XKCD: It's more than a comic

Now I'm missing some reference. What's that Kerbal Space Program this comic mentions?

Kerbal Space Program is a space program simulator game.

...That can be found on Steam and is an amazing physics spacegame.

It's the best game ever. Go buy it. NOW!

-Cue KSP crashing in 5...-

he's mentioned them before.

also, good thin it's not on the day of a new update, they're server always goes to shit when a new update comes out. (i've got it on steam now luckily.)

Restraining an airplane

Another example of a fairly straightforward subject taken to humorously absurd extremes.

The drawing of the acrobat whale was cute.

Honestly, if I was a pilot and I saw that many people looking solemnly at the airplane I was piloting holding fishing poles, I think I'd get a bit anxious.

I always figured the risky-seeming thing about hanging by your hair wasn't the tensile strength but the connection to your head. If you pull on a hair it'll probably pluck before it breaks.

I was expecting spider silk to come up in this but it didnt. Silk is used for all kinds of things in engineering

Someone pulling on your hair is hella painful. Good luck suspending your weight on it.

I especially got a snicker about the Alt Text for the very first image referring to that old question about whether an aircraft on a treadmill set to run at the same speed as the aircraft but in the opposite direction would be able to take off or not.

That question is absurd: All of a plane's wheels are free.

Well, they have some relatively minor drive power behind them for taxiing, at least on jets. But yeah, basically. The thing is that the treadmill will still exert force on the plane backward, at least to start. I think there is an actual answer someone worked out that looked right to me, but I can't recall it.

mythbusters and Randal both go with the fact the wheels will spin as fast as they need to because the engines are pushing the air, not the ground, and the air's still stationary.

Please note that I said the question was old, not that it's good.

The sad thing is that when brought up on another forum, years ago, some of the regular posters who had previously demonstrated being not stupid didn't seem to grasp the fact that the wheels were irrelevant beyond holding up the plane, and that the engine pushing/pulling was what mattered.

[edit] Also, Ten day forecast gone horribly wrong.

edited 31st Jul '13 1:50:20 AM by Nohbody

So a plane on said treadmill can take off, but will destroy its wheels in the process.

Why would the wheels be destroyed?

What's going on with Monday?

edited 31st Jul '13 4:44:09 AM by KylerThatch

That sure looks like some serious biblical plagueness.

Because it runs twice the speed it was designed to. To take off, the plane needs to travel with a speed of, say, 400 km/h while still on the ground. In our example, the treadmill runs 400 km/h backwards. The plane can accelerate without problem because the engines push the air instead of the treadmill, but the relative speed of the plane compared to the ground is now 800 km/h, which is about the same to the wheels as if the plane tried to land at full speed. The wheels are probably not designed to withstand that.

It would have to be an epically long treadmill, too, given that the plane would accelerate off of a treadmill of its own length in a few seconds.

Regarding today's, yeah, I don't want to live there either. Cue a whole bunch of people pulling up weather sites and typing in negative zip codes to see if they can get a similar result.

Also cue at least one weather site's programming staff now at work installing a new easter egg on their site.

Well, at least it's nowhere in Canada. Our postal codes are like A1A 1A1. Good luck getting something to recognize that in negative.

edited 31st Jul '13 3:38:21 PM by Zendervai