If an airship can fly at 80 kts (which is very fast indeed for an airship), it will *not* require 100% more power to increase its speed by 5 kts. That's just preposterous. Drag probably increases with the square of the speed just like (roughly) for airplanes. Obviosuly an airship will have more drag at any speed because of its huge frontal area, but the shape of the drag curve will not be drastically different. Certainly not to the point of requiring twice as much power for 5% more speed.
So the comparison with a small plane that has a cruising speed of 80 kts is in fact perfectly valid.
The GGP was talking about making headway against a strong headwind. In a steady headwind, any airplane with an 80 kt cruising speed will see the same effect from that headwind. The fact that the airship happens to be really big does not change the fact that it simply gets the same wind speed vector added to its airspeed.
Gusts would just make the flight more turbulent, but would not change the average speed much.
There are legal reasons requiring companies to react to violations of their copyright and trademarks, since they may otherwise legally lose them. However, they could have just reacted with "place a notice on your website that we own all the trademarks and copyrights but gave you explicit permission to keep this excellent remake on your website as long as it's limited to part of the first level."
It's more publicity for their game and may actually lead to more sales from people trying out the web version and then buying the real thing. But alas, lawyers don't think that way.
I wonder how it would survive a missile strike. OK, the helium is not going to explode, but if it leaks out through a big hole in the hull, you're going to go down anyway. You'll need lots of compartments to limit that, and those compartments would add quite a lot of weight.
and making much headway against a strong headwind is going to take a lot of power with that much windage.
Just to clarify a common misconception about wind and "windage": many people seem to think that wind affects airplanes the same way as cars, needing more power to keep moving in a headwind. That is not the case. Airplanes fly in the air, they don't care about the ground. If that air happens to be moving, they move along with it. It's an extra speed vector to be added to airspeed, nothing more. Like walking on a conveyor belt, you don't get more or less tired (per minute) when walking at the same pace, but you do move more quickly or slowly depending on the direction of the belt. Airplanes don't "feel" crosswinds either, they just fly straight through the air, but end up moving sideways relative to the ground because of the addition of the two speed vectors.
The only reason why airplanes often use more power in a headwind, is because the pilot may elect to fly faster to (partially) compensate for the wind. An 80 kt airship in a 40 kt headwind will only have a ground speed of 40 kt, so the pilots may well choose to increase power to get a higher ground speed. The economic optimum speed for total fuel consumption over a given distance is at a higher airspeed in a headwind, and at a lower airspeed in a tailwind, simply because the math works out that way: the airship in a 40 kt headwind will get a 10% boost in ground speed (44 i.o. 40) for only a 5% boost in airspeed (84 i.o. 80), which shifts the economic optimum speed upward. But fuel consumption per minute at the same airspeed is the same no matter what the wind is.
So headwinds don't affect the airship any more than it affects a small plane with a cruising speed of 80 kts.
Changing gusts of wind are a different matter, of course. The plane or airship definitely does "feel" those.
I think that's just a small part of it, I know plenty of rich people who give their children junk food, and poor people who make a big effort to only buy healthy stuff.
I think the researchers simply got cause and effect mixed up.
People with smaller brains tend to end up with a lower income and get less education. And their kids end up inheriting the smaller brain from their parents.
Obviously that doesn't mean than all poor people are stupid, just that statistically, people with larger brains tend to do better in life, and this results in a correlation when you look at a sufficiently large number of people.
Yeah, they'll take it down. They wouldn't want people who have never played the game before to get a taste of the first level and then go and buy the real game, would they? Best to leave them in the dark.
The real reason for the secrecy of confessions is much cleverer.
If you tell people they should confess their sins, and their secrets are safe with the priest, the end result is that the priest knows all the secrets of the village. Need I say more? The local priest used to be the most powerful person in the village, subtly using his knowledge to play the people and instill fear in them. Brilliant idea.
In the US there is no true doctor-patient confidentiality when it comes to pilots. The medical certificate application requires a pilot to list all visits to a doctor in the last three years and the reason (item 19). Item 18 asks if you have ever in your life been diagnosed as having a plethora of conditions, including "(m) mental disorders of any sort; depression, anxiety, etc."
And it's obviously completely impossible to give false answers to those questions. No, never seen a doctor. No depression, nothing, perfectly fine.
What a wonderful idea, armed pilots in the cockpit:-(
But anyway, even with two unarmed pilots in the cockpit, one of the pilots can still crash the plane if he wants to. It won't be quite as clean as a nice long descent straight into a mountain, but if you just unexpectedly yank the controls down and to one side during approach, the other pilot probably won't have time to do anything about it. Especially on an airbus where they can fight over the controls with the override button (the last to press the override button has controls, so controls could go back and forth indefinitely, making recovery impossible).
And then there's always the crash axe or fire extinguisher. Hey, look at that plane over there... wham.
Of course this kind of action would be much more agressive and less likely to be performed by an introvert depressed person. Locking the door and starting a descent is psychologically easier than physically attacking someone or fighting over the controls. But no safety measure can ever be completely fool proof. People with power can do powerful things, not just in airplanes.
How long do the pilots hold out when the hijackers slaughter the passengers one by one outside their door, on their camera?
I would immediately make an announcement for everyone to fasten their seatbelts, wait 5 seconds, then create massive "turbulence". We can do -1g and +2.5g, so we can throw the hijackers against the ceiling and back onto the ground hard a few times. Then we can give the signal for the other crew members or passengers to overpower the attackers.
But in no case would we open the cockpit door. If they take over and crash the plane, everyone is dead anyway. So no matter how many people they slaughter in the cabin, that death toll can never be higher than what we'd get if we let them in.
Fast forward a few years. Depressed cabin crew member, alone with one pilot in the cockpit, hits him in the head with the crash axe which is stored behind the first officer's seat. Or with one of the fire extinguishers.
There's no winning this. If you can't trust the crew members, all bets are off.
That's a different story. They were thoroughly confused by the contradictory warnings and indications they were getting. Overspeed and stall at the same time, stall warning that disappeared but came back when they momentarily did the right thing by pushing the nose down (making them reverse the very action that could have saved them), etc.
It's easy to see afterwards what went wrong, but a lot harder when you're actually in there and get bombarded with contradictory indications.
That's priceless. All sorts of security measures to make your life difficult, but then in the end you can get around the entire system with a simple phone call. Let me guess, you have to give your mother's maiden name?
Oh, by the way, I was talking about actual flight simulators used for training pilots, not PC simulators. I realise that may not have been 100% clear in my original post.
If there's one thing simulators can very accurately simulate, it's the programming of the computers. In fact, they often use the same computers as the airplane, or only slightly modified ones, and just feed simulated sensor data into them. If the simulator does something different than the airplane, that's a bug.
And anyway, the flight control laws are clearly explained in the training courses. So yes, you can go into alternate or even direct law, and at that point the protections are disabled and you can turn the plane upside down if you want. Any Airbus pilot knows this.
A friend of mine saw them record one of their "races" in the alps. Some big trucks arrived with supercars on them, they were carefully offloaded, they drove them up a few hundred meters, then they loaded them all back onto the trucks for the next shoot. On air, that was a neck and neck race between the three of them.
I wouldn't exactly try to do barrel rolls in the air (although this should be possible without problems), but we do have a relatively new procedure to go into alternate law in a very specific situation where the flight control computers erroneously detect a stall due to frozen angle of attack probes. In that situation, the plane pitches down uncontrollably, and the only way to override it is by turning off certain computers so you go into alternate law.
If you locked it into the IGS approach in Sion, a small Swiss airport surrounded by mountains, it would crash just fine.
(IGS works exactly like ILS, instrument landing system, only it doesn't actually lead you straight to the runway but rather to some point in the vicinity, requiring a rather long visually flown segment before landing)
Not without the pilots telling it to. An automatic approach is actually more work than a manual one. We even need periodic training to remain certified for it. And the plane won't extend flaps or landing gear by itself.
I like to think I could guide a cabin attendant to land the plane on autopilot, but I heard someone tried this once in the simulator (without the guiding pilot being able to actually see the cockpit, just a simulated radar screen) and they ended up crashing.
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If an airship can fly at 80 kts (which is very fast indeed for an airship), it will *not* require 100% more power to increase its speed by 5 kts. That's just preposterous. Drag probably increases with the square of the speed just like (roughly) for airplanes. Obviosuly an airship will have more drag at any speed because of its huge frontal area, but the shape of the drag curve will not be drastically different. Certainly not to the point of requiring twice as much power for 5% more speed.
So the comparison with a small plane that has a cruising speed of 80 kts is in fact perfectly valid.
The GGP was talking about making headway against a strong headwind. In a steady headwind, any airplane with an 80 kt cruising speed will see the same effect from that headwind. The fact that the airship happens to be really big does not change the fact that it simply gets the same wind speed vector added to its airspeed.
Gusts would just make the flight more turbulent, but would not change the average speed much.
It was filled with hydrogen, and an exploding shell did not make it explode?
There are legal reasons requiring companies to react to violations of their copyright and trademarks, since they may otherwise legally lose them. However, they could have just reacted with "place a notice on your website that we own all the trademarks and copyrights but gave you explicit permission to keep this excellent remake on your website as long as it's limited to part of the first level."
It's more publicity for their game and may actually lead to more sales from people trying out the web version and then buying the real thing. But alas, lawyers don't think that way.
I wonder how it would survive a missile strike. OK, the helium is not going to explode, but if it leaks out through a big hole in the hull, you're going to go down anyway. You'll need lots of compartments to limit that, and those compartments would add quite a lot of weight.
and making much headway against a strong headwind is going to take a lot of power with that much windage.
Just to clarify a common misconception about wind and "windage": many people seem to think that wind affects airplanes the same way as cars, needing more power to keep moving in a headwind. That is not the case. Airplanes fly in the air, they don't care about the ground. If that air happens to be moving, they move along with it. It's an extra speed vector to be added to airspeed, nothing more. Like walking on a conveyor belt, you don't get more or less tired (per minute) when walking at the same pace, but you do move more quickly or slowly depending on the direction of the belt. Airplanes don't "feel" crosswinds either, they just fly straight through the air, but end up moving sideways relative to the ground because of the addition of the two speed vectors.
The only reason why airplanes often use more power in a headwind, is because the pilot may elect to fly faster to (partially) compensate for the wind. An 80 kt airship in a 40 kt headwind will only have a ground speed of 40 kt, so the pilots may well choose to increase power to get a higher ground speed. The economic optimum speed for total fuel consumption over a given distance is at a higher airspeed in a headwind, and at a lower airspeed in a tailwind, simply because the math works out that way: the airship in a 40 kt headwind will get a 10% boost in ground speed (44 i.o. 40) for only a 5% boost in airspeed (84 i.o. 80), which shifts the economic optimum speed upward. But fuel consumption per minute at the same airspeed is the same no matter what the wind is.
So headwinds don't affect the airship any more than it affects a small plane with a cruising speed of 80 kts.
Changing gusts of wind are a different matter, of course. The plane or airship definitely does "feel" those.
I think that's just a small part of it, I know plenty of rich people who give their children junk food, and poor people who make a big effort to only buy healthy stuff.
I think the researchers simply got cause and effect mixed up.
People with smaller brains tend to end up with a lower income and get less education. And their kids end up inheriting the smaller brain from their parents.
Obviously that doesn't mean than all poor people are stupid, just that statistically, people with larger brains tend to do better in life, and this results in a correlation when you look at a sufficiently large number of people.
Makes a lot more sense to me.
Yeah, they'll take it down. They wouldn't want people who have never played the game before to get a taste of the first level and then go and buy the real game, would they? Best to leave them in the dark.
The real reason for the secrecy of confessions is much cleverer.
If you tell people they should confess their sins, and their secrets are safe with the priest, the end result is that the priest knows all the secrets of the village. Need I say more? The local priest used to be the most powerful person in the village, subtly using his knowledge to play the people and instill fear in them. Brilliant idea.
In the US there is no true doctor-patient confidentiality when it comes to pilots. The medical certificate application requires a pilot to list all visits to a doctor in the last three years and the reason (item 19). Item 18 asks if you have ever in your life been diagnosed as having a plethora of conditions, including "(m) mental disorders of any sort; depression, anxiety, etc."
And it's obviously completely impossible to give false answers to those questions. No, never seen a doctor. No depression, nothing, perfectly fine.
Airline pilots are largely convinced of their own superiority to begin with.
That's not true. I, for example, am way above that kind of thinking.
What a wonderful idea, armed pilots in the cockpit :-(
But anyway, even with two unarmed pilots in the cockpit, one of the pilots can still crash the plane if he wants to. It won't be quite as clean as a nice long descent straight into a mountain, but if you just unexpectedly yank the controls down and to one side during approach, the other pilot probably won't have time to do anything about it. Especially on an airbus where they can fight over the controls with the override button (the last to press the override button has controls, so controls could go back and forth indefinitely, making recovery impossible).
And then there's always the crash axe or fire extinguisher. Hey, look at that plane over there... wham.
Of course this kind of action would be much more agressive and less likely to be performed by an introvert depressed person. Locking the door and starting a descent is psychologically easier than physically attacking someone or fighting over the controls. But no safety measure can ever be completely fool proof. People with power can do powerful things, not just in airplanes.
How long do the pilots hold out when the hijackers slaughter the passengers one by one outside their door, on their camera?
I would immediately make an announcement for everyone to fasten their seatbelts, wait 5 seconds, then create massive "turbulence". We can do -1g and +2.5g, so we can throw the hijackers against the ceiling and back onto the ground hard a few times. Then we can give the signal for the other crew members or passengers to overpower the attackers.
But in no case would we open the cockpit door. If they take over and crash the plane, everyone is dead anyway. So no matter how many people they slaughter in the cabin, that death toll can never be higher than what we'd get if we let them in.
Fast forward a few years. Depressed cabin crew member, alone with one pilot in the cockpit, hits him in the head with the crash axe which is stored behind the first officer's seat. Or with one of the fire extinguishers.
There's no winning this. If you can't trust the crew members, all bets are off.
Neither Bush did anything for Iraq, unless you count the first one leaving a ruthless dictator in power, and I'm not so sure we should.
To be fair, the Kuwaitis probably did appreciate JB Senior kicking the Iraqis out of their country.
That's a different story. They were thoroughly confused by the contradictory warnings and indications they were getting. Overspeed and stall at the same time, stall warning that disappeared but came back when they momentarily did the right thing by pushing the nose down (making them reverse the very action that could have saved them), etc.
It's easy to see afterwards what went wrong, but a lot harder when you're actually in there and get bombarded with contradictory indications.
That's priceless. All sorts of security measures to make your life difficult, but then in the end you can get around the entire system with a simple phone call. Let me guess, you have to give your mother's maiden name?
Oh, by the way, I was talking about actual flight simulators used for training pilots, not PC simulators. I realise that may not have been 100% clear in my original post.
If there's one thing simulators can very accurately simulate, it's the programming of the computers. In fact, they often use the same computers as the airplane, or only slightly modified ones, and just feed simulated sensor data into them. If the simulator does something different than the airplane, that's a bug.
And anyway, the flight control laws are clearly explained in the training courses. So yes, you can go into alternate or even direct law, and at that point the protections are disabled and you can turn the plane upside down if you want. Any Airbus pilot knows this.
A friend of mine saw them record one of their "races" in the alps. Some big trucks arrived with supercars on them, they were carefully offloaded, they drove them up a few hundred meters, then they loaded them all back onto the trucks for the next shoot. On air, that was a neck and neck race between the three of them.
I wouldn't exactly try to do barrel rolls in the air (although this should be possible without problems), but we do have a relatively new procedure to go into alternate law in a very specific situation where the flight control computers erroneously detect a stall due to frozen angle of attack probes. In that situation, the plane pitches down uncontrollably, and the only way to override it is by turning off certain computers so you go into alternate law.
And then one day that flight attendant knocks out the copilot using the crash axe or one of the fire extinguishers.
That's it, we should teach all cabin crew Krav Maga so they can overpower... oh, wait.
If you locked it into the IGS approach in Sion, a small Swiss airport surrounded by mountains, it would crash just fine.
(IGS works exactly like ILS, instrument landing system, only it doesn't actually lead you straight to the runway but rather to some point in the vicinity, requiring a rather long visually flown segment before landing)
Not without the pilots telling it to. An automatic approach is actually more work than a manual one. We even need periodic training to remain certified for it. And the plane won't extend flaps or landing gear by itself.
I like to think I could guide a cabin attendant to land the plane on autopilot, but I heard someone tried this once in the simulator (without the guiding pilot being able to actually see the cockpit, just a simulated radar screen) and they ended up crashing.