In a bizarre coincidence, I happen to be a second year mathematician at the University of Manchester. Small world, eh?Redingold said:
Physics Question! Is my understanding correct?
- Thread starter AJvsRonin
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Hmm actually I take that back you may be right. So I've found some physics calulators.Redingold said:
Using this one:
http://easycalculation.com/physics/classical-physics/force.php
Entering 1000kg mass, and 800,000 Newtons (800kJ/m) gives an accleration of 800m/s^2!!!
Thats extremely fast though and sounds weird to me.
Using this one:
http://www.calctool.org/CALC/phys/newtonian/projectile
And entering angle as 90 degrees with an initial velocity of 800m/s^2 under gravity = 1g. Gives a maximum height of over 65 kilometres!!! and travel time of 163 seconds.
I know this doesn't take into account air resistance but still!
This has gotta be wrong right? Is a newton not a force of 1 joule/m?
I think you also need to consider your audience and the applicability of this statement to the story. We're not all physicists. if you get it wrong and it sounds fancy to a non-physicists, they aren't going to care. Aside from that, you have to take this is relevance to the story. What is the purpose of this conversation? If its to show character 2 is smart or knows physics, do your best to make sure its accurate, though remember that if your audience doesn't know how it works it just needs to sound good. If the point is to just shoot the breeze and this isn't relevant to anything else, don't worry too much about it. Focus more on important story points then on whether the fact are correct in one unimportant piece of dialogue.
overall remember that being accurate isn't always important to the story. Plenty of professional writers and popular stories use techno-babble that makes no sense. It's not because they don't check facts but instead because its simply a way of progressing the story rather then the point of the story. Nobody cares how a flux capacitor works, we only care that it makes time travel happen and thus progresses the story.
overall remember that being accurate isn't always important to the story. Plenty of professional writers and popular stories use techno-babble that makes no sense. It's not because they don't check facts but instead because its simply a way of progressing the story rather then the point of the story. Nobody cares how a flux capacitor works, we only care that it makes time travel happen and thus progresses the story.
Sorry, you lost me at the metric system. I saw a guy lift one end of a car a few centimeters once, if that helps. Probably not.
You don't have the biological facilities to release that energy in a direct way. What you have is a gallon of diesel fuel and you're putting it into a miniature hobby engine that has 0.6 horsepower which could run for days on that amount of fuel. What you would need would be equivalent to a battleship turbine which has 30,250 horsepower but gets about 32 feet per gallon(0.006 mpg). We evolved to manipulate objects about as long as our arms and about as heavy as a third our weight, it would be pointless for us to maintain the facilities to perform that kind of a feat of strength unless the environment pressured us to.
You can't have an initial velocity of 800ms[sup]-2[/sup], because that's a measure of acceleration.AJvsRonin said:
The force you need to apply has to be equal to the car's weight (Actually, it has to be greater than the car's weight, because if it was exactly equal the forces would balance and the car wouldn't move, but it only needs to be larger by a negligible amount). You don't have a force of 800kN, you're right that that would be extremely large. You only need to apply ~10000N of force to overcome gravity, and then you just multiply that force by the distance over which it acts to get the work done.
A newton is indeed a force of 1 joule per metre, and it takes 10000J to move the car upwards by one metre, because at 1m above the ground, it has a gravitational potential of 10000J. So the force you apply is 10000Jm[sup]-1[/sup]. Given that you have 800kJ available, that gives a maximum height of 800kJ/10000N = 80m.
I know, where do these people get off? Convert that shit to feet and inches if you want my esteemed opinion...lechat said:
Im glad i found this thread because ive got a story im writing too and i need to know if a crossbow would work in space
Sweet, would you need to put some sort of gyroscope into the bolts to make them fly straight though?Darken12 said:
Straight through what? Once you fire it, the bolt will travel in a straight line because there is no air to make it deviate course. It will also never slow down because there is no air friction. Also a gyroscope (or any other form of steering mechanism) would be more or less useless because steering needs to be done against something. You steer in one direction by pushing against the air/water/etc in the opposite one, so because there is nothing in space to steer against, you are hopeless to change course once fired.adamsaccount said:
I imagined the bolt tumbling instead of the pointy end staying forward since theres no air for the arrows to direct it through, i guess you could shoot explosives or something like that though, i thought gyroscopic forces worked in space?Darken12 said: