Why is this inherently an aid to people on the fringes of driving fitness? Ever try to drive in a real fog? Ever try to drive with the sun in your face? This could be a safety enhancement to everybody.
The other planes will only be tiny specks somewhere in the distance.
Three words: Reno Air Races. Hotrodded WW2 fighters and some jets, 500+ mph, 10-mile course with the front straight a few hundred yards from the bleachers.
Also, do you know how far the safety distance is behind a commercial plane? That's miles of airspace that can't be used due to turbulence in the plane's wake. Now imagine what the wake of a rocket plane is like!
This whole auto-racing thing is an artifact of a world where energy is plentiful and can be freely squandered.
...which differs from football or baseball precisely how? Have you any idea how much fuel it takes to get seventy-five thousand people from home to a stadium and back?
Trouble is, an airship is not a point mass -- its dimensions are comparable to the granularity of thunderstorm turbulence. A well-developed thunderstorm is fully capable of delivering 50-mph gusts, and an airship is large enough to get an upward gust on one end and a downward one on the other. That's precisely how USS Shenandoah, one of the latest and best-designed dirigibles ever built, was taken down by an Ohio thunderstorm -- it was simply ripped apart.
and it's not as if we don't have strategies in place to deal with turbulence
We certainly do. The one for aerostatically-suspended vehicles is "Fly in nice weather".
An airplane suspends itself entirely with aerodynamic force, which the pilot can manipulate to a high degree and on a very short time scale. Hit a downward bump, pull back a little on the stick, lift increases, flight path remains nearly constant.
An airship suspends itself principally with an aerostatic force which can't be modified very much, and maintains the desired flight path with relatively small aerodynamic forces which are manipulated in the same way as an airplane. The latter forces just don't have enough range to deal with serious turbulence.
Besides making maneuvering difficult or impossible, turbulence presents another threat: stress. While the aerodynamic forces the pilot can apply are small, the ones a thunderstorm can apply are not. Aerodynamic forces depend on the surface area of an object, and the surface area of an airship is huge. Big forces, big stresses on a necessarily lightweight structure.
I can think of few things that would have made a French Revolutionary government less popular than relying on foreign troops.
I think Lafayette's request was for money, not troops. They had spent shitloads of it over here. If they'd gotten a partial repayment, they could have done a lot to defuse the situation just by feeding people.
Of course, they wound up getting the foreign troops a little bit later anyway. And those guys were working for Wellington and Blücher, not Washington...
...and our hands aren't exactly clean in that department. We won our Revolution largely thanks to French support, which bankrupted the court of Louis XVI and triggered the French Revolution within a few years. The moderate factions there, led by Lafayette, asked George Washington to return the favor, but he sucked up to Britain instead. The revolution was hijacked by the radical Jacobins, France disintegrated into bloody chaos, and in rode the little guy on the white horse.
One of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series, Star of Danger, is pitched at younger readers...and it could lead them into reading the whole series when they get a bit older. Couldn't put those books down.
...laser rot? You could buy a green Magic Marker for about $20, paint the edges of your CDs with it, and not worry about the laser rotting the bits off.
Or the $400 Denon Cat5 cable only last week?
And there was a $10 gadget heavily advertised in general-interest magazines in the Seventies, especially Sunday supplements, that was designed to LOOK as if you could pirate cable TV with it. You just hooked it up to the antenna terminals on your TV and presto, you would get "the same type of programs you'd get on cable" -- i.e., sports, movies, news -- but you wouldn't have to pay monthly bills "because you're not getting cable!" What it was, was a rabbit-ears antenna with a plastic disk in the middle shaped like a dish antenna.
The prose in the ad was a masterpiece of subtlety. There was not a single misstatement of fact in it, but innumerable people read as a pitch for something like the pirate HBO setups that were in the news then.
If I was the vendor I wouldn't even bother to hire technicians for repairs - just replace the few damaged ones that make it back.
Nothing special about that...it's the preferred method of warranty service for any number of perfectly legitimate mass-produced products that don't have many modular subassemblies. The cost of disassembling, troubleshooting, repairing, reassembling and testing is generally way more than the incremental manufacturing cost of a new box.
The triple point pressure of water is 0.006 atmospheres, and that is based on the partial pressure of water on the gas side. The total pressure on Mars is about 0.008 atm, so the partial pressure of water in it would be much less than 0.006. Yes, water ice will indeed sublime (which is the preferred form of the verb in a physics context; "sublimate" is used in a sociological context).
Article IV of the Nuremberg Principles of 1946 established the precedent that if your superior tells you to commit a crime, and you do it, you've committed a crime. And we hanged people for it.
That band was generally locked out by a jumper on the circuit board, and all you had to do to restore it was cut the jumper. And on several scanner models, the jumper projected an eighth inch above the board for easy location and snipping...
Except for godless commies and ex-commies...the Russians have some humungous suckers on the Kamchatka peninsula, and they have a radical policy of not building houses anywhere near them.
Slashdot Mirror
As opposed to a person who (a) thinks mercury and bromine are the only two liquid metals and (b) thinks bromine is a metal at all?
rj
Why is this inherently an aid to people on the fringes of driving fitness? Ever try to drive in a real fog? Ever try to drive with the sun in your face? This could be a safety enhancement to everybody.
rj
Three words: Reno Air Races. Hotrodded WW2 fighters and some jets, 500+ mph, 10-mile course with the front straight a few hundred yards from the bleachers.
Also, do you know how far the safety distance is behind a commercial plane? That's miles of airspace that can't be used due to turbulence in the plane's wake. Now imagine what the wake of a rocket plane is like!
You mean like this? http://www.airrace.org/2007ncargallery.php Wake turbulence depends almost entirely on weight, not airspeed.
hugely wasteful kind of sport
You're talking about a sport where a few dozen airplanes perform in front of fifty thousand people who got there in cars, right?
rj
rj
1. Make an appointment with your doctor for a sigmoidoscopy.
2. Bribe him to do it wearing a Gray costume, in front of the UFO.
3. Videotape it.
4. Profit!
rj
Hey, it's just German with English words.
rj
..."The language has about 300 native speakers"? rj
Trouble is, an airship is not a point mass -- its dimensions are comparable to the granularity of thunderstorm turbulence. A well-developed thunderstorm is fully capable of delivering 50-mph gusts, and an airship is large enough to get an upward gust on one end and a downward one on the other. That's precisely how USS Shenandoah, one of the latest and best-designed dirigibles ever built, was taken down by an Ohio thunderstorm -- it was simply ripped apart.
rj
We certainly do. The one for aerostatically-suspended vehicles is "Fly in nice weather".
An airplane suspends itself entirely with aerodynamic force, which the pilot can manipulate to a high degree and on a very short time scale. Hit a downward bump, pull back a little on the stick, lift increases, flight path remains nearly constant.
An airship suspends itself principally with an aerostatic force which can't be modified very much, and maintains the desired flight path with relatively small aerodynamic forces which are manipulated in the same way as an airplane. The latter forces just don't have enough range to deal with serious turbulence.
Besides making maneuvering difficult or impossible, turbulence presents another threat: stress. While the aerodynamic forces the pilot can apply are small, the ones a thunderstorm can apply are not. Aerodynamic forces depend on the surface area of an object, and the surface area of an airship is huge. Big forces, big stresses on a necessarily lightweight structure.
rj
I think Lafayette's request was for money, not troops. They had spent shitloads of it over here. If they'd gotten a partial repayment, they could have done a lot to defuse the situation just by feeding people.
Of course, they wound up getting the foreign troops a little bit later anyway. And those guys were working for Wellington and Blücher, not Washington...
rj
...and our hands aren't exactly clean in that department. We won our Revolution largely thanks to French support, which bankrupted the court of Louis XVI and triggered the French Revolution within a few years. The moderate factions there, led by Lafayette, asked George Washington to return the favor, but he sucked up to Britain instead. The revolution was hijacked by the radical Jacobins, France disintegrated into bloody chaos, and in rode the little guy on the white horse.
rj
rj
...laser rot? You could buy a green Magic Marker for about $20, paint the edges of your CDs with it, and not worry about the laser rotting the bits off.
Or the $400 Denon Cat5 cable only last week?
And there was a $10 gadget heavily advertised in general-interest magazines in the Seventies, especially Sunday supplements, that was designed to LOOK as if you could pirate cable TV with it. You just hooked it up to the antenna terminals on your TV and presto, you would get "the same type of programs you'd get on cable" -- i.e., sports, movies, news -- but you wouldn't have to pay monthly bills "because you're not getting cable!" What it was, was a rabbit-ears antenna with a plastic disk in the middle shaped like a dish antenna.
The prose in the ad was a masterpiece of subtlety. There was not a single misstatement of fact in it, but innumerable people read as a pitch for something like the pirate HBO setups that were in the news then.
rj
Second, you increase the energy expended by the freezer every time you open the door and let warm air in.
rj
Nothing special about that...it's the preferred method of warranty service for any number of perfectly legitimate mass-produced products that don't have many modular subassemblies. The cost of disassembling, troubleshooting, repairing, reassembling and testing is generally way more than the incremental manufacturing cost of a new box.
rj
rj
...it'll come back cleaner than it was when you bought it.
rj
Been done.
rj
...if two people complain about your custom plate, it will be taken away from you. In the pre-Internet days, it happened to a driver who had OUI-OUI.
There are some folks here with much too little to do.
rj
rj
Article IV of the Nuremberg Principles of 1946 established the precedent that if your superior tells you to commit a crime, and you do it, you've committed a crime. And we hanged people for it.
Easy come, easy go...
rj
At least those, including cashiers and bank tellers, who have to balance the drawer at the end of the day...
rj
That band was generally locked out by a jumper on the circuit board, and all you had to do to restore it was cut the jumper. And on several scanner models, the jumper projected an eighth inch above the board for easy location and snipping...
rj
Except for godless commies and ex-commies...the Russians have some humungous suckers on the Kamchatka peninsula, and they have a radical policy of not building houses anywhere near them.
rj
Dirty pagans. We decent Christians blame it on St. Helen.
rj