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The Car Faster Than a Speeding Bullet
pbahra writes "Formula 1 is seen as the apogee of engineering excellence and automotive power. So it says something that in Bloodhound SSC — the car that, if all goes well, in 2013 will shatter the current land speed record — the Cosworth Formula 1 engine is just the fuel pump. 'We are creating the ultimate car; we're going where no-one has gone before,' said Richard Noble, the project director. The car, which Mr. Noble says takes £10,000 a day just to keep it ticking over, will be powered by not one, but two other engines. The smaller one, the EJ200, is normally found in the British Royal Air Force's Typhoon jet. Its job is to get the 13.4 meter long car up to 350 mph. That's when the big one kicks in. The big one is the 18-inch diameter, 12-foot-long Falcon rocket, the largest of its kind ever made in the UK. Its job is to catapult the car through the sound barrier to its maximum speed of 1,050 mph. That is, literally, faster than a speeding bullet."
1050 miles per hour, at 1 foot per gallon.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
It's only a bad idea if you hit a bump and become airborne.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
My God
The real challenge is not getting a vehicle to go that speed... It's getting a vehicle to stay on the ground and under control at that speed.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
LYTTE KVIIL! Bleeiiigggh!
It's not a waste of resources if you learn something by doing it and then pass that knowledge on to others.
As far as subsidizing automobiles, I agree -- the entire automobile infrastructure should be paid for by gas tax and DMV fees. Americans should be paying as much as Europeans do for petrol.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
1050 MPH? Thats not very fast for a bullet.
Well, maybe it is fairly good for a pistol.
But it is about half the speed of a 5.56mm NATO round from an M-16.
If there's anything that can make a triple jet powered car cooler, it's launching it up off a ramp.
Work like this is what makes air, hybrid, and rocket-based transportation a reality. Condemning an experiment pushing the limits of engineering because you don't understand its value is pitifully short-sighted.
-- Adam McCormick
I believe the contingency plan is, "If the vehicle becomes airborne, place your head firmly between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
...one of the oldest, most famous (and frankly, most blatantly obvious) email hoaxes of all time, or are you well aware it's a hoax and simply trying to perpetuate it?
I'm tending towards the latter. There can't be more than five people left on the internet who *don't* know this story's rubbish any more, surely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JATO_Rocket_Car
Wait, wait, wait - so what happens if I fire a speeding bullet from the car while the car is in motion?
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Formula 1 is seen as the apogee of engineering excellence and automotive power.
F1 may be the pinnacle of engineering excellence (though Le Mans racers may give 'em a run for the their money...?), but in terms of raw "automotive power," NHRA Top Fuel has F1 beat by an order of magnitude (F1 ~ 1k bhp, Top Fuel ~ 10k bhp).
True, a dragster may not be able to run for more than a few seconds without blowing up, but that's beside the point...
People like you are why socialism doesn't work.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I bet you also buy all your goods locally produced, eh? Oh, wait, you have a computer which means you use the international product distribution system (including roads) you twit.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
At those speeds if you hit a bump it's a crapshoot as to which parts of you will be airborne and which will remain on the ground.
That'll cut down on the commute, but what's the CO2?
Which of course is the real thing here, this is, for all intents and purposes, a rocket that happens to fly horizontally, very, very close to the ground, that is using a few wheels for stability purposes. It's cool, but it would be cooler to me if the wheels were actually applying power to the road, instead of just being for stability.
might we say the only diff between something like this and a plane is that it has wheels that stay on the ground (hopefully!). It's got surfaces tuned for precise lift (or lack thereof), jet engines, and stabilizing fins.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
I took a tire off my car and dropped it on the ground. Suddenly the Earth had a wheel. Now the Earth is not only the largest car, but also the fastest -- going around the Sun at 67,000 mph....
Well, we already know how to control rockets that go into outer space, and we already know how to make things go fast on the ground.
So I'm not sure who's really going to benefit from putting those two things together.
We already know that going fast on the ground is nowhere near as fast as we can go by not being on the ground. A nice cruise missile would kick this thing's ass in a drag race.
If they use a formula 1 engine as a fuel pump, they can probably turn that engine off, to turn the rocket off.
But what useful knowledge would we gain from this experiment?
I mean, we get supersonic vehicle to stay on the ground at speeds where it would most definitely rather fly. It's not all that useful. We develop air drag model and shape for a vehicle which has no practical purpose, nor ever will. We spend lots of money and resources just to develop a variant of a jet plane we forcibly keep from flying, for no good reason but to call it a "car" and beat a "ground" speed record.
I still say it''s a waste: the little we can actually learn from this could be either learned using vastly less resources, or the resources could be used to learn something vastly more useful.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Also of interest, is the Australian Competitor. The "Aussie Invader" team is attempting to beat the Brits, while using a fraction of the budget.
I met Nobel and Andy the pilot/driver when Thrust SSC was going and they are both very enthusiastic, utterly committed to breaking land speed records and madder than a sack of badgers. Green said the weirdest thing about the whole drive was dealing with the brain's capacity to process relative speed, or rather the lack of ability to do so. At the end of the run he'd found himself getting ready to brake hard as the vehicle felt like it was going slowly enough and found he was still going around 400mph.
That's a good use our our civilization's precious natural resources.
Well that's kind of who we are as a civilization. We climb mountains because they are there. We landed on the moon, half because we wanted to challenge ourselves (and half to show our economic system was better than communism...).
It's a general feature of life to use resources like mad without thinking long-term until the resource is nearly depleted and we have no choice. Natural selection really grilled that lesson in deep before it gave us brains smart enough to begin to question it.
I hate to be the one to say it, but this does seem utterly pointless.
Not in the "we should be spending money on hospitals" sense, but rather "all you're doing is taking a rocket and trying to cripple its flying tendencies". There are so many more cool inspire-the-kids (which is the nominal point) projects they could do! Here are some crazier and more cool ideas I just had:
* A manned quadrocopter.
* A massive computer-controlled Archimedes mirror.
* An Asimov-style multi-speed travelator.
* A Back to the Future hover-board using active magnetic levitation.
Those would all be way more awesome than "Oh its a rocket with wheels attached". /rant.
I've heard tell that they're secretly planning to test their oscillation overthruster design.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
That is one slow bullet. Faster than a very slow bullet maybe, this is only modern pistol round velocities. Heck, some pistols like the FN Five-seven chuck rounds faster than this.
In itself it uses very little of the earth's resources, and nobody is considering making a production version of this car.
What they're hoping to do is encourage people to go into engineering. It will be engineers who find ways to make cars more efficient or to replace them entirely.
That's a good use our our civilization's precious natural resources. Sorry, but I hate cars, and I hate spending money maintaining the infrastructure that makes them practical (e.g. without tons of Gov't funds for roads, oil subsidies, etc cars wouldn't have caught on).
What use is a baby?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I mean, we get supersonic vehicle to stay on the ground at speeds where it would most definitely rather fly. It's not all that useful. We develop air drag model and shape for a vehicle which has no practical purpose, nor ever will
Bullet trains?
I really don't see how this rocket car and government highway subsidies are more than tangentially related. It just looks more like a random rant than anything else. I guess the best you can do is try to have everything you don't like taxed out of existence.
Most international shipping is done via ships, then it goes onto a train and finally a truck. No reason why roads could not be self funding via fuel taxes. If anything it would make the market forces act more rationally and would increase the use of trains thus decreasing fossil fuel consumption. What exactly have you got against a functioning rational market?
In my opinion, just because a rocket has wheels doesn't make it a car.
You can eat it for one. It also can be used when it grows to childhood for all kinds of labor.
So the job of the 800 break horse power internal combustion engine is to deliver fuel into the rocket engine (not the jet engine). But the rocket is a solid fuel booster (essentially a glorified fireworks motor). Err wait, what? What do you need a fuel pump for a solid fuel rocket booster?
Experiments and other stuff
What's the point, I guess. I guess that is what cliff walls are for, eh?
Technology that can be used to fly should not count for LAND-speed records. Strapping freaking jet engines and rockets onto a car and keeping it from lifting off just makes it a jet-rocket that never lifts off.
I guess that is a rather modest proposal....
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Exactly, without narrow-minded right-wing whiners Socialism would work just great.
Is something like this really a car? The only thing it has in common is tires. If I strap tires to a whale, would that also be a car?
If you cannot drive it through normal city traffic, can it really be considered a car? This thing would have problems just avoiding tall buildings, shorter ones would just be flown over.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I've just been scrolling through some of the comments above. "Why bother?" "Spend money on hospitals!" "What are we going to learn from this?" "This isn't really a car because the power isn't going through the wheels." "Waste of money!" "There are cooler projects to spend money on!"
You know what? Get over yourselves!
Every time I see a cool story posted on /. I find myself bracing for the impact of a squillion know-it-all comments about how useless it is from the usual armchair "I call bullshit" merchants who think they have all the answers to all the world's problems. Oftentimes it's American commenters from the "not invented here" lobby who want to pull a World Cup defence and say "Well it's a bullshit competition anyway so we don't care if we get whipped!" Grow the fuck up! The Brits have made the land speed record their own and I for one tip my hat to them. It's a great way to inspire kids to get involved in engineering, just like your toy with the heavy wings and expensive heat shield up there at the minute.
So the UK government is pushing a sponsorship-funded R&D project that doesn't have immediate commercial payoff. Big deal! What would you prefer to spend the money on? Another day in Iraq?
Jesus wept! Can we not have a story posted on here anymore without having to wade through all this obnoxious crap?
Oh, and I have karma to burn, so knock yourself out if you don't like a bit of straight talking.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Strictly speaking, the F1 engine is actually the oxidiser pump for the hybrid rocket engine - it runs the peroxide pump.
(i'll go back and lock myself in the basement now)
-- We don't understand software, and sometimes we don't understand hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights
I know someone who is involved in the Bloodhound project, working with a large education company over here (one of the sponsors of the car). There is a really big focus on the education side of things with this; they're touring schools and colleges doing presentations, along with a full size replica of the car. One of the big reasons for doing it is to get kids at school interested in science, maths and engineering and that seems like a pretty good idea because there has been a continuing decline in students going on to study those subjects at higher levels in the UK (and I believe most Western countries these days).
There's a bit about it on their website http://www.bloodhoundssc.com/education.cfm . I also doubt that the overall resource usage for the entire project is actually that high (I'd bet fewer resources used than most Hollywood films for instance), so if it increases interest in the areas they're targeting so that general science and engineering gets a bit more attention, I don't think that's too bad a result.
.
I have to agree. I love F1 R&D, but drag racing what amounts to a fighter jet without wings makes me yawn. **yawn**. Now, if it was a piston based IC engine, now you've got my attention!
Life is not for the lazy.
Pilot-in-training: "So my landing went well, don't you think?"
Flight Instructor: "Yes, but you forgot one thing. You are supposed to slow down before we land. We are now doing Mach 1, on the ground."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The decades of high-speed train engineering has involved reducing drag wherever possible. Infact some future concepts are looking at running maglev trains through vacuum tubes as the only possible way to reduce drag further and close the gap between train and aircraft fuel efficiency.
So no, I can't see a single benefit this gas-guzzling rocket-propelled coffin will have for Bullet trains.
Free to do what we want that does not harm others. Free to express ourselves. Free to take risks. Free to just do it because no one else has done it before.
Sure the results are not useful, but is racing useful? Are any spectator sports useful? It all comes down to, did someone enjoy it, did someone find the technical limitations they had to engineer around interesting? There are many reasons to do this and I am sure many others not to do it. Yet where is the harm? Before someone screams "THE ENVIRONMENT" - go shove it, I really think there are bigger fish to fry than this.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Your vote is for mediocrity. Duly noted. Please drive through. Nothing to see, for you.
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
Your vote is for mediocrity. Duly noted. Please drive through. Nothing to see, for you.
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
Its about land speed record now, but it was about the sound barrier a few years ago - this SSC series cars this guy has made - they were pursuing breaking sound barrier.
.....
They were claiming that sound barrier wasnt broken on land, because the device that did it (budweiser rocket) had 3 wheels and didnt run a full course of some distance back and forth in some given amount of time. Budweiser rocket's record was determined with an air force radar.
The catch is this, these rules are the rules of british association of motor sports or cars or something. apparently, some people somewhere have the opinion that breaking sound barrier should happen on 4 wheels, and a round circu
aah never mind. as you can understand, like any other sane people on the face of the planet, i dont give a flying fuck about what some bunch of people who banded as an association somewhere think - sound barrier is going over ~340m/s, and a 3 wheeled rocket powered device has broken it long before anyone else.
im saying this, even tho im not american. so, go figure.
Read radical news here
See snopes for the rocket car story.. its a classic meme in internet history
http://www.snopes.com/autos/dream/jato.asp
F1 may be the pinnacle of engineering excellence
http://jalopnik.com/#!373884/f1-boss-max-mosley-caught-with-five-hookers-in-nazi-orgy-video-scandal
True, a dragster may not be able to run for more than a few seconds without blowing up
Well, how true that fits into this context.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Now why does that sound like a terrible idea?
Probably because they've engineered the crap out of this car.
I hate spending money maintaining the infrastructure that makes them practical
This little experiment is about as far from "make it practical" as it gets, so why all the hate?
I still say it''s a waste: the little we can actually learn from this could be either learned using vastly less resources, or the resources could be used to learn something vastly more useful.
Sometimes you need to do something that seems wasteful today to open the door for useful things down the line. Was it clear 140 years ago that Babbage's Analytical Engine was a key stepping stone towards pocket-sized super computers?
Formula 1 is seen as the apogee of engineering excellence and automotive power.
Formula 1 is the apogee of engineering excellence, but that's engineering excellence under the restrictions on car development imposed by the FIA. As a consequence of those restrictions it's very easy to build a car that's better than a Formula 1 car. There are limits on the aero package and the engine size, for example. Features like traction control are banned and so on.
The FIA imposes restrictions on car development for three reasons:
1. Safety. So drivers can walk away from this sort of thing with just a few bruises: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIAG8DvUc9c
2. To promote good racing (i.e. making the races are competitive and unpredictable).
3. Cost control. Formula 1 imposes cost limits to ensure that the larger teams don't just out spend the smaller teams in car development.
Everybody has something that they wish the government didn't spend tax money on. I for one, wish the defense budget was an order of magnitude lower. There are lots of people who worry about their tax money paying for an abortion. You don't like the automotive infrastructure. Of all the things that might get scaled way back, I'm guessing "roads" isn't even a consideration for a huge majority of the voters in the US. I'm also thinking that most people believe the rise of the car was good for America. It certainly had some benefits.
It's a general feature of life to use resources like mad without thinking long-term until the resource is nearly depleted and we have no choice.
And it's an effective strategy too. Economically, oil doesn't do anything for us in the ground. We aren't employing people with it nor do we do anything useful with it that way. The only drawback to using oil now is that its use results in certain kinds of pollution and possible global warming, which would be a significant inconvenience for us in the future.
It's not like investing. You don't get more value out of it by setting it aside.
I think we should restrict all components to wood and see who wins. No nails, screws, or glue. Choose a hill of your liking.
Why is it any of your business what they do? Because you aren't interested, you want it stopped. Fascinating.
That's a good use our our civilization's precious natural resources. Sorry, but I hate cars, and I hate spending money maintaining the infrastructure that makes them practical (e.g. without tons of Gov't funds for roads, oil subsidies, etc cars wouldn't have caught on).
So? I hate busses and trains. You can't carry significant cargo. You're locked into their schedule. You can only travel where they go, which means you're stuck in the over-polluted crowded stinking cities of this world. Besides, cars would have caught on without government funds for roads and oil subsidies.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
If there's nothing to be gained by it then by all rights you should already be able to do it but you couldn't explain all of the machines necessary to accomplish it even if you wanted to. Since it hasn't been done yet, there must be more work to be done to make it work and that is the very essence of engineering. Where do you think new advances in engineering come from if you believe adding new, hard to satisfy, constrains and pushing physical limits of both humanity and science aren't "useful?"
-- Adam McCormick
You hate a technology that has been a massive boon to humanity. It may not be perfect, but then what is? Those imperfections are what people are trying to address on a daily basis.
This vehicle might seem pointless on a superficial level. I bet there were people who also thought launching Sputnik into orbit was pointless. But look at what it's brought us. A lot of technological advance, probably most, came about via indirect routes. It's not like someone sat around one day and decided out of the blue we're going to build a mobile phone, an airplane, or a car. A lot had to happen beforehand to enable these things.
I'm curious to know if you would consider the entertainment industry a waste of money and resources. While, I firmly believe that entertainment is vital to the human existence I could easily argue that the American entertainment industry is massively wasteful, far more so than most other industries. And the vast majority of innovations within the entertainment industry, the few that exist, are mostly self-serving.
My thoughts exactly! If the wheels are not applying the power to the ground then it is just a plain that has failed to take off.
Actually. I have a big problem with this concept.
The drive is not going through the wheels at all, but is based on thrust from the rear of the vehicle.
This really isn't a car. It has no transmission. It really is a jet/rocket with a low trajectory.
I call shenanigans on this and the Thrust vehicles.
True, because then you wouldn't be setting the land speed record anymore.
The British battle cruiser HMS Hood burned 7 tons per hour at 15 knots, 70 tons per hour at 32 knots. British engines of that era were notoriously inefficient compared to US engines, I think about one half.
(back of the envelope slackness in operation)
One ton is 2000 pounds, 7 tons is 14000 pounds. One hour is 3600 seconds, which goes into 14000 four times, 4 pounds a second. One gallon is six pounds, so 2/3 gallon. One knot is 2 feet per second. So 30 feet for 2/3 gallon or 45 feet per gallon. Double the efficiency is 90 feet per gallon. 45K tons battle cruiser vs 80K ton aircraft carrier with even better engines and hull form is probably a wash (power required is not linear with displacement).
Naw, way off, 960 inches per gallon, two orders of magnitude.
Of course I probably screwed this up. But what the heck. Post corrections here!
Infuriate left and right
I mean, we get supersonic vehicle to stay on the ground at speeds where it would most definitely rather fly. It's not all that useful. We develop air drag model and shape for a vehicle which has no practical purpose, nor ever will. We spend lots of money and resources just to develop a variant of a jet plane we forcibly keep from flying, for no good reason but to call it a "car" and beat a "ground" speed record.
Actually "we" don't get anything and "we" don't do anything. They are going to do it, they will pay for it, they will have all the frustration and fun, and they will get the bragging rights. You can go do whatever you think is useful like complain about other people being wasteful.
It's their money, their hobby, their time. It's nobody else's business.
Infuriate left and right
Thanks! That's exactly how I had heard it. Interestingly false indeed.
Cheers
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
true, that would be better, but better still would be to use the funds and expertise in pursuit of something more likely to have a practical application rather than continually chasing an antique 'record' that hasn't had any true meaning since 1950 or so just for the advert wow factor...
A plain plane. On a plain.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
I think most cruise missiles are subsonic
I guess that's true. We socialists do tend to be sticks in the mud. That one Sheik's indoor ski lodge in Saudi Arabia wouldn't fly in the Netherlands, Canada, or any place where dog-eat-dog capitalism isn't king. On the plus side it's cold enough there you don't need to build a lodge indoors to ski.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I, for one, am glad I live in a world where the practical dominates my day-to-day, but the fantastical is occasionally made reality.
Get your head out of your bank acocunt balance, and enjoy the dream... Especially since you're not writing the checks, and the dream looks like a fun one.
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Not driven by wheels: check
Touching the ground at all times: check
Railed vehicles can be interesting. And since they've already gone faster this attempt is all about staying on the ground.
Mach 8.5 record for unmanned.
Only 630-something mph manned, but with an open cockpit!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_speed_record_for_railed_vehicles#Rocket_sled
If you're into believing Wikpedia: 470.444
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel-driven_land_speed_record
or non-Wikipedia:
http://www.teamvesco.com/
Probably because they've engineered the crap out of this car.
Can it turn a corner? At any speed?
>>Exactly, without narrow-minded right-wing whiners Socialism would work just great.
I know! Speak truth to power, comrade.
If we had every school kid in America contribute an idea to the design of this supercar, just imagine how fast it could go!!
It mostly already does. It was depleted by $8B in 2008 (since the tax wasn't raised since 1993), but a raise of just $0.10 per gallon. will bring in an extra $20B a year.
We already do. Our government just doesn't slap it's citizen's with the same amount of taxes yours does. It's the European governments that take the excessive taxes and put it in the general fund for everything.
Look, you cannot just double the price of gasoline in America overnight. Since the 1920's, this country built itself on cheap fuel prices, and that exploded post-WW2 with suburbanization. You don't see that in just the cars, but all the houses with shitty insulation that take 3x the amount of energy to heat/cool than it should. I don't think it's good, but it's the way it is, and to overcome that, there needs to be a lengthy transition period where people can get smaller cars and demand better built dwellings because those costs are ratcheting up.
But I don't think fuel should be increased for the hell of it. It should be increase to fund 2 things. 1, it should increase to gap any budget shortfall in maintenance and then again to fix bad infrastructure.
But 2nd, it should increase because fuel right now is being subsidized invisibly by our military. The US military has bases throughout the world and has an interest and presence in M.E. only because of oil and shipping it safely here. The defense budget is so huge, if it were really increased to reflect that, gas would really increase by double or triple. But before you laugh about being correct about the gas taxes not reflecting the infrastructure it takes to deliver oil, none of the European nations except maybe Britain, contribute an iota militarily either, they basically get a free ride from us.
If done transitionally, it would be better, plus let alternatives develop that can't compete right now at the artificially militarily subsidized prices.
they may have engineered the crap out of the car, but i think driving it would scare the crap out of me
da da da dum indeed.
The decades of high-speed train engineering has involved reducing drag wherever possible. Infact some future concepts are looking at running maglev trains through vacuum tubes as the only possible way to reduce drag further and close the gap between train and aircraft fuel efficiency.
So no, I can't see a single benefit this gas-guzzling rocket-propelled coffin will have for Bullet trains.
Umm, trains are already far more efficient than aircraft... just not at high speeds (which is what I assume you meant - all that dense air trains have to deal with is a huge impediment to high speed efficiency). A quick search suggests that the German ICE trains consume 70-120 MJ/km in operation, while something like the A380 fully loaded uses 3,000 to 4,000 gph at cruise, which translates to approximately (33 MJ/liter * 3.8 liters/gallon = 125.4 MJ/Gallon -> 376200 to 501600 MJ/hour; at 945 km/h that gives...) 398 to 530 MJ/km. Of course the ICE train is only cruising at ~200 km/h on average compared to 945, (and I'm not sure about passenger capacity - I believe on the order of ~500 passengers per trainset) but still - more (energy) efficient.
Keep in mind that much of the cost of the US military and the activities in Iraq and Afghanistan are the usual government spending money to spend money.
Nirvana!
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
It did inspire one of the better first season Mythbusters episode.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Should have included a Link.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
(roll music from 6 million dollar man)
da da da dum indeed.
At a bit over 1,500 fps
What graphics card are you using?
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
True, their "resource usage" isn't high for a project of this sort. However, just think of all the other cool stuff they can make, at even lower cost, that can inspire young people. I mean, think of robots and self-replicating 3-D printers, stuff that the young people themselves could clone, even at a cruder and smaller scale.
Here, it's mostly watch and learn, as you yourself have pointed out:
And they're likely to be more inspired by the video of a space plane soaring up to the heavens or a space probe touching down on the Moon. If I were a child, I'd definitely be more inspired at the site of a walking and dancing 2-foot high "toy" robot than the immobile mock-up of the world's supposedly fastest car.
That story is an urban legend submitted to the Darwin awards years ago, entirely untrue.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Wile E. Coyote uses stuff like that all of the time; gets them from a company called Acme.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Yeah, just a plane that doesn't take off, waste of resources, yada, yada.
I feel the same way sometimes; but if you don't want to do this, is there an alternative that's potentially productive, yet still satisfies the "need for speed"?
How about 143 mph with a 50cc engine
Of course, I'm sure that to some people both of these things will seem silly. I find the 50cc more interesting; because it's something I might actually be able to finance if I really wanted it. The point is though, whether you're horking a huge jet engine onto a car, or putting really tall gears on a 50cc, you never know what you might learn from it.
The space race had the biggest rockets after all, and arguably the very computer you're typing on is a spinoff from the space race.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
No, that doesn't follow at all.
I didn't say adding constraints wasn't useful, I said adding needless constraints wasn't useful.
Oh. Wait...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
You obviously don't pay attention. How could an AC have a UID? harryfeet at least uses his eyes.
Infuriate left and right
I nerdgasmed over this. Made my day.
If someone can get this to actually work, it may save lives in the future! http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1995-04.html Sorry...
- If we aren't supposed to eat animals, then why are they made out of meat? - Steven Wright
Izambard Kingdom Brunel didn't have to build the Great Eastern or the Clifton Suspension bridge, arguably these feats of engineering weren't required. However the act of building them is the essence of engineering itself. Its about pushing boundries with the materials at your disposal and doing things that can't be done.
Really?
1050 mph = 1540 ft/s = 470 m/s
Faster than most handgun bullets, yes, but rifles routinely launch bullets at twice (or more) that speed.
This is not just about gaining knowledge, but about inspiring younger generations of people to get into engineering or related fields.
What does space race and Hubble have to do with breaking the land speed record using a rocket?
If anything, the best expression in regards with "younger generation getting into engineering" is not inspiring but tricking - you see, the vast majority of engineers rarely appreciate wastage: there are so many useful things that can be built and technical problems to be solved if only resources wouldn't be wasted somewhere else.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
But what useful knowledge would we gain from this experiment?
I mean, we get supersonic vehicle to stay on the ground at speeds where it would most definitely rather fly. It's not all that useful. We develop air drag model and shape for a vehicle which has no practical purpose, nor ever will. We spend lots of money and resources just to develop a variant of a jet plane we forcibly keep from flying, for no good reason but to call it a "car" and beat a "ground" speed record.
I still say it''s a waste: the little we can actually learn from this could be either learned using vastly less resources, or the resources could be used to learn something vastly more useful.
You can't say that the car would "most definitely rather fly." Supersonic jets rely on a supersonic airfoil design to fly. It's just as easy to design a supersonic airfoil to give downward thrust.
The video article (and you) are overlooking the actual hard part, which is going to be managing the shock waves that the supersonic vehicle sheds. If the design is not sufficient, they will reflect off the ground and then impinge on the car frame, creating severe turbulence and oscillatory instabilities that will either destroy the vehicle outright or cause it to lose control and roll. Solving this problem is the real key to operating a supersonic car.
It also would be an incredibly useful technology to master. It's not only important for driving a supersonic car, but for understanding the dynamics of two supersonic bodies in close proximity.
Why shouldn't it? We pour millions into movies and television shows that vilify science and portray anyone who can do more than addition in their heads as undesirable mates. This is going to be expensive to combat.
So, let's start a race between who's able to waste the most, I'm damn'd sure it will be very educational indeed! Not to mention that movies/TV will be so ashamed they'd lost the race, they'll close the shop and go into the retirement home.
Heck, combating wastage may be OK of a goal, the proposed means are totally stupid to my mind.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
>But what useful knowledge would we gain from this experiment?
Advances in medical technology when the guy crashes
Huh! Better build a cannon for this, much cheaper way to blow the guy into a goo.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Making a vehicle go faster than the speed of sound doesn't involve just one big engine as you say it, but a host of others.
If "Making a vehicle go faster than the speed of sound" is your goal, I'm sure there are ways to achieve it cheaper than using a rocket.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Izambard Kingdom Brunel didn't have to build the Great Eastern or the Clifton Suspension bridge, arguably these feats of engineering weren't required. However the act of building them is the essence of engineering itself. Its about pushing boundries with the materials at your disposal and doing things that can't be done.
Except that what he built was used by others directly. Do you think, once it has been built, you'll be able to use the Bloodhound yourself together with thousands others?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Can it turn a corner? At any speed?
Sure it can! It's fairly easy. You decrease the speed down to zero, then put a trolly under the front wheel. Move the vehicle until it points to your new target on the horizon. There!
Just remember to bring lots of horizon.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
It does not follow that just because there's nothing useful to be gained from a particular endeavour, it can't be done.
And what are the practical applications of said feat ?
Building what is essentially a jet that doesn't take off, is pretty pointless.
No, "useful" would be performing some engineering that has actual benefits. Like, say, making that jet engine twice as efficient or half the weight. Or, researching the aerodynamics on a type of ground vehicle that might actually one day be used at those sort of speeds, like a maglev train.
If you can think of a point in driving a small, ground-based vehicle to that speed by something as wasteful as a jet engine, by all means elaborate on it.
huh?
your only real point has an easy solution - move closer to your job, or choose a job closer to your home. it's not rocket science (hehe).
if you're out in the burbs, you can even grow your own food and reduce your footprint further (or allowing you to drive more with the same footprint). if you're in a rural area, get food straight from the farm.
if you can afford the extra rent, you might find living closer in (or, *gasp* taking public transport) actually works out cheaper overall once all those fuel, rego and maintenance costs are eliminated or at least severely reduced.
Even if we don't make trains as "efficient" as aircraft, I think the benefits of running trains on electricity when oil is $200/gal are going to be apparent. You don't have to be super-efficient when you can drink up as much wind power you need to propel yourself at 200mph across the midwest. Until aircraft can get batteries with the same energy as Jet-A, the efficiency comparison is meaningless.
Assuming I'm doing the math correctly 1050 MPH is only 1540 feet per second. That's half again as fast as a typical .22. The current crop of "speeding bullets" is pushing around 4200 f/s.
That's only about 1/6 the way through the speed range of a typical bullet. I'd say when you get to 5/6 of the higher end you can begin calling it "speeding".
The only supersonic commercial airliner (Concorde) has been retired...
It wouldn't be speeding if it wasn't breaking that limit now, would it?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Aside from the obvious engineering research benefits that Richard Noble and his predecessors such as Craig Breedlove have brought about, in addition to the decades-long tradition of high-speed research at Daimler (Benz had built a diesel engine capable of speeds in excess of 200mph in the 1920's, and used these vehicles often to test high speed safety features including crumple zones, ABS and airbags, the first two which they had made standard)... but here's a fun fact for those questioning the noteworthiness of 1050mph as it relates to bullets...
35 years ago, in 1976, the SR-71A Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft broke the world speed record for a fixed-wing aircraft (excluding rocket-powered types, e.g. Bell X-15) at 2193 mph (3216 ft/sec). That is faster than the muzzle velocity of a .30-06 bullet (2910 ft/sec max).
It is NOT a piston driven engine, so who cares about a grounded jet engine.
We get the vast bulk of our oil from places outside the middle east.
The largest source of US oil is Canada, by far. The next four spots are, in order, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Venezuela.
Justifying the US military budget as protecting our oil source is a little disingenuous.
When many Americans rail against socialism they're railing against the idea of a social democracy, as practiced in Europe these days.
Go to Germany and ask them if their country "works". The Germans I know, at least, are pretty happy with the state of their country, and it seems to have a high standard of living and a healthy economy...
Glad to see someone else understand this -- if fossil fuels were taxed at a sensible rate to really reflect the environmental cost of using them, and the various subsidies given to their use (roads, etc.), then market forces would go a long way toward sorting the problem out.
In this instance, it's believed that the car is the first ever supersonic vehicle to have a normally aspirated engine on board that needs to keep running – so we'll at very least learn how to control air flow into an engine when going that fast. Secondly, we'll learn how to build wheels that can spin rediculously fast without disintegrating, which I'm certain will be bloody useful for many other applications. Thirdly we'll learn a lot about aerodynamics –keeping a vehicle on the ground at 1000mph is a lot harder than keeping it flying at 1000mph.
I'm sure there are *many* other things we'll learn in the process, that I've neglected to mention here.
Roads? Where they're going they don't need roads... Let's face it this has to be a sneaky time travel experiment
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
It's going to be driven by a contortionist?
There is a quote somewhere about it (which I forget), but I can't help but think that of all the wonderful things we've done with oil over the years, it seems like such a waste to burn most of it.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Which of course is the real thing here, this is, for all intents and purposes, a rocket that happens to fly horizontally, very, very close to the ground, that is using a few wheels for stability purposes. It's cool, but it would be cooler to me if the wheels were actually applying power to the road, instead of just being for stability.
You'd need a fucking big bicycle chain to cope with the power of a rocket...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Because we can?
Why couldn't they have an aircraft ejector seat?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Lubricants maybe? Getting those wheels to continue to spin at those speeds might be an issue. I don't know I don't build supercars, but often it's the little things that make a difference to society.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
Sounds like a great idea to me. I've seen a couple in the flesh. Take a look at Laffin-Gas for a current example, or Eric Teboul for a rocket powered bike (which even I think sounds like a terrible idea, but it seems to work in practice).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Bullets tend to topple with wind gusts, when they hit the ground they spiral madly and ricochet. (e.g. the largest footage of speedboat accidents) If the design works, the miracle engineering will not be in the motors(Jets) but in the wheel bearing (electromagnetically suspended...I dunno) miracle bearings. As many have learned from powerful guns with short barrels....power is nothing without control.
yeah, but what's the road and where's friction for the wheel?
You can't handle the truth.
I'm worried who in the world will drive a F1 car with an engine of a RAF Typhoon inside it, maybe Michael Schumacher? I mean, it's quite silly, in a good way. 1,050 MPH is a hell of a speed, but it cannot outrun maybe the velocity of an upcoming M1 Garand.
Because an ejector seat firing downward in an upside down plane at 10,000 feet is no big deal.
If this thing flips or rolls, the ejector seat only would be useful if the bottom of it contained the tombstone.
This sentence no verb.
Well, we've done a lot of wonderful things by burning it too, so that quote doesn't seem all that interesting.
Where do you live that all housing prices and employment opportunities are at parity over 100% of the city?
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
I admire the zeal that people have when it comes to setting new records. But really, is this necessary? I would be more interested in seeing them build a "car" that uses sunlight to recharge and then gets mom around town dropping off and picking up kids, buying groceries and running miscellaneous errands. I think momentum and mass were overlooked when I want to get this thing to the grocery store. Besides where do i park it.
Sounds like a rocket with wheels on it. Hardly qualifies as a "car" IMHO.