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The Star Wars Car
An anonymous reader writes "You think you're a Star Wars fan because you own a lightsaber? Behold, the Star Wars car. Some of the comments on the forum suggests that it's modelled after a A-Wing. One of the coolest "mods" I've seen in a long time, very original and time demanding it seems."
That's some nice detail work... note the actual hoses that go into the laser cannon on the side of the door... complete down to the "scorch marks" on the paint next to the muzzle.
Despite the fact that this car screams "cheesy," the attentino to detail is remarkable.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Reminds me of this past Slasdot story.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
i want a laser falchion, dammit.
http://www.shawnandcolleen.com/
Looks like he'll have a huge bandwith bill...
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One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
I honestly don't know. It's bizarre. It's the same mentality as a fellow I know here who puts every reflector, sticker, and gadget outside and inside his car. antennae, bumpers, air fresheners, popup tissue holders... you name it, the car has it. Maybe some people NEED to be surrounded by clutter.
In any case, I've mirrored the pics in a smaller size:
http://www.danamania.com/starwarscar/
It all depends on the car shape and relative speed. Obviously the only additional force the spoiler would add to any stationary car would be the downward force from the weight of the spoiler. As the car increases velocity, the car, sans spoiler, will develop an upward force, due to the high/low pressure differences.
The major factor is at what speed will the car begin to noticeably lift from the ground. Most cars, even the rice powered ones will never reach speeds high enough to lose traction due to the upward force. Maybe at a fast highway speed with a great headwinds, but generally not in normal daily use. The spoiler increases the coefficient of drag, and the cars top speed, acceleration, etc. Again for most cars, this is negligible, and with the composite materials that the spoilers are made out of, the weight is negligble.
Most professional race cars have adjustable spoilers, tuned to conditions for each particular race. Some are even computer controlled to maximize the effectiveness of the spoiler on turns and straightaways. But those are professional race cars, and they go just a bit faster than my dodge, and most other everyday cars. I'd have to be flooring it downhill for a long weekend before I ever needed a spoiler.
Found this page, full of more star wars car mods - Including the one this article was originally posted on
e wtopic.php?t=2649 The pictures on it actually work too.
http://www.roadsquadron.com/cars.html
Also try this forum http://wraggy.com/barryboys/forum/phpbb/phpBB2/vi
redune.com: The World 3.2 Megapixels at a time
That's the speed that you could definitely feel the lift on my old Mercury Grand Marquis('82 I think). The car was really heavy, but it started to feel much lighter and bounced around more at that speed.
I think the oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme took about 95 before you could definitely feel it.
Now that doesn't mean you need a spoiler, and one might not help much at that speed, but I'm saying you could tell the car was developing some lift.
While it is true many consumer production cars have spoilers merely for looks, spoilers can be VERY functional. You obviously have no background on this, and I am not going to get into the physics, but why do you see every rally car, and nearly every le mans car, with spoilers that have taken a fair bit of engineering to design? Think formula 1 cars have them just to look cool?
Now hold on a minute here. I do indeed have a background in this, background enough to know that to this date nobody, not one soul, has ever entered a stock Honda CRX in a formula 1 race.
Their production car based on the rally car, the Impreza WRX STi, also bears a spoiler similar to this. It creates significant downforce as low as 60mph, and its functionality has been confirmed by STi as well as prodrive.
You call 60MPH low? And my car has no spoiler, and I've never needed flight clearance to pass somebody on the expressway. Have you ever seen a car hovering six feet off the ground because of gale winds? I know that I've never seen it.
If I'm driving in a rally or F1 race, then yes, I need a spoiler. If I'm driving a rally race on the way to work, than I think I need a brain more than a spoiler.
BTW, RWD, FWD, or AWD, its entirely irrelevant.
This must be in regards to this: a negative effect (particularly on front wheel drive cars) due to increased drag. The increased drag creates a downward force, strongest in the rear, on the opposite end of the drive tires. This acts as a type of see-saw, and in a straight line, removes some of the downward force from the drive tires. Say your car shifts from second to third at or about 60MPH. This removal of force can cause a temporary loss of traction as the car shifts, resulting in "secomd gear squack", as the tires roast going into gear. This is generally not a problem, again as most people don't race the quarter mile on their way to work.
Spoilers are very useful in rally driving, as one is taking turns as fast as possible.
Spoilers are very useful in F1 racing, as the cars are going as fast as possible and have a habit of flying off the road if they don't have one (and they generally have one at the front of the car as well).
Spoilers are very useful for your everyday driver because it gives you a handle to push by when you run out of gas. That's it. No additional benefit on your 15 minute drive to work.
Another Picture
Some of the comments on the forum suggests that it's modelled after a A-Wing
Though the color scheme and armament it lacks the two tails of the A-wing though, and A-wings don't use R-2 units.
I have a Lexus GS-400, and a long, straight, flat, low-traffic place to drive it reeely fassst, so, naturally, within a couple of weeks of buying it (new) I went to see where its top end is.
GS-400s have a curvy, stout body, with token ground-effect moulding up front. The specs I'd seen said it should get into the 160s, but with all that sheet-metal I had questions.
At 145, the front end of the body started to float a bit. The wheels didn't come loose, but if I'd tried for 150, they might have. The car was nutating in three dimensions; basically flapping at a low frequency. This was severely reducing my chances of maintaining control, so I got off the throttle and let it coast back to legal speed (it took about a mile to get to 145 from 0, and a mile to idle back down to 65).
The rear end, with its little wing/spoiler/go-fast option, was just fine.
It wasn't even breathing hard at 145. The Tach said I had another 20-30% in the mill.
I did, however, melt about 2,000 miles off the tires (140 treadwear rating; soft, grippy rubber like rock-climbing shoes; specced for 12K miles before replacement under normal driving conditions, but you need that traction in this thing or you're spinning at every green light; I can't imagine what kind of glue the VW Phaeton's tires will have to exude to stick down) and left it as a dusty black film on the rear fenders.
I think with a tighter suspension (they'd softened it to make the car a little less hotrod and a little more luxury sedan) and a shallower nose, or a nose-wing, I could have clocked into the 160s, maybe 170s.
And Burt Rutan thinks he has a rocket.
LMCBoy (185365) sez: "Uh, no. A parsec is the distance of a star at which its parallax angle (as seen from the Earth) is one arcsecond."
e b98_1.htm.) One concept being explored is the stretching of space-like dimensions, so that a craft can traverse a space without violating light speed. A very early paper on the subject was written by Frank Tipler in 1974 in Phys Rev D. It was titled "Rotating Cylinders and Global Causality Violation". (Larry Niven wrote a story based on this, with the same name; it's in his collection "Convergent Series".) Here's a link to a message (someone else's) which quotes a personal reply from Tipler, giving the reference to this and other papers (http://keithlynch.net/cryonet/9/21.html).
a /Hyperspace.html).
Yes, yes, 3.26 light years. This "mistake" is a geeks' favorite. Unfortunately there's applicable science available to explain not only the "mistake", but the correctness of its presentation in the film.
NASA's advanced propulsion research has already started looking at trans-relativistic mechanisms for space travel (http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast02f
If space dimensions can be compressed, then a vehicle can traverse that space as though it were a shorter distance. The efficacy of the engines (and if they're "bending" space, then "warp" is apropos) would then be considered in terms of how much shorter they could make a given distance become. Hence, the Millenium Falcon's warp engines could have been powerful enough to shrink the Kessel Run to less than 12 parsecs, when it is "normally" much farther. Here's a Wikipedia entry that provides another explanation (http://www.4reference.net/encyclopedias/wikipedi
The evidence from the movie that this was in fact the nature of the M.F.'s engines? When they went to warp speed, the stars' images got stretched out into lines, as though the space in front of them was stretching. Had they accelerated to a significant fraction of light speed, the images of the stars from all around them, front and back, would have been compressed into a halo of stars with blue shift towards the center and red shift at the outside. Here's a site that shows better than I can tell (http://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/cship.html).
Other evidence that they did not approach lightspeed is the fact that they "disappeared" into warped/hyper-space in a finite time. Had they accelerated to c, it would have appeared to take forever from the viewpoint of an outside observer.
Feel free to disagree. After all, this is at the nexus of science, pre-science and science fiction. But I think I can support my assertions at least as well as those who simply appeal to standard relativistic physics. And, after all, I am a scientist. I consider it part of the job to come up with answers that are so good that, right or not, they might as well be.
Maybe I ought to just send this to George Lucas so he can work it into one of the last 4 episodes and get you guys off his back.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B