quote:
Originally posted by UTI
quote:
Originally posted by CookieRevised
EDIT: Oh and "You can travel faster than sound in it, but not survive it." <= you can't travel faster than sound with it as they don't generate enough power/speed.
Not when they're flying level, the reason why you can't survive it is because to fly faster than the speed of sound in a propeller driven aircraft, you have togo into a dive... and after you break the sound barrier friction is greatly decreased (if not absent *I can't remember) so there was no way for the pilots to pull out of the dive.
You're mixing things up here.
You wont be able to dive faster than the speed of sound without aided power because of the air friction. Without the needed power (which must be big, unlike a propellor driven aircraft) you eventually wont go faster.
Without friction, you will fall faster and faster (acceleration would be roughly 9m/s). But with air friction this isn't so, you never would even come close to the speed of sound (without big power to overcome air friction) and the accelartion would be, at one point, 0m/s; you'll fall at the same speed (if you jumped out of the aircraft high enough to reach this point before you hit ground
).
Important: friction is not decreased when you fall/dive faster than the speed of sound. It will be exactly the same. Sound speed and friction have got nothing todo with eachother.
Hence:
quote:
Originally posted by UTI
In the movie they told of many lives that were lost trying to break the sound barrier, it was one of the few science movies that caught my attention and held interest.
those pilots didn't lost their lives because friction was close to zero (because it wouldn't), it is because they couldn't control their aircraft anymore because of aerodynamics (the didn't have lift anymore; which is related, but still something different than friction) and ran out of distance...
somthing like that... probably can't explain it properly, blah... here is a dutch site:
http://www.techna.nl/Kracht%20en%20beweging/valsn...id/valsnelheid.htm 
/ 
