Most of those claims were based on what the pilot saw on the airspeed indicator. Trouble is, the reading on an ordinary ASI is meaningless from about Mach 0.9 up. A standard ASI senses the difference between the pitot and static air pressures; a Machmeter senses their ratio.
The Navy tried to develop an approximately circular airplane, with conventional propulsion, during WW2 -- long before the 1947 incident that added "flying saucer" to the vernacular. Google "Flying Flapjack".
Having it mounted on a ship means that there is no possible orbit or inbound vector that this system couldn't intercept.
...if the ship is in the right place at the right time. You wouldn't be able to hit just any orbiter or missile from just any point. If the target is a satellite, you'll have to wait up to maybe half its orbital period before it's "in your sights". If it's a missile on the other side of the earth, well, you could shoot that far, but your trajectory could easily take longer than the missile's flight time.. so "a ship" becomes "a distributed pattern of ships".
And if you don't provide any on-board propulsion, you have no terminal guidance, so your hit or miss depends entirely on getting incredible accuracy from a gun mounted on a pitching, rolling ship.
Also, it would take a pretty expensive ship to handle the recoil of a gun that big: something like the largest battleships of WW2, which could fire a broadside from nine 18-inch guns.
You could (theoretically) fire a ballistic projectile at an escape velocity and at such an angle that the atmosphere will slow it down to be an orbital velocity.
...whereupon you would still be in the sensible atmosphere at the end of the "maneuver", and your orbit would decay in short order. Besides, you don't want to slow it down to achieve the orbit: you need to speed it up at the injection point.
You could also fire and use a gravitational slingshot to put an object in orbit.
Thrust is not the only means of changing a ballistic trajectory into an orbit, both drag and gravity work as well.
If you had enough energy to fire the projectile so far out that the moon's gravity becomes significant, yes, you could do it as a three-body problem.
The first point here also means you cannot really have a perfect ballistic trajectory inside an atmosphere.
your teacher or urban-legend websource was only considering the earth as a lone body.
No, *I* was considering this as a pure two-body problem because any three-body solution to getting a projectile into LEO would involve a ridiculous amount of energy.
You can't put anything in orbit with any gun, acting by itself. You must apply some thrust after the projectile reaches the desired height. If you don't do that, no matter how powerful the gun is, no matter how high the muzzle velocity is, no matter where you point it, one of two things will happen: it will hit the earth before completing one orbit, or it will fly away and never come back.
If you want to launch to orbit from a gun, you have to provide a rocket motor on the projectile that starts up at the appropriate point in the trajectory.
Here's another way to express it: you cannot achieve a repeating orbit whose low point (perigee) is higher than the last point at which thrust was applied. For a simple gun, that point is the muzzle.
The problem is that the law gave the illusion of privacy for cell phone calls rather than actual privacy - scanners that can listen to analog cellular were easy to come by even after the ban and there were a number of "private" cell phone conversations made public in the media even after the ban. Some scanners required a simple hardware mod
In fact, some popular scanners from Radio Shack and Bearcat had the cellphone band locked out by grounding one pin on a chip. The grounding was provided by a jumper wire on the circuit board -- and it was installed extra long, protruding about an eighth-inch above the board so it was easily found and snipped...
The word "pound" is used for both weight and mass. One pound-force (lbf) is the weight of an object whose mass is one pound-mass (lbm) under standard gravity. In popular usage, they're both just called pounds.
The same situation exists in the SI (metric) system: one kilogram-force (kgf) is the weight of an object whose mass is one kilogram (kg) under standard gravity.
Is it confusing? Yes. Does it excuse public ignorance of science? Yes. Is it going away? Not bloody likely. Live with it.
I like the ones in Autobahn gas stations. You drop a one-euro coin in a slot to get in. When you get up, the toilet senses the loss of your weight and flushes itself; then a nozzle and a brush swing down onto the seat. The nozzle spritzes, the brush spins, the seat rotates 360 degrees, and then a dispenser gives you a receipt you can use to get your money back if you buy anything.
But quite a few small restaurants in Paris still have "Turkish Bombsights"...
Then it ain't gonna be fixed, because he's not a Randist any more. He bailed on her back in April when somebody in the Tea Party figured out how to work Google and found out she was an atheist.
I once worked in a place where numerous people spent long hours sitting at consoles waiting for things to happen, and were allowed to read to stay awake. One guy used to read the same book over and over again, perhaps a hundred times over a decade...
the fighter jets on the flight deck with shattered cockpits
That's the usual fate of aircraft put on permanent static display in an unsecured location. The unbroken canopy parts turn yellow in the sun and then craze, the tires rot, the paint fades, the cavities fill up with bird shit and used condoms, and you have an eyesore within a couple of years.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I hate the expression "sound barrier". It is not, and never has been, a barrier; it's a hurdle.
Most of those claims were based on what the pilot saw on the airspeed indicator. Trouble is, the reading on an ordinary ASI is meaningless from about Mach 0.9 up. A standard ASI senses the difference between the pitot and static air pressures; a Machmeter senses their ratio.
The Navy tried to develop an approximately circular airplane, with conventional propulsion, during WW2 -- long before the 1947 incident that added "flying saucer" to the vernacular. Google "Flying Flapjack".
Indeed. Here's a picture of it doing pretty much all it could do:
http://www.laesieworks.com/ifo/lib/AVRO-pict/avrocar11.jpg
Having it mounted on a ship means that there is no possible orbit or inbound vector that this system couldn't intercept.
...if the ship is in the right place at the right time. You wouldn't be able to hit just any orbiter or missile from just any point. If the target is a satellite, you'll have to wait up to maybe half its orbital period before it's "in your sights". If it's a missile on the other side of the earth, well, you could shoot that far, but your trajectory could easily take longer than the missile's flight time.. so "a ship" becomes "a distributed pattern of ships".
And if you don't provide any on-board propulsion, you have no terminal guidance, so your hit or miss depends entirely on getting incredible accuracy from a gun mounted on a pitching, rolling ship.
Also, it would take a pretty expensive ship to handle the recoil of a gun that big: something like the largest battleships of WW2, which could fire a broadside from nine 18-inch guns.
Orbital velocity is about Mach 23
Orbital velocity is Mach nothing. Mach number has no meaning in vacuum.
You could (theoretically) fire a ballistic projectile at an escape velocity and at such an angle that the atmosphere will slow it down to be an orbital velocity.
...whereupon you would still be in the sensible atmosphere at the end of the "maneuver", and your orbit would decay in short order. Besides, you don't want to slow it down to achieve the orbit: you need to speed it up at the injection point.
You could also fire and use a gravitational slingshot to put an object in orbit.
Thrust is not the only means of changing a ballistic trajectory into an orbit, both drag and gravity work as well.
If you had enough energy to fire the projectile so far out that the moon's gravity becomes significant, yes, you could do it as a three-body problem.
The first point here also means you cannot really have a perfect ballistic trajectory inside an atmosphere.
Quite true.
your teacher or urban-legend websource was only considering the earth as a lone body.
No, *I* was considering this as a pure two-body problem because any three-body solution to getting a projectile into LEO would involve a ridiculous amount of energy.
You can't put anything in orbit with any gun, acting by itself. You must apply some thrust after the projectile reaches the desired height. If you don't do that, no matter how powerful the gun is, no matter how high the muzzle velocity is, no matter where you point it, one of two things will happen: it will hit the earth before completing one orbit, or it will fly away and never come back.
If you want to launch to orbit from a gun, you have to provide a rocket motor on the projectile that starts up at the appropriate point in the trajectory.
Here's another way to express it: you cannot achieve a repeating orbit whose low point (perigee) is higher than the last point at which thrust was applied. For a simple gun, that point is the muzzle.
but we are overdue an ELE (Extinction Level Event) by about 15 million years
Welcome to the Monte Carlo Fallacy...
The problem is that the law gave the illusion of privacy for cell phone calls rather than actual privacy - scanners that can listen to analog cellular were easy to come by even after the ban and there were a number of "private" cell phone conversations made public in the media even after the ban. Some scanners required a simple hardware mod
In fact, some popular scanners from Radio Shack and Bearcat had the cellphone band locked out by grounding one pin on a chip. The grounding was provided by a jumper wire on the circuit board -- and it was installed extra long, protruding about an eighth-inch above the board so it was easily found and snipped...
And I should pay attention to language criticism from a person who says "would have went"?
For those who've been denied the thrill of the experience, Six Sigma is Scientology for corporations...
The stereotypical hyper-efficient corporation is a myth - most of us know of stunning wastes of money at our own employer.
Can you say "Six Sigma"?
The word "pound" is used for both weight and mass. One pound-force (lbf) is the weight of an object whose mass is one pound-mass (lbm) under standard gravity. In popular usage, they're both just called pounds.
The same situation exists in the SI (metric) system: one kilogram-force (kgf) is the weight of an object whose mass is one kilogram (kg) under standard gravity.
Is it confusing? Yes. Does it excuse public ignorance of science? Yes. Is it going away? Not bloody likely. Live with it.
Toilets are great. Poor sanitation has arguably killed more people than wars.
...and through most of history, wars have done most of their killing by means of poor sanitation.
I like the ones in Autobahn gas stations. You drop a one-euro coin in a slot to get in. When you get up, the toilet senses the loss of your weight and flushes itself; then a nozzle and a brush swing down onto the seat. The nozzle spritzes, the brush spins, the seat rotates 360 degrees, and then a dispenser gives you a receipt you can use to get your money back if you buy anything.
But quite a few small restaurants in Paris still have "Turkish Bombsights"...
can only be fixed by putting a randist in charge.
Then it ain't gonna be fixed, because he's not a Randist any more. He bailed on her back in April when somebody in the Tea Party figured out how to work Google and found out she was an atheist.
I once worked in a place where numerous people spent long hours sitting at consoles waiting for things to happen, and were allowed to read to stay awake. One guy used to read the same book over and over again, perhaps a hundred times over a decade...
It was Battlefield Earth.
I think he'll outsource it to a call center in Mumbai.
There's fightin' whiskey and there's lovin' whiskey...
If you can't get a gun, you can't shoot people. It's really not rocket science, what part of it is hard to understand?
And if drugs are illegal, you can't get high.
the fighter jets on the flight deck with shattered cockpits
That's the usual fate of aircraft put on permanent static display in an unsecured location. The unbroken canopy parts turn yellow in the sun and then craze, the tires rot, the paint fades, the cavities fill up with bird shit and used condoms, and you have an eyesore within a couple of years.
Likely not...earth is not a really good conductor of heat and the air temperature in caves tends to vary only slightly over the year.
America outspend the rest of the world on what it still calls "defense".
I wonder why. Could it be for the same reason that a jewelry store outspends a hot dog stand on defense?