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The Bloodhound Will Stay On the Ground At 1,000 mph
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that engineers designing the world's fastest car, the Bloodhound SSC, built to smash the world land speed record of 763 mph set by the Thrust SuperSonic Car in 1997, believe they have a solution to keep the vehicle flat on the ground at 1,000 mph after initial iterations of the car's aerodynamic shape produced dangerous amounts of lift at the vehicle's rear. John Piper, Bloodhound's technical director, said: 'We've had lift as high as 12 tonnes, and when you consider the car is six-and-a-half tonnes at its heaviest — that amount of lift is enough to make the car fly.' The design effort has been aided by project sponsor Intel, who brought immense computing power to bear on the lift problem. Before Intel's intervention, the design team had worked through 11 different 'architectures' in 18 months. The latest modelling work run on Intel's network investigated 55 configurations in eight weeks. By playing with the position and shape of key elements of the car's rear end, the design team found the best way to manage the shockwave passing around and under the vehicle as it goes supersonic. 'At Mach 1.3, we've close to zero lift, which is where we wanted to be,' says Piper. In late 2011, the Bloodhound, powered by a rocket bolted to a Eurofighter-Typhoon jet engine, will mount an assault on the land speed record, driving across a dried up lakebed known as Hakskeen Pan, in the Northern Cape of South Africa."
Seriously, you rip the wings off of a fighter jet and make it stay on the ground does it become a car? To really be a "car" I would almost argue it needs to be propelled by the wheels.
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They would have to then engineer a treadmill that can move the belt at 1000MPH, a wind machine that can blow wind at 1000MPH so that the Bloodhounds engines get the intake that it needs. They would then likely have to take care of all the exhaust gasses... ... AND IT WOULDN'T BE AS COOL!
The only thing it has in common with a car is that it has wheels and runs on the ground. Given its size and weight it would be more accurate to call it a jet powered truck.
IMO the real land speed record is the wheel driven ones , not the one where you just strap a huge rocket on the back and try and stay on the ground.
Since it's a jet engine (pushing against the air), it would be the old "Plane on a treadmill" problem. Meaning it would drive off the treadmill.
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That has nothing to do with the fact that this simply isn't a car. It's a rocket/jet with wheels attached. Just because a plane has wheels doesn't make it a car either. Yes, it's very difficult (to understate the issue) to keep any object traveling 1000 mph on the ground, but that doesn't negate the GP's point. It's not a car. It's not designed like a car would be, it's not propelled like a car would be, and it's not driven like a car would be.
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i would argue that not the design method, but rather the designed purpose would determine what an object is.
This thing is designed to move accross a hard surface supported by wheels, pretty much making it a car (notice i explicitely said wheels to rule out any funnymen with the 'but but hovercraft is a car' argument).
It might not be a car in the traditional ford sense of the word, you wont drive your kids to school in it, and it isnt practical for everyday use, but its purpose is still driving accross terain.
People, what a bunch of bastards