And the obvious question is...
how many sandwiches can you fit in a cubic meter?
If we knew that, we could easily calculate how many football stadiums full of people could share one sandwich bag.
The fourth launch of NASA's high-altitude, heavy-lift super pressure balloon (SPB) is on hold while scientists wait for a break in the weather over Wanaka Airport, on New Zealand's South Island. The SPB is designed for "ultra-long-duration flight of up to 100 days at mid-latitudes", at a more-or-less constant float altitude of …
> It depends if you cut the crusts off.
And what the filling is. Something like salami doesn't appreciably add much to the mass or thickness of the sandwich.
Fried egg, sausage and bacon [1] on the other hand..
[1] In sufficient quantities. I've now auto-baconlusted. Damn.
Assuming a spherical cow of uniform density who happens to have nothing to do with this calculation, and also assuming a slice of bread being 10x10x1 cm^3, with an average filling thickness of 5mm (less for a slice of cheese or ham, more for compound fillings like fried eggs with bacon or tuna with boiled egg), and each slice/filling/slice entity being cut diagonally to yield two sandwiches, you get 8 sandwiches per liter, or 4.619 per Bulgarian Airbag. With the size of the 1 kilocat lifter being 206.3629 Olympic swimming pools, I get a total of 4131992 sandwiches. The question now is: how hungry are these football-stadium visitors? Would they be content with two sandwiches each, or is the distribution of such a huge number of sandwiches to a somewhat less huge but still huge number of sandwich-eaters going to take long enough that they will want four or five?
Yes indeed. Have NASA got no respect? Don't they know that those letters belong to an organisation with an unimpeachable track record in (nearly) space flight and playmonautical derring do? I should think they might apologise and have a word with the FAA by way of making things right again.
Super-Pressure Balloon, what a waste of three good letters anyway. Next they'll be claiming the rights to Nasaly Aspirated Snot-like Accelerant, or some such tissue fodder.
By the time you're done rounding up 10 cats, you'll be almost retired. Despite indications to the contrary, they don't come in herds.
So yeah, all will be well.
I will remember the "kilocat mission". I like that.
> By the time you're done rounding up 10 cats, you'll be almost retired.
Nah. Rounding up cats is easy - you just have to have something that they really, really want. Drugs are good (catnip etc - except for the odd[1] cat that Doesn't Do Drugs). Fresh fish also good [2].
Or the opportunity for the to thump the New Dog very hard and repeatedly..
[1] Lets just say that I'm pretty much an expert in Odd Cats. Most of the ones I've given homes to seem to be in that category. We used to have a normal one but then she got run over, lost her tail and became Metal Cat. And gained a few personality kinks.
[2] Why is it that cats love fresh fish? It's not like they would be able to get much of them in the wild? Especially not from a previous neighbours prize goldfish pond. No - that must have been the heron. Honest!
A quick googling gives the average cat weight as 3.6 - 4.5kgs so they've erred on the of caution and gone for the fattest of average moggies (though I've no idea if that's mean, mode etc etc....).
Still... I wonder if the real SPB could join forces with NASA's SPB to get LOHAN lifted on this mighty orb at some point?
On a side note, no mention of how fast they think this thing'll fly. We need to know it's SiV* velocity ratio.
(*Sheep in Vacuum)
Welp my parents last cat managed 4kgs at its heaviest before old age go him (still a surprise be lasted so long since he was a farm cat and would go for anything that looked at him funny. Herons, koi carp, rats bigger than himself.... You name it)
Their current moggy looks 5kgs but is quite the feather weight at 3kg (dry weight though, no idea how heavy when wet. I like my arms too much for that experiment)
> the average cat weight as 3.6 - 4.5kgs
I wish! I think our lightest one is about 4kg. Although the vet does keep muttering that the Grand Evil needs to slim down a bit - at 7kg she's a little on the porky side.
Although the ginger is 6.5kg, on him it's not mostly adipose.
Odd to choose "the wingspan of a 747" for the height. If a 747 has its wings vertical, then there's probably something seriously wrong. Couldn't they find anything 68.96m high that's naturally vertical?
And can you imagine the sound 10 grand pianos would make when dropped from a height of 33.5km?
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Well, according to a study, they would be landing on something feet-first, and probably survive the fall. Cats twist around, and then flatten out. Above a certain height, they can slow themselves down enough so that their terminal velocity is actually survivable.
The real question is, will they be laser-guided?
I think that the container for the cats would weigh at least possibly around 500Kg for a decent container. Then of course you need cardboard boxes for the cats to climb in. That would all decrease either the number or the size of the cats. I would propose that we keep the number of felids at 1000, but respecify that they be kittens, not cats. A small 12 week old kitten might weigh 1Kg, so theres plenty of space for cardboard boxes, cat toys water and some kibbles. And the advantage of using kittens is that the cuteness level increases. Normally cuteness is measured in MilliKittens (so a baby hedgehog might be 400 millikittens), so presumably the cuteness will average out at around 1 Kilokitten.
Whats the point of this again? How many pangolins could this think hold?
Hang on, we have the weight equivalent of a white van full of tools dangling off something with the strength of a sandwich bag at 33km altitude and nobody is worried?
It's going to make an interesting hole dropped from 100m, let alone from 33km height. What goes up must eventually come down again too: how is this going to land?
"Regarding the weight"
Mass, shirley, as weight is a function of gravity, hence would decrease upon ascension..
I'm still puzzled by the necessity to overpressurise, as the official (Vulture) SPB techlog demonstrated the need to vent lifting gas in order to reduce the chance of catastrophic envelope breach (similar systems can be seen WRT undersea deployment, in reverse)..
Oh well, I suppose the US has to find some use for its He2 overstocking..
"conformability error"
wthin the context I was talking about the length of the area between the stumps, not the area (value) of the area (physical location)
"You're also missing an apostrophe."
Good, I virtually never use them. They are an old anachronistic hangover from an older age of copperplate, procrastination and pedantry. Far better without
Its nice to know if you can't find your cat, you can use 22 kangaroos or 400 cats. Seeing as though I live in Blighty and kangaroos are hard to come by thanks to budgets cuts, I am looking forward to coming to work by cat power. I wonder if nasa is planning to use cpw (cat power) as a new fuel source to reach mars and beyond
To me, a Toyota Highlander is mid-sized, when compared against a Hummer H1 or a smaller Subaru Outback. Others might claim a MIni Cooper is mid sized as compared to an Ariel Atom. This sandwich bag could only lift 1 Hummer, 2 Highlanders or probably 9 Atoms. So which mid-sized cars were they talking about and what color? Also does this weight calculation include a driver for each car?