explain how you deal peacefully with wicked men? Saddam would not have left willingly. He was asked to go into exile before the war, but refused. Should we have waited for him to die naturally? One of his sons or like minded minions would have taken power right afterwards.

What do you tell the people oppressed by wicked men? Just tough it out, things will be better in the next world?

Here is a decent quote/witty saying to add to your list.

Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace-- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! -- Patrick Henry

Re:Wrong goal.

[gailwynand]

I assume you refer to the National debt. Right. By far the largest portion of the debt is owed by the government to the Federal Reserve; that is, to itself. There is a significant portion owed outside the US, but the US is not "kept afloat" by this. The main problem is that the government spends far too much. Check out come facts and links here.

Re:Wrong goal.

[Anonymous Coward]

When you assume....

Anyway, I'm guessing he's referring to the fact that most currencies in the world are backed by dollars and that the oil business is conducted in dollars. When central banks around the world start emptying out their dollar reserves and/or oil starts to be traded in euros, the US is in for a world of hurt..

what actually happened

[tankdilla]

At approximately 88 mph the vehicle became a blur and seemingly vanished, and after 6 seconds it appeared at the end of the track. A scientist known as "Doc" was subsequently questioned about the contribution of the controversial flux capacitor technology used to power the vehicle, but he declined to comment. All he kept saying was "Great Scott!!!"

Re:what actually happened

[AragornSonOfArathorn]

This is heavy.

Going into orbit

[asciimonster]

If they were able to increase it's velocity to about 4x its value, It would have launched into orbit! If I remember correctly, the ISS is moving at 22,500 mph (36200 km/h). I wonder if they had to generate some downforce the keep the trainything on the rails. The earth is a sphere and therefore the track should be slightly bent!

Challenge for Train spotters

[2sleep2type]

Rather tricky to get the numbers on this when it's passing through.

WOW

[John_Renne]

And just this morning my 100 mile trainride took me 2 hours thanks to a freight-train running in front of us.

How about different kinds of railed vehicles...

And in finacial news just in...

[NewtonsLaw]

Shares in the Acme Novelty company have risen 23 percent.

Re:And in finacial news just in...

[haystor]

I just can't believe it took them this long to make something like this to get the hell out of New Mexico.

Re:Well Rounded Education

[ch-chuck]

'science' is just as much about opinion as
the humanities.

Basically what you are saying is there are no objective truths about reality in the hard sciences, just followers of intellectual fashion which are mere 'opinions' disguised as solid, arrogant, indisputable 'facts'. There's a lot to be said for that view, but consider this: is the equation E=mc^2 "merely" Einsteins 'opinion' or does it convey some real usable truth's about the universe? Similarly with Newton's F=ma or Ohm's law, E=IR? Certainly there is some element of arbitrary fashion and social cultural convention with those 'absolute truths' - the letters used to represent variables. In Ohm's law, why do they (we) use 'E' for electromotive force when we could use 'V' for voltage? Those 'truths' could also take a different form if the fundamental unit definitions where changed like the terms of the speed of light or units of energy. So you can see, the language of the 'hard' sciences contains a lot of social convention and arbitrary fashion dictated by a paternalistic hierarical social command and control structure, but they also convey, once you see thru that descriptive human language, an intuition about the workings of the actual physical universe that appearantly you artsy fartsy faggots will never understand.

Re:Aww.

[black mariah]

Like the article said, it's a record for railed vehicles. RTFA, THEN post.

not *that* funny

[mirko]

excuse me, how has this been marked twice(*) as funny ?
he should at least have written it "zoooooooooooooweeeeeeeeeeeee" so that the Doppler effect would have been taken into account...
and why can't I post as anonymous anymore ? not that I miss it but...

(* there should be a glitch in the matrix.)

Re:not *that* funny

[UniverseIsADoughnut]

eh, i don't know why it did as good as it has for a comment. anyways, the doppler idea is ok, but that assumes i was someplace mid track, i think most people would be somewhere near the start point and away from the thrust, so as to be in a very safe spot, relitive to most other spots. So they would hear no doppler effect.

Re:not *that* funny

[fireman sam]

Actually, reguardless of where you stood, you would hear the doppler effect, as that is the effect of wavelength distortion due to a difference in velocities of to objects. You have two shifts, a red shift for objects moving away from you (the waves are stretched) and the opposite is a blue shift (the waves are compressed). Therefore, standing at the start you would observe a red shift all the way. At the end, a blue shift, and in the middle a blue shift, then a red shift as the sled passed.

Re:not *that* funny

[nolife]

Considering it is traveling much faster then the speed of sound, I assume you would hear nothing if you were in front of it ;)
Eventually you would hear it but you would actually hear the sound from the end before you heard it at the starting point. It seems that you would detect the compressed shift but its arriving backwards... Whoa, I'm done, too early in the morning for me to think that one through.

I have an old fiesta that can barely

[noogle]

get up to 60, you insensitive clod.

Re:I have an old fiesta that can barely

[sn0wcrash]

I've got a Yugo that can only go as fast as I can push it... you insensitive clod!

Re:I have an old fiesta that can barely

[Anonymous Coward]

get up to 60, you insensitive clod.

And that's with it falling over a cliff.

G - forces

[krygny]

I'd be interested to know how many G's you'd pull at that rate of acceleration. Yes, I know, I could dust off my old physics text books and calculate it. But I'm not that interested and I'm not posting it as a challenge because it's not that hard, so don't go there.

Just a thought, even though I'm too lazy.

Re:G - forces

[Lairdsville]

Read the posts. Someone worked it out!

Re:G - forces

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately that someone did it completely wrong. Having a greater accelleration in the second stage does not seem logical. The sled might have done the second stage at an almost constant speed while it had a non-linear accelleration in the first stage. You just can't calculate that from the little numbers given in the text (if you could they would not need to process the data, would they).

Landspeed records don't impress me

[dk.r*nger]

Every once in a while, the quest to build the fastest car, train, whatever, is on Discovery.

But these vehicles are merely planes touching the ground. The real quest, in my eyes, would be building a vehicle that is powered through its wheels, not a giant rocketmotor. At least if the quest is to build a car or a train, not a rocket!

Re:Landspeed records don't impress me

[LinuxGeek]

You are quibbling about power transfer methods. Simply put though, air resistance becomes much greater than your friction level contact between drive wheel and surface. Once you loose traction and spin at 400+ mph, you do serious damage to the friction material on your wheel, which won't be anything like you know as a pneumatic tire/wheel setup. The last land speed vehicles have had aluminum wheels with no rubber, it wouldn't stay attached at the speeds reached anyway. Then the matter of trying to get traction with smooth aluminum wheels shows the reason that wheel drive isn't very practical over 450mph or so.

Re:Landspeed records don't impress me

[Sp4rtikuz]

They got that too =)

sounds fun!

[JMastahFlex]

i wanna go for a ride!!

In other news

[Timesprout]

Signs of nervousness in the Syrian leadership as the US announce they intend to build a new high speed rail link between Baghdad and Damascus as a gesture of goodwill.

Re:In other news

[poot_rootbeer]

Signs of nervousness in the Syrian leadership

Oh. I thought you said SYBIAN leadership, which made me start thinking of how this high-speed train technology could lead to the development of better, faster vibrators...

Re:Wow...

[Coelacanth]

Great idea. As long as you don't mind arriving in the form of slightly lumpy, reddish-brown slurry.

Take the extra hour or two, and fly :-)

Of Dubious Value?

[JoseMonkey]

Call me cynical, but I'm trying to figure out if this type of research has real merit, or if it is entirely masturbatory. What's the point exactly?

It's a military project, i.e., tax-payer funded, so I'd like to hear some relevant, practical uses for said technology. It sounds like it was used to deliver a bullet-type missle in this case. Something tells me that you couldn't really use this delivery method in an actual *war* . . .

Re:Of Dubious Value?

[buckinm]

Call me cynical

You're Cynical!

Re:Of Dubious Value?

[Detritus]

One obvious application would be a rocket-assisted, ground-penetrating bomb or missile. They are already using old artillery tubes packed with explosives and fitted with guidance/steering units as "bunker busters". There is a lot of interest in weapons that can destroy deeply buried command and control facilities.

Re:Of Dubious Value?

[BattleTroll]

Want to bomb bagdhad? Three easy steps:

1) install hundreds of miles of high speed railing. Don't worry, no one will mess with it. We're the United States, after all.
2) haul heavy, rail guided missile, place on rails.
3) fire and forget.

Seems perfectly cost effective to me.

Re:Of Dubious Value?

[ocelotbob]

I'd say that the principal use of this technology is that it's good initial testing of new rocket engine designs. By putting the rocket on a rail, you can control the trajectory and course much easier, allowing better monitoring of such things as fuel consumption, acceleration, etc. This way, you don't have to deal with the dangers of sending a rocket up when you really don't know how it's going to behave.

If you're looking for something outright, then really, this tech would seem pretty silly. But as part of a testing regimen, it makes perfect sense.

Re:Of Dubious Value?

[FroMan]

What is escape velocity of the earth?

Is this possible to design as a orbital launch method?

Maybe we can test to see how certain materials handle extreme force.

Re:Of Dubious Value?

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC orbital velocity is around 17,000 miles per hour. Escape velocity around 24,000 mph.

Re:Of Dubious Value?

[jandrese]

Why yes, I think you've hit on something here. YOu'd better patent it. Call it: Method for using a multistage rocket motor to achieve orbit. I'll be nobody has ever thought of that before.

Re:Of Dubious Value?

[bugnuts]

The delivery mechanism is secondary to the effects of hitting something with a large missile. The idea is not so much to set a speed record, but to see what happens when the missile they had attached to it hits something at 6400 mph, in a highly-controlled environment. If they had fired the missile at an airborne target (for instance) they couldn't get as much data on the actual interaction between missile and target due to the difficulty in placing sensors accurately.

Re:Well Rounded Education

[black mariah]

Tube amps haven't been abandoned at all, they just went upscale. All the high-grade 'audiophile' bullshit is tube. Guitar amps are still mostly tube. Basically, the only problem is that morons like you call them 'valves'. Damn Brits. ;)

Yes, that was a joke.

Re:Well Rounded Education

[Anonymous Coward]

And you wonder why people make fun of Humanitites students.

It is NOT opinion that allows the Fabrication of CPUs that run at 3 Gigahertz. Nor Opinion that puts satelites in orbit. Nor for that matter opinion that allows for relativistic effects in the timing of GPS signals.

Astrology is NOT a science. 'Nuff Said.

And if you can process and internalise 3 books a week, I might be tempted to deride the complexity of the content.

Incidently, what does "Peace be to God" mean ? Are you wishing that noone should wage war on Him ? Are you concerned that He may be besieged by other deities ? Surely you are not "Narrow Minded" enough to rule out multiple gods ?

Blues Skies,
Soft Landings.
Dave.

Land speed record primer

[192939495969798999]

Here's the deal: Regardless of whether the "vehicle" makes contact with the ground via wheels or a rail, it more or less is flying while in contact with the ground. Anyone who remembers "blue lightning" will recall that it was/is a missle painted blue with a driver's seat and wheels. If you want a record for the fastest gasoline-powered car, that's a whole separate arena. These people are trying to get something that 1) goes the fastest while 2) remaining in contact with the ground in some way. The reason this craft could go so fast is precisely because the rail system reduces the friction from the ground to a significant degree.

Re:Land speed record primer

[drinkypoo]

It's pretty lame though, if UT Austin just took their railgun and fired a hot wheels car out of it along the ground instead of into it, they'd be the new winners. I know it's not a requirement for the definition, but I don't think it's really a "vehicle" unless it has pilots. This is just a projectile.

The interesting land speed records are the cars with pilots, and the unpowered, using some sick-ass bicycles. I met the (former?) world record holder "Fast Freddy" in Santa Cruz a while back, where he is now working (at? for?) calfee making and designing carbon fiber recumbents. (As you probably know if you're way more into bikes than I ever will be, calfee is like the name in diamond-frame carbon fiber.)

Re:Land speed record primer

[Anonymous Coward]

"Blue Flame", actually.

"... averaged 617.602 mph on the first run and 627.207 on the second for a new land speed record of 622.407." (in October of 1970).

Underground transatlantic trains

[locarecords.com]

I remember reading a book that speculated about the kind of speeds that trains could reach for transatlantic deep tunnels to hop across the world in no time at all without the airplanes...

Unfortunately I think the heat these things generate would make the whole thing untenable... Plus of course the air pressure problems (though I seem to remember the tunnels being vacuums - with their own issues...)

Re:Underground transatlantic trains

[oojah]

I doubt heat generation would be a problem - I can't really see such a train ever being built.

Consider the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France. It descends to a depth of less than 200m below sea level ( see this page or this picture from the same page).
Now consider the atlantic ocean. A cross section is shown on this page.

Firstly, the depth at the maximum is around 5000m below sea level (a cool 25 times deeper than the channel tunnel). A brief search on google for submarine maximum depth tends to suggest that maximum submarine depths (other than for specialised submarines) are typically less than 1000m. See 1, 2 and 3. I can therefore hardly see a commercial train operating at 5000m.

Also, the incline at the continental shelves is a significant factor - trains aren't noted for coping well with steep gradients so a long rise would be needed at either side. I can't comment on whether this is a problem because there is no X axis scale on the referenced atlantic ocean picture.

These are just my opinions and observations of course.

Cheers,

Roger

Re:Underground transatlantic trains

[ColdGrits]

Ah yes, that woudl be the Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter Hamilton to which you refer (The Reality Dysfunction et al). As you mention, he had them running in vacuum precisely to overcome the air pressure / friction / et al problems to which you refer. They struck me as a pretty neat form of intercontinental travel, far better that aeroplane!

One day... :)

Re: Well Rounded Education

[Alan Partridge]

we ALL hate jokes that aren't actually funny

Why they built it.

[MyNameIsFred]

Several posts have asked if this has military applications. The answer is yes for testing. They use the sled to examine the interactions between weapons and targets in a controlled dynamic environment. For example, you park an aircraft at the end of the rail. Shot a warhead down the track and let it hit the target.

Why not do this in the air? You can carefully place cameras and other instrumentations to observe the test. Afterwards, you can easily collect debris for further analysis.

Why set a new land-speed record? Think of the Republican Party's wildest dream -- National Missile Defense.

Re:Why they built it.

[GrubInCan]

This is one way that you can guarantee sucessful targeting by the missile defense system.

When you see incomming missiles, you quickly build a railway up to the missiles and crash big nasty trains into them.

Re:Why they built it.

[pmz]

They use the sled to examine the interactions between weapons and targets in a controlled dynamic environment.

That's what they wrote, but, really, they just thought it would be cool to see something going mach 8 hit a wall. Who wouldn't want to see that?

Re:Why they built it.

[Naosuke]

I know that I would pay money to see it.

How much faster?

[flamingdog]

Damn, that thing would probably go faster than light if it had a 5" exhaust pipe that made it sound like a go-kart, a body kit, a spoiler higher than its roof, new rims and low profile tires, and a paint job that made it look like vaginal expulsions...

I mean, wow, what if those scientists really fucking knew what they were doing and did some of those high-tech mods like new spark plug wires, and painting the engine block? Holy shit...

Oh wait...nevermind...

Re:How much faster?

[jolshefsky]

Well, that's how they did it--they just took the same sled design from 1982 and painted "Type-R" on it to get it to go faster.

Re:How much faster?

[frinkster]

Don't forget the nawwwwwwws. They also added two of the big bottles.

Re:How much faster?

[phillyclaude]

Its too bad the economy's down. Otherwise, they could also go for such high-money performance mods like green neons all over, a big japanese character painted into the tint on the back of the sled, and clear taillights

Re:How much faster?

[sbillard]

Did you write this ebay item description?
Kicker Box

but ...

[The Clockwork Troll]

That thing got a hemi?

Re:Well Rounded Education

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, on his/her humanities course of study he/she says, "It is a lot of work, but the upshot is
improved grammer and spelling skills that are lacking in the technical."

OK, nice idea but it loses credibility when his/her post includes gems like this, "...humilaite them whenever possible." Or, "...astrology, the most rediculious of the sciences!" Or, "Whilst you want to trun collage into a trade school with yore narrow minded views that collage..." Or finally, "I'm going on to so a PhD in socialolgy..."

Come back when your improved spelling and grammar skills help you spell your major correctly and we'll talk. Until then, back to class, troll!

Land speed record

[maccrapper]

They should of had my wife driving..

railgun-type launch platform

[The Fun Guy]

So, is this the first step toward a railgul type launching platform? The payload on this sled was about 200 pounds. Can you make satellites that small?

Re:railgun-type launch platform

[Muad'Dave]

Can you make satellites that small?

Yes.

Re:railgun-type launch platform

[mikerich]

Can you make satellites that small?

Smaller. There was a lot of interest from the 1960s onwards with launching satellites from high velocity artillery. The work was pioneered by Gerald Bull, who later went on to develop long range artillery for the South Africans, develop the Iraqi supergun and ended his days being assassinated - presumably by the Israelis.

Bull was in charge of a 1960s project called HARP which built an enormous cannon to fire projectiles into the upper atmosphere (and we're talking about 180 km here) over Barbados (well if you're going to do science, you should do it somewhere nice).

The projectiles were instrumented devices known as martlets, Bull planned to develop martlets with small motors that would give them enough kick to enter low orbit.

The cannon would have been much cheaper than rockets, but the technology of building advanced satellites capable of withstanding the shock of launching would have been formidable.

The supergun built for the Iraqis by the British company Matrix Churchill would have not been able to fire satellites, but a bigger one designed by Bull would have. He got round the problem of a short, sharp shock by having a series of explosions accelerate the projectile as it travelled along the gun barrel. Since there would be less pressure on the barrel, it needn't be so strong or made of advanced materials. Bull got the idea from the German V3 gun built to bombard London during WW2. The photo is dreadful but it shows the central barrel and the side barrels coming off it. Each of those would have fired in turn behind the shell and accelerated it up the gun and towards Britain.

More on HARP here and other space guns (with an awesome picture of the HARP gun firing here.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Sonic Wind 1

[wowbagger]

At the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center they have the original Sonic Wind 1 rocket sled. They also have a video loop of some of the test runs of this beast.

Remember that Sonic Wind was all about trying to determine what would happen to a pilot who ejected at speeds greater than Mach 1 - so the occupant of Sonic Wind 1 was sitting on the front of the sled without any windscreen.

In the video, as the craft exceeds Mach 1, you can see the shock waves (a.k.a. sonic booms) forming off the craft, including one forming off the pilot himself.

That always gets me.

Re:Sonic Wind 1

[mooman]

Actually, the "Sonic Wind 1" is at the International Space Hall of Fame in New Mexico.
The Kansas Cosmosphere has the "Sonic Wind 2" on display...
</nitpick>

Re:Sonic Wind 1

[statusbar]

Wow!

So I wonder what compensation the 'occupant' was expecting to get after doing that?

Did they not like him or something?

What happened to him?

--jeff++

Re:Sonic Wind 1

[wowbagger]

Thanks for the correction - I was running from memory.

I must be getting old.

Still, it beats the alternative.

0-6,400 in six seconds...

[jaredcoleman]

wouldn't that be the land acceleration record???

Re:0-6,400 in six seconds...

[mla_anderson]

Mach the 6,400 is the speed record. The 0-6,400 in 4 seconds is impressive.

Is it real???

[unixgeezer]

Not to start a conspiracy theory or anything; but, does any one else think the picture on MSNBC looks like one of those little models they use in the movies?

Re:Is it real???

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks something similar to the one used in "Terminal Velocity".

Re:Aww.

[calethix]

"It would be far more legitimate if it had had to be done over the ground, in a car-like vehicle."

and in the end, far more explosive as well :)

Re: Well Rounded Education

[gpinzone]

If he were a humanities student he would have known how to spell his post right.

Have you ever seen what passes for a college student these days?

Purpose?

[jackdoodle]

Now, in all honesty, why would the air force care about being able to speed a rocket sled to Mach 8.6? It's still too slow for ABM use (assuming they could target it, once it's off the sled - and, IMHO, ABM is an inane, dangerous idea). It's entirely too fast for any sort of useful transportation. And, for that matter it's barely faster than the 20 year old record, relatively speaking. So how much did this cost to develop? Whiz-bang garbage like this is part of the reason we have a $400 billion military budget...

Re:Purpose?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to wonder why people keep saying that ABM is an inane, dangerous idea? Do they think that any weapons development is inane? The new PAC-3s shot down a lot of theater ballistic missles in the Gulf this time around. The russians already have a HUGE ABM setup. How well it works who knows. They use nukes for the warheads so lets not test it any time soon okay. So it is not like the US is building the first ABM system. How much would saving even one city be worth? How is a defence dangerious? Because it is unfair? Dude I am 100% for an unfair advantage in this case. Before I get flamed yes I do know that it could not protect the US from an all out strike from Russia. By the way this test had nothing to do with ABM. It had everything to do with bunker busting bombs.

Re:Purpose?

[mikerich]

The russians already have a HUGE ABM setup. How well it works who knows. They use nukes for the warheads so lets not test it any time soon okay. So it is not like the US is building the first ABM system.

Actually you did, it was called Nike-Zeus and introduced in 1958.

The Russian system is a hangover from the days of the SALT talks. Each of the two signatories (the US and the USSR) were able to retain one ABM system that had been deployed or was in the process of deployment, on three conditions: 1. That there were no future developments; 2. That the technology was deployed at no more than two sites; and 3. That no site possessed more than 100 interceptors.

A further appendix to the treaty then reduced the number of sites to one.

The US was in the process of deploying its own AMB system known as Safeguard, originally authorised in 1970. It was deployed at Malmstrom USAFB in Montana and Grand Forks USAFB in North Dakota. It would have then been rolled out to Whiteman USAFB in Missouri, and Warren USAFB Wyoming.

When the SALT negotiations proved to be a success, the US abandoned the second two sites. Malmstrom was abandoned when the final section of the talks were concluded.

The Grand Forks base was completed and brought into operation in April 1975, and was fully fitted out with all 100 missiles by October 1975. A day later, Congress cancelled all funding for Safeguard and the system was withdrawn.

The Soviet system was called Galosh and as you said operated around Moscow. It is doubtful whether it is operational any longer.

And as for your, NMD is a good idea - well even if you overlook the horrendous spending projections needed to build the system, the dubious statistics used by the Pentagon, the faked test results you're left with the obvious pork-barrelling in a time when the US economy and budget aren't looking too healthy.

If you choose to ignore the message this sends to China - build up your missile fleet before its made obsolete. If you want to forget that the Chinese already see the US as a long-term strategic threat - and the Indians see the Chinese as a threat and the Pakistanis see the Indians as a threat...

You still have severe questions about the political implications of such a system. The US and its political catamite the UK have shown themselves willing to trample over international law to get their own way with Iraq. We broke international law and the UN Charter to take on a country we knew we could beat without retaliation.

Imagine the temptation to get involved in a conflict with ANY country if you thought your country was immune from any retaliation.

Bush and co. are scary enough without NMD, with it - well I won't be sleeping much.

Best wishes,
Mike.

What the story won't say...

[Pig Hogger]

Is that, typically like any Amtrak train, it ran a few hours late...

Re:Aww.

[arivanov]

That is not the point.

The point is designing an rail launcher. Which is what these guys do for a living.

Problem with rail launchers is that the aerodynamics of moving surfaces located close to one another at such speeds is horror squared if not even to a higher degree. That is the reason people still use rockets to fire loads in space instead of this. Idea is there, has been there for ages, but we have at least 20 years to go before we understand some of the preliminaries for a successful implementation.

you've got it backwards

[prisoner]

95 in the middle of rush hour is a study in *slow* speeds. All other times of the day, the traffic would give this rocket a run for its money

One problem

[donscarletti]

Oct. 5, 1982

Sorry for being whiney but I think all metric using, english speaking countries put the day before the month, i.e. 5th Oct. 1982 or 5/10/1982. Forming a nice natural progression between the smallest unit and the largest unit.

Of course I think the system that is used by the Japaneese amoung others, is even better: yyyy mm dd forming the same progression as the hindu arabic number system by putting the largest unit first.

I think around the world only three countries do not have a unit magnitude based progression, one of them is the US, another of them is somewhere in scandinavia and I think the other one may be Korea but I don't know, I should ask my Korean friend next time I see him.

Re:One problem

[eht]

the yyyy mm dd format is also very good because it makes for very easy sorting

Re:One problem

[ergo98]

In Canada month/day/year is also common (largely because we share so much technical literature with the US). The reasoning often given is that most people say "October 5th, 2003", and not "The fifth of October, 2003", so the numerical ordering follows the verbal ordering.

Having said that, they both stink because of the existence of the other. The simple fact that I have to wonder what "02/03/05" refers to because of the competing standards renders them all flawed. The only standard that anyone should use is the ISO 8601, which is as you mention yyyy-mm-dd (it's hardly a "Japanese" system - It's been used and advocated as a "metric" sort of date for many decades).

Re:One problem

[Guppy06]

"Sorry for being whiney but I think all metric using, english speaking countries put the day before the month, i.e. 5th Oct. 1982 or 5/10/1982."

Months and years? How antiquated, especially after the recent posting about leap-seconds. Real Men use Julian. Try Day 2445248.

Re:One problem

[Anonymous Coward]

2003-02-03 is still ambiguous.

how about yyyy.ddd? Sat 3rd May is 2003.123.

Re:One problem

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not as ambiguous as the others, however. Month-Day-Year and Day-Month-Year are both in wide use. Month-Day-Year is anomolous, but it is used by the United States, so that messes everything up. Year-Day-Month is pretty much unheard of so it is pretty safe to assume that, when the date is listed year first that it will follow Year-Month-Day, unless the person writing the date is in error.

Your suggestion of yyyy.ddd would work if it were not for the existance of months. Many people might have trouble with converting that kind of date to the actual day and month. Then again, most people do not seem to have any trouble converting 05 to April, so they might simply learn how without problem. Trouble is, simply the perception that things would be more complicated under that system would prevent it from being adopted. It would be simpler if we just eliminated Months altogether. But people would be very reluctant to give up their months.

OK, I'll say it

[barzok]

6400 MPH should be enough for anyone.

Helium-filled tube?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why didn't they fill the tube with hydrogen instead of helium? Would it be able to go even faster travelling through a lighter gas?

Surely in this case they can relax about any additional risk of fire it might cause?

Colonel Kurtz

[Kinthelt]

Am I the only one who's scared that a guy called Colonel Kurtz was in charge of this thing?

The numbers don't add up!

[Muad'Dave]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but how can you get 6400 MPH from their numbers? They must be claiming an instantaneous velocity as opposed to an average over any of the segments they mention.

From the article:

1. The sled covered the "roughly 3 mile course" in 6 seconds. That's 3 / 6 * 3600 = 1800 mi/hr.
2. It covered the first 1.4 mi in 4.65 s. That's 1.4 / 4.65 * 3600 = 1084 mi/hr.
3. It covered the last 1.8 mi in 1.3 s. That's 1.8 / 1.3 * 3600 = 4985 mi/hr.

If you _add_ the speeds, you get 6069 mi/hr, but that's certainly not legit.

The average speed over the whole 3.2 mile course was (1.4 + 1.8) / (4.65 + 1.3) * 3600 = 1936 mi/hr, which is close to the speed referred to in bullet point 1. Hardly impressive, and hardly 6400 mi/hr! My guess it they meant that the sled hit 6400 mi/hr when the rocket cut in at 4.65 s, but quickly slowed since the average speed after 4.65 s was only 4985 mi/hr.

Re:The numbers don't add up!

[JatTDB]

Stop thinking about averages. It's accelerating the whole time, and the 6400mph number is the maximum speed. If it started that last 1.3s at a fairly low speed and only achieved the max towards the end, you'd still come out with an average speed for that segment in the range you mention.

A car that can go 0-60mph in 10s and use 200 feet of road in the process only averages 13mph in that 200 feet, but it's certainly travelling much faster than that at the end.

Re:The numbers don't add up!

[KillerBob]

You're not accounting for acceleration. The final speed can easily be higher than the average.

At the start of the 6 seconds, the speed was zero. It travelled under rocket power for 4.65 seconds, at which point an additional set of rockets was ignited. They report that the final speed was roughly 6,400 mph.

On a smaller scale, you can duplicate the experiment with your car. Go out and run a quarter mile. Time it, and look at your exit speed. You'll invariably find that your exit speed is higher than your average speed.

Re:The numbers don't add up!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you actually *read* the article and not just the /. summary, it clearly states that the rocket continuously accelerated. At the end of the first 4.65 seconds, it kept accelerating, finally hitting 6400 mph before it hit the wall.

Re:The numbers don't add up!

[Lawrence_Bird]

But some nice momentum on the projectile.. 87.09 kg * 2735.28 m/s = 238,212.92 Kg-m/s! But what we really want to know is the KE: 651,586,189.12 joules or about 0.155 ton of TNT

Re:The numbers don't add up!

[hp48]

The numbers do add up. Here's the math:
Note - I am not writing out all the digits, but I kept them when doing the math to avoid rounding error.

Given:
x = x0 + v0*t + 1/2*a*t^2
v = v0 + a*t
Started from rest
1st segment: 1.4 miles in 4.65 seconds
2nd segment: 1.8 miles in 1.30 seconds

Assumption:
Constant acceleration during each segment, although different acceleration for the segements.

Solution:
First segment acceleration:
x = x0 + v0*t + 1/2*a*t^2
x = 1.4 miles; x0 = 0 (starting from here); v0 = 0 (starting from rest); t = 4.65 sec
1.4 = 1/2*a*4.65^2
solving: a = 1.4/10.81125 ~= 0.129 miles/sec^2

Final speed at end of first segment:
v = v0 + a*t
v0 = 0 (starting from rest); t = 4.65 sec; a ~= 0.129 miles/sec^2
v ~= 0.129*4.65
solving: v ~= 0.602 miles/sec or 2167 mph

Second segment acceleration:
x = x0 + v0*t + 1/2*a*t^2
x = 1.8 miles; x0 = 0 (starting from here, or we could add 1.4 to this and x); v0 = 0.602 miles/sec; t = 1.3 sec
1.8 = 0.602*t + 1/2*a*1.3^2
solving: a = 1.0172/0.845 ~= 1.204 miles/sec^2

Final speed at end of second segment:
v = v0 + a*t
v0 = 0.602 miles/sec; t = 1.3 sec
a ~= 1.204 miles/sec^2
solving: v ~= 2.17 miles/sec, or 7800 mph

Thus assuming constant acceleration, we actually achieve a velocity greater than 6400 mph. With decreasing acceleration (a real-world condition), 6400 mph is a believable result.

Hmmm....

[CaffeineKills]

When will the street version be coming out?

Escape Velocity

[MhzJnky]

This would put it at 1/4 of the required Escape velocity for the earth. That's not bad. Of course the phisics get kinda sticky after a while, but you would need far less than an order-of-magnitude increase to reach the required 25k mph.

Also, if you wanted to do satalites you don't want to escape the earths gravity anyway, so you don't need the full 25k.

This could make for a interesting way to launch satalites in the future. Of course you'd be pulling just a few G's when you go from horizontal acceleration to vertial "flight".

"Researchers at Holloman AFB"

[argStyopa]

Finally got that Oscillation Overthruster working, eh doc?

Re:"Researchers at Holloman AFB"

[weeboo0104]

Geez, this has got to be the first Buckaroo Banzi reference I have seen on /. That movie has got to be one of John Lithgows best roles.

Re:"Researchers at Holloman AFB"

[ashitaka]

New here, aren't you?

The Hong Kong Cavaliers come up regularly.

Quite fast, but...

[miketang16]

I'd be interested to know if a human could survive these types of speeds. i.e. future planes/vehicles

Re:Quite fast, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The speed itself doesn't matter.
Speed is only relative.
What matters is the acceleration.

For instance Earth is orbiting at around 100,000
km/h around the sun, and that doesn't really
matter for us, we don't feel it because there is
no change in speed.
But if it were to come to a dead stop in a few seconds, you can be sure as hell we would feel it ;) (not even talking about the orbital
result that coming to a full stop would have).

Re:Quite fast, but...

[miketang16]

Very good point, acceleration and the G-forces is what'll kill u.

Re:Quite fast, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can get around the idea of any force that could make the earth come to a dead stop in a few seconds it is still hard to imagine such a force not stopping everything on earth, including the people, evenly. If everything did not stop evenly the earth would probably heat up very, very quickly and the supposedly solid ground would churn like a stormy ocean. If the Earth did come to a sudden stop and only the people did not, it is still hard to imagine it happening without a huge surge of heat. Supposing all that is taken care of, you still would not feel it. The fastest nerve signals travel in your body is 200 MPH. Anything that suddenly sqaushes your body from one end to the other faster than that will not be felt at all.

Right angle circuitry and the Flux Capacitor

[A55M0NKEY]

Certain materials 'conduct' magnetic flux well and can be used instead of electrically conductive materials to conduct energy. Since you can move energy around as magnetic flux, I wonder if there might be circuit components that are analogous to electrical circuit components such as resistors, coils, transistors, and yes capacitors. If not time travel, what WOULD a flux capacitor make possible?

A link about magnetic flux etc: http://www.amasci.com/elect/mcoils.html

Re:Right angle circuitry and the Flux Capacitor

[Anonymous Coward]

err... you mean like an inductor?

There were two hobos....

[Anonymous Coward]

Hobo 1: "OK Willie, you hop the boxcar, and i'll [splat]

Land speed record NOT broken

[ElfMagic]

Last August the Bomarr group, at a lab in Dallas, Texas, managed to accelerate a marble made of heavily compressed composite glass and steel fibers from zero to just over eight thousand miles an hour in four and one eights of a second.

The acceleration occured on a track while developing a new magnetic propulsion system that uses electromagnetics to spin an intricately spun sphere with a series of directional pulses. The compressed nature of the marble allowed it to be *very* lightweight and still strong enough to handle the force exerted upon it.

The technology is still being developed as a military defense mechanism to intercept things like unmanned spy planes without damaging them so much that useful data about the origin of the craft cannot be collected from the crash site.

Re:Land speed record NOT broken

[prestidigital]

The post did specifically mention rail transport, but still an interesting comment given this excerpt from the CNN report:

"Base spokesman Bob Pepper had no information on whether any higher speeds had been reached by land vehicles other than sleds, because the base doesn't do other types of land speed experiments."

When will this attraction be in Six Flags?

[huphtur]

As stated on their website: "Thrill Seekers Wanted". I mean, granted, they have nice attractions right now, but who wouldnt want a new facelift when going mach 8.6?

Re:When will this attraction be in Six Flags?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, it's no sillier than Botox or "chemical peels" to make you look younger.

Maybe it's military, maybe it's Maybelline.

What about the IMPORTANT stuff?

[Anonymous Coward]

What I REALLY want to know/see is the video of the bugs hitting the windscreen. That could be some useful and interesting stuff!

Old Timey Steam Locomotive

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what it really looks like.

amazed this hasn't been posted yet

[dboyles]

I said the metric systm is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hog's head, and that's the way I likes it!

I thought the RIAA held the record...

[thumbtack]

Or at least their lawyers. The manage to set some kind of record racing to the courthouse to file all of the those lawsuits. Hence the phrase "Faster than an RIAA lawyer."

rods to the hogshead

[camusflage]

Bah. My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I like it!

Yikes! Is there an EDITOR in the house?!?

[Sabu mark]

The Alamogordo Daily News article has some of the worst writing I've ever seen. Get this guy an editor, quick! Not only is the science explained incorrectly, but paragraph after paragraph is filled with laughably awful sentence structure.

Here are just four paragraphs, with my commentary on them. The entire article is this bad.

Obviously, the world record was broken and the Test Track now owns the fastest thing ever attached to Earth. Jolliffe even suspects that once data is evaluated, the speed could exceed Mach 8.6.

It's usually unprofessional to use "obviously" in news articles.
Somehow I think the speed isn't going to exceed zero anymore. What the writer means is that they'll FIND that the speed DID exceed Mach 8.6, not that the speed WILL exceed Mach 8.6.
You probably should insert "the" before "data," buddy, because you're probably not referring to the data I evaluated this morning, which as far as I know didn't affect the missile's speed.

The spline system succeeded. Previously, double-sided tape held the plastic to the track. For this test, seven tankers pumped helium into the 11,000-foot tube. Because helium is 1/7th air's density, when the sled shot through the tube for the last two miles of the three-mile run, the sled's momentum increased by a "tremendous amount of speed," Kurtz said. As the sled entered through a diaphragm, the tube immediately disintegrated; but because of the speed the vacuum created helped the sled to continue unimpeded.

Jesus - the sled's momentum increased by an amount of speed? I bet its energy also increased in power and its current went up by fifteen volts.
I think the guy means TANK, not "tanker." A tanker is a vehicle containing tanks. A tank is a vessel containing the actual helium.
What's with the last clause, the one after the inappropriate semicolon? Because of the speed the vacuum created helped? What? There's too many verbs. It took me a long time to parse this sentence. My best guess is "Because of the speed, the vacuum WHICH WAS created helped the sled...."

The Hypersonic Upgrade began in 1997. The program converted the monorail sled (which held all previous speed records) to a double, narrow-gauge track with the rails 26 inches apart. (Supersonic speed transitions to hypersonic at Mach 5.) The monorail generated "high vibrations," Jolliffe said. The dual track reduces vibration by a factor of four (from 80 Gs to 18 Gs), helping in the push to faster speeds.

They converted a sled to a track?
Somehow I doubt the monorail sled held ALL previous land speed records. For instance, the speed records that were set before it was invented. Those were probably held by something else.
"Supersonic speed transitions to hypersonic at Mach 5" - what an opaque way of explaining it. I would say "The term 'hypersonic' refers to speeds of Mach 5 and above; speeds below Mach 5 but above Mach 2 are called 'supersonic.'"
And why the hell is that sentence in that location, in between two sentences that discuss rail construction? It should have been immediately after the sentence in which "hypersonic" appeared.
Was it really necessary to quote the words "high vibrations" directly?

According to Kurtz, the sled's first three stages were designed to traverse 1.4 miles in 4.65 seconds, and the final two stages 1.8 miles in 1.3 seconds. At a pre-specified point along the three-mile route, bolts on the missile front were explosively detached -- allowing the simulated warhead to lift about 20 degrees -- and a fraction of a moment later the back bolts were detonated. The track then dipped, and centrifugal force carried the missile upward into the target.

As George Carlin would say, "pre-specified" should mean it hasn't been specified yet. Even if it doesn't, the "pre-" is still redundant.
"A fraction of a moment" is bad. Just use a "moment" or "split second" - you don't have to be accurate to within a fraction of your made-up time interval.
It would appear from this paragraph that 1.4 plus 1.8 equals three.
And, of course, centrifugal force has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the motion of the missile. Centrifugal force isn't even real.

Re:Yikes! Is there an EDITOR in the house?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say "The term 'hypersonic' refers to speeds of Mach 5 and above; speeds below Mach 5 but above Mach 2 are called 'supersonic.'"
The Mach number is a ratio of something's speed to the speed of sound, so anything above 'Mach 1' would be supersonic.
And it should read "once the data are evaluated, buddy :)

Lan Speed Record Broken

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I need to get new glasses or a better monitor. At first glance, I thought the title was, "Lan Speed Record Broken!" LOL, it's because there is always talk here of computer terminology.

Mr Science says:

[RealAlaskan]

... who else than the rest of the World uses metric anyway?

It's only the rest of the world who uses metric, so who cares.

I can tell you WHY they use it: expressing their speeds in kilometers per hour makes it sound as if they're really going fast. It helps make up for their dinky cars with under nourished hamsters for engines. The metric system is really just a coping mechanism for an inferiority complex.

If we wanted to bring the rest of the workd back to the traditional system, all we'd have to do is start quoting our speeds in furlongs per fortnight. Since the American brown snail can travel at about 15 furlongs per fortnight, it's plain that our speed numbers would again exceed theirs, and their coping mechanism would be shattered. They would have to come flocking back to our familiar, traditional system.

It might seem a harsh thing, but it would be best for them. The additional arithmatic skill required by the traditional units is clearly the explanation for the United State's consistant superiority in all things mathematical over the benighted metric world.

Re:Mr Science says:

[dcmeserve]

all we'd have to do is start quoting our speeds in furlongs per fortnight ... our speed numbers would again exceed theirs, and their coping mechanism would be shattered.

Ahh, but then they'd just start using millifurlongs per fortnight.

288 mph improvement in over 2 decades !!

[Anonymous Coward]

288 mph improvement in over 2 decades !!

My silly question for today

[Black Copter Control]

Who "Rode the Rocket", and how long will they be in hospital for?

278 I meant...

[Anonymous Coward]

278 I meant...
I was typing at 6400 words per minute...

Wheels?

[psychofox]

Based on my rough calculations,

If this thing had turning wheels (with say 20cm diameter) then at maximum speed, the wheels would be spinning at 220,000 rpm - or to put it another way about 30 times faster than the average desktop harddisk.

I don't believe there is any known material that not disintegrate subjected to such stress...

So, if the thing doesn't have wheels - I'd hardly call it a land vehicle. Its more like a low flying rocket...

Re:Wheels?

[mla_anderson]

According to the article it was a sled, probably no wheels.

I'd mod you up, if I could.

[RatBastard]

Grommet! It's the rong JATO! And it's gone wrong!

Re:Well Rounded Education

[mla_anderson]

Science is significantly more than opinion. It starts out as opinion and is tested. Once a theory can be reliably reproduced it becomes accepted. However in the sciences we are continually testing even old proven thoeries because we develope better methods of testing. So we are continually cross checking our theories.

In the humanities once a well known person writes something down it's accepted as fact. There is no more testing of the theory it's accepted as truth.

A MCSE is not considered to be an engineer by anyone but the sales force at Microsoft. There is significantly more work required of an engineer than learning the three fingered salute.

The big difference between a hard sciences education and the humanities can be summed up in one rhetorical question: How many top knotch engineering schools are also party schools?

Clearly speed is not the only goal

[jtheory]

From the article:
Base spokesman Bob Pepper had no information on whether any higher speeds had been reached by land vehicles other than sleds, because the base doesn't do other types of land speed experiments.

If their goal were simply moving something as fast as possible along this ground, this would NOT be the case. I'll bet their assignment was to find the most controlled way possible to hit a target with a missle, so that the process can be studied and improved.

Or, maybe just just like sleds. "I'm also glad my wife and three kids were here today to see this great day -- ah, correction: just two kids... we got a little carried away with the tobaggan upgrades this past winter."

Oh no

[stalinvlad]

There I was thinking:-"Blimey news NOT about another Linux Distro/*BSD release" and it turned into that dream I had about Charles the First crossing the Atlantic just at the outbreak of the civil war and becoming the first King Of America (Then follows 3 sets of 26 episode TV stuff, you know bearded blokes plotting evil deeds and speaking about...)

What was I on about ?

Oh yeah that otherthing METRIC

Obligatory reference

[OrbNobz]

I wonder if this test included an intervening mountain, an oscillation overthruster, and a pilot wearing a kamikaze headband?

"Holloman AFB, Lt. Col. James Jolliffe speaking."
"Sir? Hi, I have a 'Lord Whorfin' with a 'Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems' on line 1? Something about wanting his overthruster back?"

- OrbNobz
Big Boo-TAY! TAY! -=BANG=-

I make it 48 G's

[apsmith]

Metric helps on this one:

10,240 km/hour = 2844 m/sec
accelerating to that speed in 6 seconds means
474 m/sec^2 or about 48 times the 9.8 m/sec^2 of Earth normal gravity.

Re:I make it 48 G's

[martissimo]

but that is of course assuming constant acceleration which is a bit of an assumption given the (sketchy) facts the article gives about such matters

This still doesn't run as fast as

[Anonymous Coward]

Taco Bell goes through you

Re:Well Rounded Education

[Austerity Empowers]

You're definitely on the fast track to that PhD in sociology. 1) If you think dieticians are real scientists, you must be a sociology major. (Belief that raw statistical data, especially of human subjects, constitutes actual research) 2) Belief that reading many books a week is useful only to improve spelling and grammar, is exactly the kind of conclusion I expect from sociology students. (Are you reading hooked on phonics?) 3) Talking about "mathematics" as if it were a cult conspiracy to overthrow the purely rational knowledge that everyone "knows", qualifies you as a sociology major. After all, what everyone believes MUST be true, right? (The world is FLAT, and the universe revolves around the earth!) 4) Science is opinion. Yeah, the universe's opinion. In some sense, no one elses opinion matters. Case in point, many phys ed and liberal arts students may choose to BELIEVE that if you drop a sledge hammer and a tennis ball off a roof, that the sledge hammer will land first. The universe disagrees. Scientists and engineers know this, because 1) we have done it and 2) we have modelled the action by an evil conspiracy called mathematics and science. You're cut out for sociology because you choose to believe what everyone else thinks, rather than reality. Some people never quite get out of high school. 5) We are narrow minded and cynical. As a group, you're right! Excellent conclusion my sociologist friend. Unfortunately your "science" or understanding isn't quite useful enough to fix the problem is it? Probably that your spelling and grammar hasn't improved enough yet! Keep trying! See narrow minded and cynical that we are, our job is actually to fix problems. Problem: Humans can't fly, Solution: Airplanes. Problem: Walking is to slow and horses are hard to maintain? Solution: Cars, busses, trains, bycycles etc. 6) Go get a degree in electrical engineering. CS is too easy to wiggle out of, you could (and I have a CS degree as well, so I'm not really bashing CS students) theoretically do nothing technical and get a degree, much like you are now. Show me how easy it is. If you can pull of a GPA (you've heard of that right?) of better than 3.5/4.0 in an accredited institution, I'll eat my matlab and go back for some humanities.

Re:Well Rounded Education

[Le Marteau]

/me clobbers AC with a clue stick:

IT *clonk* WAS *clonk* A *clonk* JOKE!

Re: passengers

[Anonymous Coward]

During the 50's and 60's at Edwards AFB, men and chimps both rode the rocket sleds (admittedly, at much lower Mach numbers). The chimps took over when the brass decided it was getting too dangerous for human tests. This was a study of high speed and G-forces on the body, which was useful both for military aircraft and NASA's manned space flight program.

There's a semi-urban legend that they trained the chimps with bannana rewards. After one particularly rough ride, the chimp allegedly took the peeled bannana and shoved it into the trainer's face!

yeah, but...

[Tumbleweed]

Did it have a VTEC sticker on it?

star trek

[Anonymous Coward]

haven't you heard of intertial dampers. how else do you think picard can go 0-c in one second and not fly through the viewscreen

Alamogordo

[drivers]

haha. The last time my old home town of Alamogordo was in the national news it was because Christ Community Church was burning Harry Potter books.

Re:Alamogordo

[JDWTopGuy]

That's probably what the payload was.

About 83 Gs?

[irritating environme]

Did I do that wrong? average acceleration of 83Gs? It's been forever since I did those old equations.

Is it usable as 1st stage in launch system?

[BerntB]

How much heavier could you build such a train and track system? I e, would it be economical as the first stage in a launch system?

The tracks would have to go up an incline at a mountain close to the equator. (Kilimanjaro?) The release system for the second stage would be the hard problem, I guess?

wow, that is fast

[tenman]

Seriously....

1/12000 " straightness

[MWYankee]

Running the numbers, that 4 times the pivot on TI's DLP micro mirrors.

Imperial Doesn't Measure Up

[fm6]

Appropriately enough, you seem to have U.S. measure confused with Imperial measure. Not quite the same. For example, the Imperial system defines a gallon as 10 pounds of water under certain specific conditions. (Works out to 277.42 cubic inches.) This was imposed by act of Parliment in 1822, and replaced a large number of traditional "gallon" values.

Now by 1822, the U.S. had ceased to be part of the British empire (at least in our own minds), so traditional measures remained in use. We've cut way back, but we still have two kinds of gallons: the liquid gallon (which is the same as the English "wine gallon"; 231 cubic inches) and the dry gallon (same as the English "corn gallon"; 268.8 cubic inches).

Painfully complicated, no? I've always thought this kind of confusion is the real reason the metric system drove out all the competition. We were all told in school that the metric system triumphed because it's more logical and simple: you have a few basic definitions, and everything else extends from them in a simple way. But people don't mind complexity, if it's the kind they're used to. Not being able to communicate is another matter. Which is why Europe, with its thousands of diffent units of measure, embraced the metric system, but rejected all the similar reforms that came out of the French revolution (the decimal clock, the "rational" calendar).

And it's also why Americans have so thoroughly resisted metric reform. The "customary" system is familiar, the "logical" metric system is confusing. It's probably not that big a deal for American consumers; it just means we sometimes have to convert unfamiliar units. But it's totally unacceptable that any engineering gets done in customer units. It makes for lost space probes and airliners with fuel issues.

Re:Imperial Doesn't Measure Up

[bobbozzo]

According to your link, the Gimli Glider was caused by a sudden change to metric units. (The 767 was apparently the first plane in the fleet to use kilograms instead of pounds for fuel density specs.)

I did about 20G's

[spineboy]

When my car got forced off the road. The telephone pole stopped me in about 2 feet from about 35 MPH.

My fist left an imprint in the windshield - like those nail thingys you see in the joke gift shops.
Broke 3 ribs, radius, ulna. I did get to set my own wrist after I noticed it was kinda bending the wrong way.
I went and bought the exact same car a week later - I figured it could have gone much worse

Re:I did about 20G's

[intermodal]

Exactly, I once took out 35 feet of guardrail including the posts with a police-edition crown victoria going 95 miles per hour and niether me nor the passenger were injured. Needless to say, I am a loyal fan of the Crown Victoria Police Interceptor now, and I bought another one with the insurance money.

Re:I did about 20G's

[InfiniteWisdom]

Sounds like somebody wasn't wearing seatbelts!!!!

Seatbelts save more lives and prevent more injuries than all other safety devices put together!

Short Morning Commute

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, since i take the train 12 miles to work, i'm pretty excited about reducing my commute to 24 seconds! Finally, I have time for a decent cup of coffee in the morning!

Re:Well Rounded Education

[Dossy]

Don't you mean Minesweeper Consultant, Solitaire Expert?

That's about all they're good for ...

(Please mod this down as Flamebait or up as Funny -- I just couldn't resist.)

-- Dossy