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Shadoof
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Blog Entries posted by Shadoof
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A fantastic game that has an incredible physics physics engine is Kerbal Space Program. At the end of Physics C we do get to play with this game, but I own the game and have had many fun times in it. The premise of the game is you own a space agency on the planet Kerbin (earth). You have to design rockets or planes that can power themselves taking into account of lift and mass of the aircraft. You also have to worry about how the atmosphere will effect the craft including the drag due to air resistance. The game also lets you do gravity assists around any planet, probably using the gravitational force formula. It is a fun game to just mess around in and see how many rockets you can strap to a single capsule. But it can also be very difficult because of the real world physics you have to deal with when trying to land a space craft on the Mun.
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On Friday September 16th our class was assigned the task to shoot a book with a ball. Some may say a very simple task, yet we failed anyway. Some problems that could have caused this failure was the lack of communication between everybody working alone, and also the lack of similar measurements. To redeem ourselves we were given the opportunity to redo the lab as a blog to get full credit, instead of a big fat 0.
The ball was shot in the x direction at a rate of 4.64 m/s and in the y direction at a rate of .32 m/s. After calculating the initial velocity we could determine the time it would be in the air using the formula ∆y= vt + ½at². Plugging in the known values, (1.035 = .32t + ½(9.8)t²) for this I could use the quadratic equation to solve for t, getting a positive value of .43 seconds. Then using the time and the velocity in the x direction it is easy to determine how far it will go. Using ∆x = vt, we can plug in our time and velocity to get 1.99m.
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There's a YouTube channel that I watch called SmarterEveryDay, in one of his more recent videos he used a slow motion camera to see how a bullet would effect a Prince Rupert drop. Before I talk about the video I will first explain what a PR drop is. How they are made is some molten glass is dropped into some cold water, creating an incredibly strong price of glass. However everything has a weakness, in this case it is the tail of the glass piece which is incredibly fragile. The hardness of the glass comes from the rapid cooling creating a bulb that has a cold exterior that pulls inward on the hot interior which pushes out. These forces equal to something that is bullet proof.
And here is another video of his showing the properties of the PR drop.
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Anybody even slightly interested in science and technology will have heard of a relatively new space company called Space-X. They are very close to launching yet another craft into space set currently for Jan 14th. But, one of their most memorable accomplishments, for me at least, is when they had a Falcon 9 rocket land on an autonomous barge that was floating in the Atlantic Ocean. The physics and calculations that had to be done before hand, and during, had to be crazy. The team at Space-X would have had to write programs for the rocket and the ship to be able to talk to each other, they had to have very precise GPS to put the rocket in the same place as the ship. Other things they had to account for is that the ocean is wavy and the barge would be moving all over the place, they had to make the barge be very stable and still, making it move to directly under the rocket. To make sure that the rocket didn't have too much speed as it touched down on the barge they had to program for a very precise 'suicide burn' that would stop any lateral movement and greatly reduce the vertical movement. All of these physics calculations came into a very amazing and groundbreaking landing. Hopefully Space-X will continue to do new and exciting things to make space travel cheaper and safer.
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The SR-71 was developed in the 1960's by Boeing. This was a revolutionary aircraft in that it could travel at Mach 3 speeds, or 3 times the speed of sound. This plane is quite strange because when it is sitting on the ground the plates of the aircraft don't meet up properly and the plane actually leaks fuel. The reason behind this design is since the plane flies so fast and so high up. At an altitude 80,000 ft the pressure on the metal on the outside of the aircraft is so little that the outside begins to expand, the engineers at Boeing had to account for this so they made the panels fit together loosely. Another factor for why the metal would expand in flight is that it would get very hot flying at mach 3 speeds. At such high speed the external body would reach upwards of 500 degrees, and the inside of the windshield would reach temperatures of 250 degrees, this is all caused with how much friction the air has on the plane causing this massive amount of heat. To deal with this massive amount of heat they had to develop a special cooling system that would take the hot air from inside the cockpit and put it in the fuel right before being used.
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