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Story: Monday, March 13, 2017

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5 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Almost forgot Superman.

It may not really get messier than transformations or resizes :)

Unless the authors really overdo it and make Flash move faster than light, still on Earth surface. Or Superman flying into past.

It gets pretty messy with lots of unintended consequences.  Unlike Superman, Flash and Quickslver do not have their own personal reactionless drives handy.  (Or at least that's not how super-speed is presented).  Every accelerating step forward requires their shoes grip the surface and transfer the acceleration energy to the floor.  Imagine what that does to the floor.  They can go up stairs OK but they can't go down them any faster than they can fall.  They would have to run down walls, which aren't built to be floors.  Now let's talk about the forces that ac on them when they try to turn or what they do to the air around them as they go by, or the friction heating they would have to deal with.  Invoking physics the entire world to a speedster is like they're immersed something like water slipping on glass.

Then let's talk about collisions, bugs, dust, even smoke become hazards to a speedster.  Superman, at least, is invulnerable...

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35 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

Then let's talk about collisions, bugs, dust, even smoke become hazards to a speedster.  Superman, at least, is invulnerable...

Smoke? Even clear air if fast enough.

36 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:
53 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

It may not really get messier than transformations or resizes :)

It gets pretty messy with lots of unintended consequences.

On the other hand, do you remember the discussion we had about resize in NP few pages pack? With several possible explanations, the least messy ones involving extremely curved space?

I'm not saying superspeed doesn't get messy (although good point, Superman avoids most of the problems). I'm saying it's not only superpower which gets messy with lots of unintended consequences.

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39 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

It gets pretty messy with lots of unintended consequences.  Unlike Superman, Flash and Quickslver do not have their own personal reactionless drives handy.  (Or at least that's not how super-speed is presented).  Every accelerating step forward requires their shoes grip the surface and transfer the acceleration energy to the floor.  Imagine what that does to the floor.  They can go up stairs OK but they can't go down them any faster than they can fall.  They would have to run down walls, which aren't built to be floors.  Now let's talk about the forces that ac on them when they try to turn or what they do to the air around them as they go by, or the friction heating they would have to deal with.  Invoking physics the entire world to a speedster is like they're immersed something like water slipping on glass.

Then let's talk about collisions, bugs, dust, even smoke become hazards to a speedster.  Superman, at least, is invulnerable...

I am going to steal a leaf from Mlooney's book and recommend this storyline from The Whiteboard. In it, Doc overdoses on caffeine and gets temporary superspeed. The comic is a lot less gentle to Doc when it comes to consequences from it.

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2 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

I am going to steal a leaf from Mlooney's book and recommend this storyline from The Whiteboard. In it, Doc overdoses on caffeine and gets temporary superspeed. The comic is a lot less gentle to Doc when it comes to consequences from it.

This time I did read the whole thread.  I was going to post a link to that.

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12 hours ago, mlooney said:

This time I did read the whole thread.  I was going to post a link to that.

Every time I read The whiteboard, I feel the need to get a screen cleaner...

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I'm saying this from memory but: a while back (few years back?) an aeroplane went off course when in UK airspace.  This was responded to by a (military?) jet scrambling to check up on it, which lead to breaking the sound barrier at low altitude.

I was eating in the kitchen at home at the time, and first thing I noticed was a shockwave of air slamming into the side of the house, very loudly, as if someone was trying to blow the back door in or something.  The next was audible aircraft noises.

Our windows were fine, but my sister mentioned that a few windows at School were not.  I think I also heard from someone also that one teacher was convinced that it was a bomb exploding, as she had lived near an airport and experienced aircraft sonic booms which were not that loud (presumably being at higher altitude).

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1 hour ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

Where I live in Florida, the Space Shuttle often passed overhead when landing.  It never broke a window here, but it rattled everything else in the house.

They didn't land it to build you more pyramids? What sort of astronauts fly these things, anyway?

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6 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

They didn't land it to build you more pyramids? What sort of astronauts fly these things, anyway?

Could be worse, could be pyramids from the UK flying overhead, dropping Jaffa Cakes on everyone.

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10 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

Where I live in Florida, the Space Shuttle often passed overhead when landing.  It never broke a window here, but it rattled everything else in the house.

I'm pretty sure that the Shuttle drops to subsonic speed by the time it gets that close to the landing site.

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Supersonic planes flying overhead don't break windows, because the intensity of sound is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, and the shockwave of breaking the sound barrier(and the shockwave from explosions) follows the same principle of sound: differences in air pressure.

So overhead planes won't cause problems due to distance from the shockwave's epicenter, but if Cheerleadra goes supersonic at ground level, it'll be like she set off a bomb. Especially if she's inside a building, where the shockwave can reflect off the walls(unless the shockwave is stronger than the walls, in which case it will break them.) This is, of course, assuming she doesn't have the fancy reduced/capped air resistance common to speedsters in comics.

Edited by Drasvin
Minor grammar fix

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2 hours ago, Drasvin said:

Supersonic planes flying overhead don't break windows, because the intensity of sound is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, and the shockwave of breaking the sound barrier(and the shockwave from explosions) follows the same principle of sound: differences in air pressure.

So overhead planes won't cause problems due to distance from the shockwave's epicenter, but if Cheerleadra goes supersonic at ground level, it'll be like she set off a bomb. Especially if she's inside a building, where the shockwave can reflect off the walls(unless the shockwave is stronger than the walls, in which case it will break them.) This is, of course, assuming she doesn't have the fancy reduced/capped air resistance common to speedsters in comics.

This makes me wonder what would happen if anyone broke the speed of sound underwater. Admittedly hard to do because 1) sound moves much faster underwater and 2) water resistance obviously makes it harder to accelerate to high speeds. But if it succeeded, the results ought to be spectacular.

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10 hours ago, Drasvin said:

Supersonic planes flying overhead don't break windows, because the intensity of sound is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, and the shockwave of breaking the sound barrier(and the shockwave from explosions) follows the same principle of sound: differences in air pressure.

So overhead planes won't cause problems due to distance from the shockwave's epicenter, but if Cheerleadra goes supersonic at ground level, it'll be like she set off a bomb. Especially if she's inside a building, where the shockwave can reflect off the walls(unless the shockwave is stronger than the walls, in which case it will break them.) This is, of course, assuming she doesn't have the fancy reduced/capped air resistance common to speedsters in comics.

We have no evidence yet that Cheerleadra is capable of supersonic speed. We know that she can fly across town a lot faster than a vehicle driving between the same endpoints in the middle of a light snowfall (seen at New Year's Eve), but that still doesn't necessarily exceed a hundred knots, and you need over six hundred to break the sound barrier at low altitude.

7 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

This makes me wonder what would happen if anyone broke the speed of sound underwater. Admittedly hard to do because 1) sound moves much faster underwater and 2) water resistance obviously makes it harder to accelerate to high speeds. But if it succeeded, the results ought to be spectacular.

Long before it gets near sonic speed in water, any solid body will start to cavitate--that is, the pressure behind it will drop so low that vapor bubbles will spontaneously form. These bubbles would seriously interfere with the formation and spread of the shock waves that would result from supersonic movement.

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13 hours ago, ijuin said:

I'm pretty sure that the Shuttle drops to subsonic speed by the time it gets that close to the landing site.

Nope.  The Shuttle was bleeding off speed all the way down.  It didn't get down to subsonic speeds until it was almost at KSC.  Depending on the exact descent angle, the double sonic boom might have been heard anywhere from the Suwanee River to South Beach.

If the Concorde reduced power to the engines mid flight, it would drop below the speed of sound in a matter of seconds.  The shuttle had no engines for landing.

The speed of sound at sea level is less that .1,125 feet per second.  The ISS orbits at 4.76 miles per second.  That is a lot of velocity to burn off with nothing but air resistance.

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18 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

The speed of sound at sea level is less that .1,125 feet per second.  The ISS orbits at 4.76 miles per second.  That is a lot of velocity to burn off with nothing but air resistance.

On the other hand, what else would you reduce the velocity with? You can't exactly pack another set of these huge fuel tanks used to GAIN that speed (actually, it wouldn't be enough: you need fuel to move that fuel, meaning you would need something like 15x more fuel).

Remember: Space is not far away. Space is FAST.

(BTW, for people who already upgraded to metric, ISS orbits at 7.66 km/s and speed of sound is 340.29 m/s)

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1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

In fact, once you decide to leave your current planet, space is pretty much the only thing that is NOT far away. Other planets - far away. Other stars - seriously far away. Other spiral arms - way far away. Other galaxies - yeep.

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On den 18 mars 2017 at 2:49 AM, ijuin said:

Long before it gets near sonic speed in water, any solid body will start to cavitate--that is, the pressure behind it will drop so low that vapor bubbles will spontaneously form. These bubbles would seriously interfere with the formation and spread of the shock waves that would result from supersonic movement.

The fastest submersible thing we've managed to create, AFAIK, are the supercavitating torpedoes. Back in the 70's the Soviet Union started working on a torpedo called squall. It is actually rocket powered and "flies" through the water inside a bubble created byt the shape of the nose cone and exhaust gases that's bled off from the rocket engine. This way it can reach about  370 km/h; 230 mph. As the speed of sound in water is about 5,213 km/h or 3,239 mph they are currently not anywhere near breaking the sound barrier under water.

It's been claimed that it's theoretically possible to create a submersible capable of reaching more than 5,000 mph, but I doubt anything like that will ever be built.

 

Edited by Cpt. Obvious
Spleling

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1 hour ago, Cpt. Obvious said:

It's been claimed that it's theoretically possible to create a submersible capable of reaching more than 5,000 mph, but I doubt anything like that will ever be built.

I'm sure it will. It doesn't seem it will happen soon, of course, but the universe is still young.

Actually, maybe it already happened and just not in this remote corner of galaxy. (Well ... ok, not really corner, the spiral arms are round ...)

The question if it will happen on EARTH is harder, as Sun is close to half of it's life. And hardest is question if WE will do it (I mean humans, not EGS readers, although why not, perhaps popularity of EGS will go up in next centuries ...).

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5 minutes ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:
15 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

humans, not EGS readers, although why not, perhaps popularity of EGS will go up in next centuries

homo Goonicus?

Considering we are Bunnies, Homo Oryctolagus?

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