Re: Education (the "Whoa, Cool!" Factor)

This may not be entirely relevant to the subject of the British land speed record vehicle, but...

...I spent most of my boyhood and early adolescence in the '60s and early '70s watching Gemini and Apollo/Skylab missions on TV and, along with about 99% of young American boys at the time, thinking "whoooaaa, cool!"... and, in between Gemini/Apollo missions, got my thrills watching the latest land speed record attempts by Breedlove and Gabelich at Bonneville Flats. Many of those boys of my generation were inspired to take up careers in science and/or engineering; many of them ended up working at places like NASA/Goddard and JPL -- and many of those ended up becoming astronauts themselves.

While I, myself, ended up choosing a career in art and graphic design, I still maintained my interest in science -- especially spaceflight and astronomy -- because of all those boyhood days I spent watching Saturn Vs leaving for the Moon and thinking, "whoooaaa, cool!" Even today, I'll regularly drop everything to watch a Shuttle launch (at least up until the end of the program), or a Soyuz launch to ISS, or an ISS EVA, and thought nothing of sitting up until 4am watching Curiosity land and waiting for it to transmit its first fotos back from Mars.

Re: Not really a ‘car’, is it?

I agree with you.

To call it a land based vehicle, the wheels should be driven by the engine.

This is a rocket with just enough downforce to keep it on a carriage.

Impressive. Noisy. Fast.

But it's not a "car".

Re: Not really a ‘car’, is it?

The word car comes from carriage - a horse drawn vehicle with wheels. The definition of car does not mean the wheels have to be driven by the engine. Just a thought.

Re: Bah Humbug!

Still, it's not exactly brain surgery, is it?

Re: Massive testicles

Andy's nickname on the ThrustSSC project was Dead Dog. That was the sort of level of reaction that major emergencies elicited from him, probably because he was used to flying a Tornado ADV at high speeds and could cope with the workload.

Remember that ThrustSSC used rear-wheel steering and was not fully stable in yaw. Andy had to drive using a combination of fast and slow steering impulses to damp out the instability manually while doing all the other things such as monitoring speeds, engine parameters, brake parachutes, deal with overheating on-board computers and hope that the front of the vehicle didn't lift off the ground (there was an inverted ejection seat rocket motor to prevent this, fired by the on-board computer if it sensed the front wheel load drop below a certain threshold.

I watched him talking about the rocket motor test yesterday, he's the personification of calmness and was making a pretty good job of being a physics teacher too.

It's great to see what Britain's engineers and adventurers can achieve when put to the test. No other country has taken as many land speed records over the course of more than 120 years.

Re: Massive testicles

Live stream from Cornwall, infrastructure provided by Cisco.

I would have loved to have been there, but was not in the group of people invited to see it live :(

Re: pandering

Yes fuck the fucking Americans and their retarded 1680 AD measuring system/s.

I have a chart on wire gauges - the really, really, really, fine hair thickness, instrument making gauges.....

And fuck me.... there are about 25 fucking gauges and ONLY the METRIC size actually gives the fucking SIZE of the wire.

"Ooooo you mean a #32 Brown and Sharp enameled copper wire is 0.000017 Troy shims thinner than the 63B Western Telephone gauge, which was derived from the French 1766 clock makers spring gauge series, which is 11/315 per degree Bernoulie larger than the Guild of French Polishers, 15th coat layer, on float glass, at 17% Rhineland Humidity - and not the 22% coastal marsh humidity?"

"No shit?"

"Ohhhhh so that is just 0.035mm OD? - instead of 0.033mm or 0.038mm OD?"

Fuck I hate American measurements, especially when they do bastardised combinations - like Yard Newtons of Torque, or Feet Pound Rankin Meters etc...

Ranting.

Re: pandering

Except that we live in Britain which has been an officially metric country since the mid 1990s and has in fact been all-metric for science and engineering since the 1970s or early 1980s.

But most of all, assuming the idea is to encourage youngsters into studying STEM subjects, maybe journalists would wake up to the 21st century (or even the 20th) and write articles in the same units as those schoolchildren use - metric ones.

I can at least congratulate El Reg for making less of a Luddite-centric, pro-imperial-units cockup of a story than the BBC just did. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19818009)

And stuff France. Apart from the fact that it was their last pre-revolution king who decided that they would become the first nation actually to use the already 100 year old metric system (invented in Britain), neither the French (nor the E.U) have any claim to it.

If you, 'skirmish' don't like it, go like in the USA where they use a system that is not based on mathematics, nor on the number of fingers humans happen to have, nor on any other rational principle.

Re: pandering

Oh4FS, we 'murricans didn't invent this crap, we inherited it from all around the world. Remember we've only been here a bit over 200 years. I hate it as much as you do, but old habits die really hard.

Try watchmaking - diameter of a watch movement is expressed in "lignes" (pronounced "lines", no not that kind, they didn't have that stuff then), and is some "logical" fraction like 1/37th of a pre-revolution French inch, which was different than any other inch on the planet anyway. The symbol for lignes is ''' (three apostrophes), so you'll see things like "10.5 ''' movement".

(Besides, anyone who hails from someplace that invented Whitworth has *very* little to complain about.)

And there's NO WAY I'd ride in that thing, in fact, I prefer to watch from a very safe distance, probably on TV via a satellite link. Youse guys over in Blighty have something and someone(s) to be proud of in this deal - I wish them luck and continued good health (and I'll donate a couple of sets of earplugs, please provide a mailing address.)

Re: pandering

Oh please. The units aren't important in an article, it's getting the meaning of them across that matters. I'm British and I use pounds, miles, feet, and inches because they mean something to me. I have to convert metric to imperial so I can get a sense of what it means. Bloody SI Nazis, you'll have us all going into pubs and asking for a 0.56826125 litre of beer.

Re: pandering

As a transplanted Brit, nothing makes me miss home more than shopping in an American home improvement store.

- a '2x4' piece of wood is nowhere near 2" x 4". Not remotely close. You never get used to this.

- their machine screws and bolts have ridiculous measurements like "#10 1 1/2". Take a deep sigh and think lovingly about how easy it is to order an M6 bolt in Blighty

- their plumbing supplies are wacky. They love soldered joints and treat compression fittings like the redheaded stepchild. Whoever thought it was a good idea to let weekend warriors loose with a blowtorch in a confined space in wood framed houses? The mind boggles.

On the bright side, they do have some seriously badass power tools.

Re: pandering

Re 'FatGerman' above: The units are *utterly* important in an article, and there should only be one set given (S.I in this country). Otherwise, people (our kids even) end up inadvertently memorising something like the melting point of steel (say), only to discover later in life that they'd accidentally memorised the value in Fahrenheit due to some dumb-arse journalist who thought that "the units didn't matter".

And, non sequeteur though it was, no we wouldn't have ourselves or anyone else "going into pubs and asking for a 0.56826125 litre of beer". Since when (outside a university chemistry lab) would you ever expect someone to be able to measure any fluid to the nearest 10nL? What we might expect is to order a nice sensible 500mL, expecting to be served with any random value between about 490 and 510mL (i.e plus or minus a spoonfull or two).

Re: Who works on this project?

You could say that.

Ron Ayres, the aerodynamicist, who designed BloodhoundSSC's basic shape, and ThrustSSC's basic shape was one of the people working on the Bloodhound SAM in the 1950s/60s, so has a long pedigree working with supersonic devices and is a bloody smart bloke to boot.

Re: "equivalent to holding a large family car on the palm of your hand,"

They actually ran at 16,600 rpm yesterday, and had a pump exit pressure of a bit over 800psi.

That translates into about 4 family cars resting on his hand.

I was delighted to see that the thermal camera and then eventually everything else too failed either during or just after the run. The estimated acoustic level inside the HAZ was 185dBA which is way beyond the fatal level for a human being and clearly shook either their cameras or wiring (or both) to bits. As Andy Green said, they need to know what stresses to design sensors to tolerate on the real car and this gave them the data they needed to start on that process.

Re: Why the car engine?

It needs to be easily controllable too. One way of supplying the oxidiser is to use some of the HTP to drive the turbo-pump via a turbine. The problem is that it isn't as easily controllable whereas the CA2010 engine is and is already developed. The Bloodhound team didn't need to design and debug an 850hp turbo-pump and its control system.

It's also great publicity for Cosworth who don't just make racing engines these days but get involved in all sorts of precision engine/engineering work.