Recent content by David Morgan

No idea why this popped into my head on the drive home tonight, but here we go: Would it be possible to build a rocket filled with either liquid Nitrogen, or some other super-cooled substance, then use a battery of high-energy, ground-based laser beams pointed at the super-cooled propellant to...

If you know the distance to the horizon, and we're assuming you're on a spherical surface with uniform sea all around you... The distance to the horizon would be your radius r. Circumference C of your 360 degree view would be 2πr Factor in your field of view... for example a FOV of 108 degrees...

Maybe I'm off base here, but I feel like this would require a two pronged attack focusing on both the intake/fuel delivery as well as scrubbing the exhaust output. On the intake side of things, I feel like you'd want to prevent H2O from getting created in the first place by reducing the amount...

This turned into a fun thread! To clarify my original position a bit, I wasn't really imagining dispensing the actual exhaust gases to the front of the car. My original thought was somewhere along the lines of creating a front bumper out of the exhaust header. Especially in turbo charged...

Thanks for the replies everyone, it's definitely helping me better understand the error of my ways. So looking at this from a mass-energy equivalence standpoint: injecting more energy into the air in front of the car would essentially be the same as making the air more massive. The basic...

Fair enough, air will be air in this case, no phase changes... however, if we instead look at it as an energy transfer problem, would injecting wasted heat energy into the air in front of the car supplement the kinetic energy of the vehicle itself in moving air particles out of the way?

I'm assuming that hotter air would be less dense (or if nothing else, slightly more chaotic) and therefore easier to push a car through. I guess I'm seeing the whole "hot knife through butter" cliche in my head, with a hot car staring as the butter knife, and the air playing the role of butter.

I was reading a BBC article about the automotive challenges of building a 300 MPH capable, street-legal vehicle and had a the following thought/question: Could one dissipate enough of the considerable exhaust heat generated by these supercars into the front bumper/air-splitter, so that the air...