Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
..a curry through you on a Friday night
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
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.
This post is free (as in cheese in a mousetrap).
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Shares in the Acme Novelty company have risen 23 percent.
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
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.
.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
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
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
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.
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.
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
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
6400 MPH should be enough for anyone.