1000-mph Car Planned 380
Smivs notes a BBC report on a British team planning a 1000-mph record-breaking car. The previous land-speed record broke the sound barrier. The proposed vehicle will get from 0 to 1,050 mph in 40 seconds.
"RAF pilot Andy Green made history in 1997 when he drove the Thrust SSC jet-powered vehicle at 763 mph (1,228 km/h). Now he intends to get behind the wheel of a car that is capable of reaching 1,000 mph (1,610 km/h). Known as Bloodhound, the new car will be powered by a rocket bolted to a Typhoon-Eurofighter jet engine. The team-members have been working on the concept for the past 18 months and expect to be ready to make their new record attempt in 2011."
falling forwards (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How can you call it a car... (Score:3, Interesting)
Can you call a Formula 1 racing car a car? Look at what happens when one of those loses a wing...
Re:MPG is an obsolete measurement (Score:5, Interesting)
I expect my lecturer would disagree with you on that point. I'm an undergraduate at Swansea University, where a lot of the work (such as the aerodynamics) is being done. The computational fluid dynamics code that's being used to allow this thing to go 1000mph was developed here, powers aerospace firms like Airbus, BAE Systems and Rolls Royce, and has been decades in the making.
Which means that you sir, are trolling.
Re:When does it stop being a car? (Score:4, Interesting)
Fighter jet landing gear and tires are not built for 1,000mph. Maybe 300-350 absolute max. Rebuild it to do 1,000mph, and you'll end up with something that looks quite a lot like this thing does.
One similar speed record 'car' [landspeed.com] is literally an F-104 body, sans wings.
Re:MPG is an obsolete measurement (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:MPG is an obsolete measurement (Score:4, Interesting)
Engineers who are paid for what they are doing are encouraged to use established solutions. That's why engineers go home and work on their own projects. Then they get to do something different, just for the sake of doing something differently.
Re:MPG is an obsolete measurement (Score:5, Interesting)
Reasonable men adapt to the world around them; unreasonable men make the world adapt to them. The world is changed by unreasonable men.
-- Edwin Louis Cole
Re:I've got a better idea (Score:3, Interesting)
As a side note at highway speeds drafting can significantly increase fuel efficiency by moving to a computer controlled highway system we could increase average fuel economy above what simple drag calculations would suggest.
PS: I don't think you will see out highway system getting this good but saying it's breaking some laws of physics is a different argument.
Re:MPG is an obsolete measurement (Score:3, Interesting)
If it was really powers of 2 based, sure, but it has lots of 3s too, meaning the practical difference is marginal.
Sure, 10 is a really crappy base, but we're pretty much stuck with that by now, it so it makes sense to have the measurement system match the numeric system.
For computing, a base with only 2s as factors (e.g. 8 or 16) would be "better", but
then the whole point of computers is to make things easier for _us_, so that's not really a concern.
What would be the most useful for us (as a counting base _and_ measurement base)?
12.
It's in the right order of magnitude for us to handle mentally, and it has the very everyday-useful factors of 2, 3 and 4. Counting on your fingers would be slightly harder, but most people seemed to be able to deal just fine with dozens long before any education was widespread, so that can't be that bad.
10 only has the factors 2(very useful) and 5 (mostly useless except for stuff that arises directly or indirectly from its role in our base number)
Now I know imperial measures does employs 12, but not repeatedly and consistently, and neither it nor the others are consistent with our numeric system, so it remains hell to work with.
Re:MPG is an obsolete measurement (Score:2, Interesting)
To be fair, the entire US customary measuring system is obsolete...
Really? I had no idea that all my measuring devices, textbooks, and construction techniques had suddenly ceased to perform their functions adequately.
"You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means." --Inego Montoya
The traditional US measuring system, which is derived from the pre-imperial English anthropic system, is in many ways superior to the metric system for common tasks like home construction. Basing your system on 12 instead of ten is extremely practical (outside the ivory towers and groves of Academe) because carpenters, artists and architects can easily achieve aesthetic and functional balance without generating excessive trim waste or requiring computers to figure out how to center a window frame.
Daniel Fahrenheit went to a great deal of trouble to set up his temperature measuring system so that the most practically useful values (water freeze point & human body temperature) were on 32 and 96 degrees respectively. Easily manipulable numbers are a good thing. The metric system is best relegated to the lab, and even their its essential arbitrariness makes it inferior to systems based on natural units. [wikipedia.org]
Re:MPG is an obsolete measurement (Score:1, Interesting)
Have you ever tried to work on home construction with the metric system? It's just like the imperial system, because you either measure things out directly, or you use fractions as derived by geometric methods.
Yes, easily manipulatable numbers are good. Base 10 is no better than base 12 when it comes to geometric relationships, but far easier when it comes to numeric relationships.
And seriously? Using computers for figuring out how to center a window frame in the metric system? I'll suspect you've never done this, because the same methods you use to do it in the imperial system work in the metric system (Hint: it generally involves a long string that may or may not be marked at regular intervals).
I'm not sure what you mean. When I use 8-foot 2x4s to frame a wall, the resulting room is the appropriate height for humans using human-sized furnishings and appliances. If I've had my 2x4s supplied as 24, 16, 12, or 8 foot lengths, the cut-off pieces are exactly the size needed for other parts of the structure, minimizing waste.
In western platform construction, we use 8 foot 2 inch by 4 inch studs on 16 inch centers to build a typical wall. In some applications we use 12 foot centers for extra load bearing or 24 inch centers for non-bearing applications. We put 2 inch by 6 inch rafters on 24 inch centers for roofing, and use 12 inch by 2 inch joists to support the first floor of a multi-floored building. All these numbers were empirically derived from hundreds of years of practical experience and are part of a complete system for allocating resources to serve human comfort optimally. By contrast, the metric system uses base 10 because we have ten fingers. That's the only reason. All the other supposed reasons are actually derivatives of that base reason.
Centering a window in the US system? You walk over and put it in the center. In many cases no measuring is required, no strings or anything, you just put it where an existing board ends; the center is self evident because you can see the relationships between all the framing members with your naked eye. In a difficult case, OK, I see you've got three 8-foot runs there, I want to center a 36 inch wide window, I measure 30 inches from the end of either of the joints between 2x4s and double-check myself by measuring the other side too. (I just did that in my head after nearly 20 years of not doing that kind of work.)
In the problems that normally arise in construction and fabrication, you are going to get 1/3 and 2/3 fractions quite frequently. When I get one of those in the base 12 system, the resulting measurement is going to align with a mark on my measuring tape - there isn't going to be any repeating fraction. If you've ever worked as part of a crew of frame carpenters, you'll know that's a real issue. Tony the toothless has to be able to do the math and get the same answer as Manny the mathematician.
I'm sure Europeans have come up with clever ways to build under the metric system. But they are conforming their methods to their paradigm, which is the opposite of what has happened in the USA - here various competing systems fought it out and the most efficient one for our purposes beat out the others. Remember, the metric system was invented *before* the European settlement of North America! We use a decimal system for money, and a base 60 timing system, because those systems worked out best for those purposes. We use feet and inches for measurement of distance because that works best for us in practice.