I went to Georgia Tech, which is just now getting to about 70:30 male-female. AE is about 97:3 or something like that. And most of the girls were managment majors, which means we never saw them at all.
Stuart Slade wrote The Big One and other books in that timeline as a series of chapters on a message board. People would then comment on it and so forth. He once explained why the print version had so many typos in it, but I forget what the reason was.
There are still stories being written for it, too.
Laws to prevent insurers from charging sick people extra are potentially dangerous, but even if not--they should be federal, not state-by-state. Can you explain? I'm not disagreeing, I just want to see your reasoning.
Good for you. But some of the rest of us have memory problems.
I'll put something down for a minute to go answer the phone, or use the bathroom, and then completely forget what I was in the middle of doing. Or, I'll get up and forget to put the tool down, and then spend five minutes looking for what I have in my hand.
Trying to organize things, find a place for them, and keep it that way literally gives me headaches. I'm not quite sure why.
You took a response I made while pissed off at everything in general and turned it around to make me laugh. Thank you for making today a little more bearable.
I'm aware of the liability issues and such in aviation--I fly privately and work in the industry, too. There's a significant lack of common sense.
As far as cheap airplanes go, you can get hold of a used Cessna 150 or 152, or some flavor of a Piper Cub, for around $25k or less. You can build something like a Sonex or an RV for 30-40k, plus a couple years of work. Yes, it requires a little sacrifice (driving an older car instead of buying a new Explorer, forgoing that big-screen TV, buying a slightly more affordable house, etc), but it's within reach of a lot more people than you would think.
Let me know when your floating trains and buses become reality. Or when you figure out some other way to cross thousands of miles of ocean in less than a day.
The Mooney Mark 20 is a line of high performance, high reliability, cheap, complex aircraft that provide solid performance, excellent safety and great economy. I do see your point... but I'd hesitate to call an airplane "cheap" until the average person can afford to buy one... basically, the cost needs to be around the same range as a decently-equipped car or SUV. A lot of homebuilts fall into this category, but most people aren't willing to spend the time it takes to build one.
That's why the Cessna 152 (a small trainer) is only something like 39 inches wide Try squeezing your 180lb self into a 150 with a 230lb instructor (a former rugby player from South Africa). That was fun... the tired old airplane would climb at maybe 200ft/min during a hot Georgia summer.
Both of my instructors complained and asked why I didn't go to a 172, but I was a high school student paying for the lessons myself. Couldn't afford it.
Though if you consider the orbiter itself as payload, then you do reach Saturn V levels (roughly).
Seriously, though, Shuttle-C and others would have narrowed the usable payload gap considerably. It still leaves the pesky problem of a side-mounted payload, but at least said payload wouldn't have a TPS to get damaged.
In engineering, once you get out in the field your specialization often doesn't really matter. I was an aerospace engineer, with a focus (such as it was) on space mission design and orbital mechanics. My hobbies are flying private aircraft and flight model simulation. Yet, my current day job is designing system test rigs, and my previous one involved programming avionics test codes and routing simulator wiring. A friend of mine also has an AE degree, but he's now a head designer in our electrical systems group. Another friend (mechanical eng.) now designs plants for Florida Power.
A lot of companies don't care what your specialization was; they look to see if you're adaptable and able to learn (which is supposedly what your degree demonstrates). Unless you did time in grad school, your real specialization usually comes after you've been working in the field for a few years. That's when guys most often get sorted into structures, test, aerodynamics, MRB, etc.
Ok, here's what I was talking about... I stand somewhat corrected.
The normal separation sequence to free the Orbiter from the rest of the system takes 18 seconds, foar too long to be of use during a first stage (SRB) emergency. Therefore a capability called "fast-separation" was build into the flight software for use at any time. Fast-separation bypasses or reduces the normal built-in delays in order to achieve separation in approximately three seconds... Unfortunately, subsequent analysis has shown that if fast separation is attempted while the SRBs are thrusting, the Orbiter will "hang-up" on its aft attach points and pitch violently, with the probably destruction of the vehicle. Therefore fast-separation does not provide a meaningful way to escape unless some form of SRB thrust-termination system is implemented, and this was rejected for sound technical and safety reasons in 1973 and again in 1986.
--Dennis Jenkins, Space Shuttle It goes on to say that this ability is still available for contingency aborts after SRB separation. Crew would have to bail out, as chances of surviving a ditching are low.
I've read some things to indicate that, when possible, the crew would be given enough warning to attempt a "fast sep", which is an emergency separation from the tank and boosters while still under powered flight. You don't have much of a chance of surviving this, but it's better than not trying at all.
M855 ammunition is a 62-grain 5.56mm NATO round. Standard ballistic tables show a muzzle velocity of 3100 ft/sec, or about Mach 2.7. It drops to Mach 1 at around 700 meters, so maybe if you were around 500-600 meters or so?
M118 (a 7.62mm NATO round) stays supersonic out to 1000 meters, or over half a mile. Certainly long enough to be able to hear it.
You may be correct but I have always heard/believed that the sonic boom was a single event happening as an object passes the speed of sound (and I am a bit of a Discovery chan junky). I have seen planes fly by at greater than the speed of sound and heard no sonic boom, they are loud but not that loud. You might watch the Discovery channel, or even stay at the Holiday Inn Express... but I'm an aerospace engineer. GP is right; the boom is not a singular event, but rather it's the perceived sound when the "wake" of the shockwaves passes by the observer.
Also, how are you sure that the aircraft you claim to have seen were indeed supersonic? I've heard a real one (and many recreated F-18 and Concorde ones in Gulfstream's sonic boom demo trailer), you definitely notice it.
Yeah... lots of handgun rounds fall out in the transonic range. There's only so much speed you can get out of a short barrel before the pressures (and recoil) get too high.
Common.22LR (rimfire) rounds are generally supersonic from a rifle; you can buy subsonic ones or higher-velocity "stinger" type rounds too. Interestingly, the subsonic ones tend to be more accurate... the supersonic-to-subsonic transition is unstable and tends to disturb the bullet.
The sound when you fire the gun is from the expansion of the heated gasses after the bullet leaves the barrel. It has nothing to do with the bullet.
Supersonic bullets (for there are subsonic ones too) make shock waves, just like anything else going supersonic. They do produce a little sonic boom, too. From most accounts that I've read, it sounds like a small "crack!" as said bullet travels by. In order to observe this, I expect that you need to be a nontrivial distance from the gun that fired it, so that the bullet could pass over and leave its boom before the sound from the firing reaches you.
Public safety announcement: Please, kids, don't try this at home. Intentionally standing anywhere in front of the business end of a gun being fired is a bad idea and makes you a moron at best. Being the idiot on the other end, pointing and firing said gun while a person is there is downright criminal (except in very specific circumstances, like legitimate self-defense). If you must, set a cheap camera or microphone up. I'm all for the private ownership and (responsible) use of firearms... but please don't do something stupid.
Where I see this really opening up possibilities is hypersonic flight (M > 4~5) since the drag drops back down to subsonic levels, making fuel economy on par with the current crop of jet liners. I think you're confusing drag with the drag coefficient. The Cd may go down, but total drag is still much higher (since drag is proportional to the square of airspeed.
Thus the simplified example: assuming constant Cd and TSFC, doubling speed results in four times the drag --> four times the thrust --> four times the fuel consumption (per time unit). Now, you're going twice as far, but burning four times the fuel, and so your effective "MPG" is half that of the slower speed.
Assuming that Cd does indeed drop back to subsonic levels, we'd need to see incredible TSFC numbers to be viable. I really don't think that'll happen.
Re:Is it a parody? Comedy?
on
Iron Sky Trailer
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· Score: 5, Informative
Firefly actually did too... I remember noticing that in the first episode.
Serenity did until the final aerial battle; I've heard claims that they just couldn't stand to do it without sound (for the general audience's sake) so they made it take place in "upper atmosphere" or something like that. I don't know.
How would you have designed the interface? With a "draw ellipse" tool, just like MS paint. Have a little popup settings box where you can choose raster or vector drawing. Selecting a space (or path, or whatever), then having to do something else to it, is too many steps.
The best interface I've found for graphics programs is actually the old Paint Shop Pro... I use version 6; the new versions have a few more features but I keep going back to the old one. It just makes sense (except that ctrl-v pastes as new image, instead of pasting in the current image). Granted, I'm not a graphics wizard; paintshop satisfies my needs for something better than paint but still usable by the average person.
Just because your program is super-advanced and capable of doing really complex stuff doesn't mean you should neglect the bottom end tools. Catia, for example, can do some really wonderful kinematic stuff, and handle really complex things; however, you can still go back and do a simple 2D non-parametric drawing very easily. My high-school vintage TI-86 can still do simple arithmetic, and it works the same way that an old four-function one does. No multi-step operations just to add.
The UI is just plain FAIL. There's no other way to put it. Every other program (just about) uses F5 to refresh the view... but in LN, it locks the program and requires a password again to unlock. F9 refreshes.
It also adds that stupid little header bar to every fucking email. And insists on including a picture and fancy formatting too. I don't need my emails looking like cute stationery. Just send the damn text and be done with it.
If you're very lucky, pasting text from another app just might be readable, if it does anything at all.
Links are "links" or "hyperlinks", not "hotspots". I spent half an hour looking for an "insert hyperlink" command before I found that little gem.
They did fix the annoying little thing where it would mark messages you just replied to as unread. I don't know what in the world would ever posess someone to program that in in the first place.
It must come from the same bozos that designed Photoshop, which can't even make a plain, simple circle without going through a few menus and stuff. Even paintbrush from the win 3.1 days was easier to use. And "it's an image manipulation program, not a draw program!" isn't an excuse.
Slashdot Mirror
I call BS. That ratio is preposterous.
I went to Georgia Tech, which is just now getting to about 70:30 male-female. AE is about 97:3 or something like that. And most of the girls were managment majors, which means we never saw them at all.
Stuart Slade wrote The Big One and other books in that timeline as a series of chapters on a message board. People would then comment on it and so forth. He once explained why the print version had so many typos in it, but I forget what the reason was.
There are still stories being written for it, too.
It doesn't help that your insurance comes with your employer, instead of being independently selected or maintained.
Good for you. But some of the rest of us have memory problems.
I'll put something down for a minute to go answer the phone, or use the bathroom, and then completely forget what I was in the middle of doing. Or, I'll get up and forget to put the tool down, and then spend five minutes looking for what I have in my hand.
Trying to organize things, find a place for them, and keep it that way literally gives me headaches. I'm not quite sure why.
You took a response I made while pissed off at everything in general and turned it around to make me laugh. Thank you for making today a little more bearable.
Seriously.
I'm aware of the liability issues and such in aviation--I fly privately and work in the industry, too. There's a significant lack of common sense.
As far as cheap airplanes go, you can get hold of a used Cessna 150 or 152, or some flavor of a Piper Cub, for around $25k or less. You can build something like a Sonex or an RV for 30-40k, plus a couple years of work. Yes, it requires a little sacrifice (driving an older car instead of buying a new Explorer, forgoing that big-screen TV, buying a slightly more affordable house, etc), but it's within reach of a lot more people than you would think.
Let me know when your floating trains and buses become reality. Or when you figure out some other way to cross thousands of miles of ocean in less than a day.
Both of my instructors complained and asked why I didn't go to a 172, but I was a high school student paying for the lessons myself. Couldn't afford it.
Am I the only one who first thought the article was referring to hardening systems against EMP effects from a nuclear event?
Though if you consider the orbiter itself as payload, then you do reach Saturn V levels (roughly).
Seriously, though, Shuttle-C and others would have narrowed the usable payload gap considerably. It still leaves the pesky problem of a side-mounted payload, but at least said payload wouldn't have a TPS to get damaged.
In engineering, once you get out in the field your specialization often doesn't really matter. I was an aerospace engineer, with a focus (such as it was) on space mission design and orbital mechanics. My hobbies are flying private aircraft and flight model simulation. Yet, my current day job is designing system test rigs, and my previous one involved programming avionics test codes and routing simulator wiring. A friend of mine also has an AE degree, but he's now a head designer in our electrical systems group. Another friend (mechanical eng.) now designs plants for Florida Power.
A lot of companies don't care what your specialization was; they look to see if you're adaptable and able to learn (which is supposedly what your degree demonstrates). Unless you did time in grad school, your real specialization usually comes after you've been working in the field for a few years. That's when guys most often get sorted into structures, test, aerodynamics, MRB, etc.
Real men don't need anaesthetics. They cut the chip out of their arm and laugh while doing so.
--Dennis Jenkins, Space Shuttle It goes on to say that this ability is still available for contingency aborts after SRB separation. Crew would have to bail out, as chances of surviving a ditching are low.
I've read some things to indicate that, when possible, the crew would be given enough warning to attempt a "fast sep", which is an emergency separation from the tank and boosters while still under powered flight. You don't have much of a chance of surviving this, but it's better than not trying at all.
Some quick googling:
M855 ammunition is a 62-grain 5.56mm NATO round. Standard ballistic tables show a muzzle velocity of 3100 ft/sec, or about Mach 2.7. It drops to Mach 1 at around 700 meters, so maybe if you were around 500-600 meters or so?
M118 (a 7.62mm NATO round) stays supersonic out to 1000 meters, or over half a mile. Certainly long enough to be able to hear it.
Also, how are you sure that the aircraft you claim to have seen were indeed supersonic? I've heard a real one (and many recreated F-18 and Concorde ones in Gulfstream's sonic boom demo trailer), you definitely notice it.
Yeah... lots of handgun rounds fall out in the transonic range. There's only so much speed you can get out of a short barrel before the pressures (and recoil) get too high.
.22LR (rimfire) rounds are generally supersonic from a rifle; you can buy subsonic ones or higher-velocity "stinger" type rounds too. Interestingly, the subsonic ones tend to be more accurate... the supersonic-to-subsonic transition is unstable and tends to disturb the bullet.
.17HMR...
Common
What I really want is a
The sound when you fire the gun is from the expansion of the heated gasses after the bullet leaves the barrel. It has nothing to do with the bullet.
Supersonic bullets (for there are subsonic ones too) make shock waves, just like anything else going supersonic. They do produce a little sonic boom, too. From most accounts that I've read, it sounds like a small "crack!" as said bullet travels by. In order to observe this, I expect that you need to be a nontrivial distance from the gun that fired it, so that the bullet could pass over and leave its boom before the sound from the firing reaches you.
Public safety announcement: Please, kids, don't try this at home. Intentionally standing anywhere in front of the business end of a gun being fired is a bad idea and makes you a moron at best. Being the idiot on the other end, pointing and firing said gun while a person is there is downright criminal (except in very specific circumstances, like legitimate self-defense). If you must, set a cheap camera or microphone up. I'm all for the private ownership and (responsible) use of firearms... but please don't do something stupid.
Now you know... and knowing is half the battle.
I worked on that--helped build it, actually. Can't comment on where things might be headed from this point, though.
Thus the simplified example: assuming constant Cd and TSFC, doubling speed results in four times the drag --> four times the thrust --> four times the fuel consumption (per time unit). Now, you're going twice as far, but burning four times the fuel, and so your effective "MPG" is half that of the slower speed.
Assuming that Cd does indeed drop back to subsonic levels, we'd need to see incredible TSFC numbers to be viable. I really don't think that'll happen.
Firefly actually did too... I remember noticing that in the first episode.
Serenity did until the final aerial battle; I've heard claims that they just couldn't stand to do it without sound (for the general audience's sake) so they made it take place in "upper atmosphere" or something like that. I don't know.
The best interface I've found for graphics programs is actually the old Paint Shop Pro... I use version 6; the new versions have a few more features but I keep going back to the old one. It just makes sense (except that ctrl-v pastes as new image, instead of pasting in the current image). Granted, I'm not a graphics wizard; paintshop satisfies my needs for something better than paint but still usable by the average person.
Just because your program is super-advanced and capable of doing really complex stuff doesn't mean you should neglect the bottom end tools. Catia, for example, can do some really wonderful kinematic stuff, and handle really complex things; however, you can still go back and do a simple 2D non-parametric drawing very easily. My high-school vintage TI-86 can still do simple arithmetic, and it works the same way that an old four-function one does. No multi-step operations just to add.
The UI is just plain FAIL. There's no other way to put it. Every other program (just about) uses F5 to refresh the view... but in LN, it locks the program and requires a password again to unlock. F9 refreshes.
It also adds that stupid little header bar to every fucking email. And insists on including a picture and fancy formatting too. I don't need my emails looking like cute stationery. Just send the damn text and be done with it.
If you're very lucky, pasting text from another app just might be readable, if it does anything at all.
Links are "links" or "hyperlinks", not "hotspots". I spent half an hour looking for an "insert hyperlink" command before I found that little gem.
They did fix the annoying little thing where it would mark messages you just replied to as unread. I don't know what in the world would ever posess someone to program that in in the first place.
It must come from the same bozos that designed Photoshop, which can't even make a plain, simple circle without going through a few menus and stuff. Even paintbrush from the win 3.1 days was easier to use. And "it's an image manipulation program, not a draw program!" isn't an excuse.