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1000-mph Car Planned
Smivs notes a BBC report on a British team planning a 1000-mph record-breaking car. The previous land-speed record broke the sound barrier. The proposed vehicle will get from 0 to 1,050 mph in 40 seconds.
"RAF pilot Andy Green made history in 1997 when he drove the Thrust SSC jet-powered vehicle at 763 mph (1,228 km/h). Now he intends to get behind the wheel of a car that is capable of reaching 1,000 mph (1,610 km/h). Known as Bloodhound, the new car will be powered by a rocket bolted to a Typhoon-Eurofighter jet engine. The team-members have been working on the concept for the past 18 months and expect to be ready to make their new record attempt in 2011."
(1050/40) (mph / second) = 1.19661658 g. Neat. Accelerating just above the rate one falls. No excessive gee forces to worry about, at least.
Can you call a Formula 1 racing car a car? Look at what happens when one of those loses a wing...
I expect my lecturer would disagree with you on that point. I'm an undergraduate at Swansea University, where a lot of the work (such as the aerodynamics) is being done. The computational fluid dynamics code that's being used to allow this thing to go 1000mph was developed here, powers aerospace firms like Airbus, BAE Systems and Rolls Royce, and has been decades in the making.
Which means that you sir, are trolling.
Nobody else has this sig.
Then they should just run a Eurofighter on a runway trying not to take off... Just as much a "car" as this thing.
Fighter jet landing gear and tires are not built for 1,000mph. Maybe 300-350 absolute max. Rebuild it to do 1,000mph, and you'll end up with something that looks quite a lot like this thing does.
One similar speed record 'car' is literally an F-104 body, sans wings.
it become obsolete when we stop using gasoline -- gallon of what? in the future we might be seeing measurements like miles per kilowatt
Engineers who are paid for what they are doing are encouraged to use established solutions. That's why engineers go home and work on their own projects. Then they get to do something different, just for the sake of doing something differently.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Reasonable men adapt to the world around them; unreasonable men make the world adapt to them. The world is changed by unreasonable men.
-- Edwin Louis Cole
(velocity^3) so at 55mph you could do 900mph we already have 46% effecent powerplants. And nothing is stopping us from hitting 50%. http://w1.siemens.com/innovation/en/news_events/ct_pressemitteilungen/index/e_research_news/2008/index/e_22_resnews_0814_2.htm
As a side note at highway speeds drafting can significantly increase fuel efficiency by moving to a computer controlled highway system we could increase average fuel economy above what simple drag calculations would suggest.
PS: I don't think you will see out highway system getting this good but saying it's breaking some laws of physics is a different argument.
If it was really powers of 2 based, sure, but it has lots of 3s too, meaning the practical difference is marginal.
Sure, 10 is a really crappy base, but we're pretty much stuck with that by now, it so it makes sense to have the measurement system match the numeric system.
For computing, a base with only 2s as factors (e.g. 8 or 16) would be "better", but
then the whole point of computers is to make things easier for _us_, so that's not really a concern.
What would be the most useful for us (as a counting base _and_ measurement base)?
12.
It's in the right order of magnitude for us to handle mentally, and it has the very everyday-useful factors of 2, 3 and 4. Counting on your fingers would be slightly harder, but most people seemed to be able to deal just fine with dozens long before any education was widespread, so that can't be that bad.
10 only has the factors 2(very useful) and 5 (mostly useless except for stuff that arises directly or indirectly from its role in our base number)
Now I know imperial measures does employs 12, but not repeatedly and consistently, and neither it nor the others are consistent with our numeric system, so it remains hell to work with.
sudo ergo sum
To be fair, the entire US customary measuring system is obsolete...
Really? I had no idea that all my measuring devices, textbooks, and construction techniques had suddenly ceased to perform their functions adequately.
"You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means." --Inego Montoya
The traditional US measuring system, which is derived from the pre-imperial English anthropic system, is in many ways superior to the metric system for common tasks like home construction. Basing your system on 12 instead of ten is extremely practical (outside the ivory towers and groves of Academe) because carpenters, artists and architects can easily achieve aesthetic and functional balance without generating excessive trim waste or requiring computers to figure out how to center a window frame.
Daniel Fahrenheit went to a great deal of trouble to set up his temperature measuring system so that the most practically useful values (water freeze point & human body temperature) were on 32 and 96 degrees respectively. Easily manipulable numbers are a good thing. The metric system is best relegated to the lab, and even their its essential arbitrariness makes it inferior to systems based on natural units.