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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."
Righto, time to ask the serious questions! But what happens when they hit 88 miles per hour?
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Why don't they make it drive on a treadmill?
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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Who in their right mind would trust an Intel FPU with their life?
Yeah, it may look like a troll, but some of us remember the FDIV bug.
Every billion, or so, calculations might be wrong, but, since you never know WHICH is wrong in an application, it must be assumed that they ALL are.
Aside from the fact that that is a different world record in itself, I would like to point you to TFA which goes to great lengths to explain to complexity of even keeping this thing on the ground, so it's hardly some trivial feat.
763 mph=1 228 km/h
1000 mph=1609 km/h
Chronologically late.
At last!
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
Please do remember that, originally, "car" was any vehicle drawn by animals.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
redshift.
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.
Depends on if it's a fixed aero-surface vehicle or not. F1 cars had variable surface aero-parts for one or two years before they were outright banned. The idea was that you could increase the angle of attack to increase downpressure in the corners, but make the car aerodynamically neutral in the straightaways so you're spending more power on thrust rather than dividing it between thrust and downforce. Depending on how the rules for "world's fastest car" are written, how the aero is done determines how impressive this really is. If John Carmack can write a javascript to control thrust for a vertical takeoff rocket (Armadillo Aerospace), you can design a fast car with dynamic aerosurfaces. Building a fixed aero car that's neutral at 1000mph but won't fly into the air and flip when you hit a rock is a lot harder to do. Check out this hella sweet video of a Le Mans car doing exactly that at 220mph: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM4guvo6Ifo
I'll admit this post was an excuse to post that video, but damn if it isn't cool. And that's at a quarter of the speed at which they'll be attempting this. It's not as easy as it looks.
Here's another cool video of the same thing happening. It's relatively common, even though they design against this exact sort of thing from happening. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y65oUlBMSUs
moox. for a new generation.
Tsutomu never actually got his degree. I have long lost touch with him, so I don't know whether he ever went back to school, but at least for many years he was working as a research physicist with no degree of any sort. Not even a BS. I actually got better grades than he did. The reason Tsutomu didn't do so well is school was that he was spending all his time publishing original research.
Anyway, Tsutomu got hired away from Caltech by Los Alamos National Laboratory. His first project there was a cellular automaton implemented in hardware. It was a massively parallel computer, with each "processor" implementing the operation of a single cell. The first cellular automaton was the well-known Conway's Game of Life, but there are many other kinds. Some cellular automata are designed to solve specific kinds of problems. In Tsutomu's case, he was simulating supersonic fluid flow, for use in designing fighter planes, reentry vehicles and the like.
He described his device as "About as expensive as a Cray, but it solves just that one problem at a thousand times the speed of a Cray".
I don't have a link or a literature reference for you. I don't know whether he published an unclassified paper about it, but if he did it shouldn't be hard to dig up.
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Once again it fails to get off the ground.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Anybody knows the point of this?
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile#Etymology
The...name car is believed to originate from the Latin word carrus or carrum ("wheeled vehicle"), or the Middle English word carre ("cart") (from Old North French), or karros (a Gallic wagon).
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I remember watching an F1 race where just before the finish line the guy in second place does a 360deg flip lands on his wheels then rolls across the finish line still in secind place. I love youtube, took me 5 minutes to find it at 2:13 on this compilation.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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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This story made me think of the phrase "not enough of him left to fill a matchbox".
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There are 3 teams racing to break this record. The Brits, the Aussies and a USA/Canada team.
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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
Let me see.. Rocket engine, uplift much higher than weight, 1000mph...
That's a jet plane, not a car. Sure, it got better landing wheels than normal, and a bit special body, but it's still a goddamn jet plane.
If that's a car, we've had flying cars for over 50 years now.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
The...name car is believed to originate from the Latin word carrus or carrum ("wheeled vehicle")...
Excellent point! You've totally refuted the OP's point about this not being a real car.
Let me show you a few "cars."
Here's one!
Here is another "car"
These are all really fast cars!
There's no separate league for cars driven by internal combustion engine, but here is the fastest of those.
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Only in the 2000-2004 F1 series*. Each race in the series assigns points, so a 2nd place (2pts) is far superior to a DNF (fleet+1, or 9pts). You can recover from a 2nd, or even a 3rd place and still win the series, but after one DNF you're just racing due to your sponsorship contract, hoping another team has more DNF or DNS than you do by the end.
*2000-2004 is when Schumacher wiped the floor with the F1 series, pretty much running uncontested in 1st place with the Ferrari team, basically uncontested for five years.
moox. for a new generation.
Hopefully it includes SYNC or some other means of hands-free cell phone use. You know, for that ever-important phone call. Can't really consider it a car until the driver can yak away while driving...
If you come second in every race of the season then it's very likely you will win the championship.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Umm...I've been watching F1 for a lot of years, and I'm pretty sure you never got more points for a DNF than for a second place. DNF = 0 points (except in very unusual circumstances), 2nd = 8 last year or 18 this year.
As for a DNF killing your season, that's crap. Button won the championship last year and got 1 DNF, Hamilton did the same the year before. In 2007 Raikkonen won the championship despite 2 DNFs, likewise Alonso in 2006. For a driver to complete every race in the season is pretty rare, particularly if they're actually competitive (and thus driving hard).
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