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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.
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.
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.
People like you are why socialism doesn't work.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
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.
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 guess that is a rather modest proposal....
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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
And you don't want to see that? Especially with slow-motion replay?
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.
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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.
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?
It's not a pure solid fuel rocket. It contains solid fuel, but then they pump hydrogen peroxide thru the rocket as an oxidizer. That's being pumped by the F1 engine. Seeing how it has to pump one ton of HTP in 22 seconds, you can see why they need that much power for the pump. More details on the rocket engine.
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
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
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.
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?
Yes. Its my grandfather's Cadillac.
If you cannot drive it through normal city traffic, can it really be considered a car?
I see you've met my grandfaather.
This thing would have problems just avoiding tall buildings, shorter ones would just be flown over.
So, he gets the pedals mixed up once in a while. The DMV says he still can drive.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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
Alright! Someone understands!
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.