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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."
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.
"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!!!!
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...
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 :-)
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.
..a curry through you on a Friday night
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
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?
What is the point of the internet?
Why stick to a car-like design when you can improve on it? Cars are a lazy, Victorian, inefficient idea.
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
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.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
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!!!"
-Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
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 ?
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Rather tricky to get the numbers on this when it's passing through.
Shares in the Acme Novelty company have risen 23 percent.
Like the article said, it's a record for railed vehicles. RTFA, THEN post.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
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.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Syria?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
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!
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.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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
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* . . .
Bin Laden sitting in a Bently?
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.
stuff |
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.
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...
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That thing got a hemi?
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
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.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Seems like they have a fairly effective braking system. I wonder what the immobile target was ?
Uh... History?
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.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
6400 MPH should be enough for anyone.
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".
"Failure is not an option, it's part of the standard package"
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)
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.
See what I've been reading.
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.
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...
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.
Did it have a VTEC sticker on it?
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
..........FULL STOP.