Another Contender For the Land Speed Record 85
We've been following developments with the British-led Bloodhound SSC, a jet car aiming to hit 1,000 mph in 2011 and shatter the land speed record. Now reader Thea Chard writes in about a rival project from Washington state, one aiming at 800 mph before the end of 2010 — still plenty fast enough to break the record. "For the past 12 years Ed Shadle, 68, Keith Zanghi, 55, and their 44-man team have been racing to break the world land speed record with the North American Eagle, a converted 1957 F-104 Starfighter 'turbojet car.' Although the team is rushing to beat out their biggest contender, Bloodhound SSC from Great Britain, whose team leader holds the previous land speed record and has secured much more financial support for the project, Shadle and Zanghi hope to run the Eagle at around 800 mph later this year, breaking the sound barrier and setting a new world record for fastest land vehicle."
New speed record last week - 293 km/h (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6311K220100402 [reuters.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOGX73P8RqM [youtube.com]
Re:Feels like cheating (Score:2, Interesting)
Agreed.
But even the Dieselmax can't start on its own: they get a tractor (!) to bring it up to 30mpg, before it can engage first gear.
Which is fine and all, but personally I'd be more impressed with something that has that additional gear onboard. It does add weight, it will make the top speed slightly slower, and that is, I feel, why it is important.
Re:Feels like cheating (Score:5, Interesting)
Serco, those guys are just everywhere. The biggest company you've never heard of.
I think this is the first time they have tried putting the jet engine on top of the rocket motor, in a car. The variances in air pressure on the uneven ground may make the research into the control systems that keep the nose on the car worthwhile.
Just sayin.
Re:Feels like cheating (Score:4, Interesting)
...the land speed record for a wheeled vehicle is 10,400 km/h (6,462 mph) ..... on rails, unmanned
Railed vehicles can go much faster than free wheeled vehicles and the manned speed record was for a railed vehicle ... the only reason they stopped the manned tests was that they did not have a reason for them to be manned ...
Like the steam car record and the diesel car record the "land speed record" is very artificial, many vehicles have gone faster on land, many have gone much faster manned above it ...
Re:Feels like cheating (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, they do tend to have traction control and possibly even active stability control in modern F1 cars. They have massive slick tyres too so easing back on the throttle will quickly give you your grip back if you get into a power-slide (and that's basically what traction control and stability control do when they detect things are going slightly squiffy).
Counter-steering also becomes hard wired if you do enough sliding around in real life, or play enough computer games ;) I panicked and stomped on the brakes the first time I slid on snow last winter, but when I started to learn the limits of my car (only just got it last summer, it's the first car I've owned that has rear wheel drive), I had a lot of fun and learned to anticipate and provoke it then go with it rather than fighting it :) You react to things a lot more quickly if you're actually expecting them (undergrad Psych tutorials ftw).
Re:Tribute to a genius (Score:3, Interesting)
"I wonder what it would take now, to do what he did."
To design a pointy tube with wings? Especially one that was a death trap [wikipedia.org] (nicknamed the "Flying Coffin"), that Lockheed had to pay massive illegal bribes [wikipedia.org] to get anyone to buy? I'm guessing there are harder things to do.
Re:Feels like cheating (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm actually much more impressed by something like the Dieselmax [wikipedia.org], even if it is much slower.
I just read that and now I am impressed. 350mph, 2.7 tonne vehicle (yeah I'm mixing units) and a fuel tank size of 9 litres. And according to that article they only limited themselves to 350 as a safety precaution for the tires, and they weren't even in top gear!
Choice of F-104 (Score:3, Interesting)
The choice of the F-104 is by no accident. It's low altitude performance is well known.
Darryl Greenamyer's [wikipedia.org] Red Baron F-104 did 998 mph (mach 1.30) officially and 1013 mph (mach 1.33) unofficially. At less than 300 ft, back in the '70's. The J79 has to be water/alcohol injected during runs like these, otherwise it will exceed it's maximum inlet operating temps.
Say what you want about the F-104, but it was built to fly straight and fast, intercept and shoot down bombers. Another work or artfrom Kelly Johnson and company IMHO. Especially considering the timeframe.
Re:Tribute to a genius (Score:2, Interesting)
Regarding your first point, it should be noted that the postwar Luftwaffe was NOT the best air force out there, and was using the F-104 outside of it's original design intent - it was intended to be a high-speed, high-altitude interceptor, and not fly low altitude dogfights. The Canadians had some of the same problems. Other air forces had much better experiences with the plane.
That being said, should the Germans have bought it? Probably not. But the bribes Lockheed gave at the time weren't illegal, as you state - the FCPA was passed after they took place.
The F-104 was a pretty radical design which went counter to American design trends at the time. It was small, wickedly fast, and unforgiving, much like European sports cars of the era. But the US designs were trending toward larger and heavier, sacrificing maneuverability for protection and increasing speed by application of more power, similar to the 60's domestic musclecars. Witness the F-111, originally conceived as a fighter but it grew so heavy that it can only be used as a bomber/ground attack plane. It's small wonder the Italians seemed to love the F-104
Re:Tribute to a genius (Score:3, Interesting)
So what? It was a *very* simple aircraft with a fairly undemanding set of performance specifications - go fast in a straight line, carry a couple of missiles, shoot down bombers. (Not to mention every other project of the day was built with slide rules and without computers or computer modeling.)
Probably like designing a computer from that era, it could be done in a few days by a grad student on his laptop. But nobody would bother other than a grad student with time on his hands, because there really isn't much of a point to doing so.
Don't get me wrong, Kelly Johnson was a very gifted engineer, but much of the 'cult' that surrounds him is because people rarely understand the context and that he worked in a very different era than today.