BBC dumps Gulf oil spill on Middlesbrough In case you've ever wondered just how far a Mars rover might have wandered if it had set out from your front door, or indeed the exact area covered by the Chernobyl radiation cloud, if that ill-fated nuclear facility had been built at your mum's house, then look no further than BBC Dimensions. Auntie's "experimental prototype …
Wellll,
Assuming the swimming pool falls flat, ie water can't spill out, the weight of the walls is negligible, and it has a drag coefficient of 0.8 (that of a cube), its terminal velocity at sea level will be almost bang on 200m/s (447mph)
So, the kintic energy in the falling pool is about 50GJ, which equates just just under 12 tons of TNT, which about the same energy in 48 SC500 bombs.
Quite devastating really.
Feel free to pick at the numbers, I did this will eating my Thursday pie & chips.
The RAF found it easier to drop two Grand Slam bombs (total 8 tons of Torpex) rather than lift a spare* municipal swimming pool into low orbit.
Which is why there are no pictures of very damp flattened German infrastructure with lots of pieces of broken tiles.
*"What do you mean, it's for the war effort? I've got a class booked!"
<quote>The RAF found it easier to drop two Grand Slam bombs (total 8 tons of Torpex) rather than lift a spare* municipal swimming pool into low orbit.</quote>
8 tons of Torpex sounds more like either two Tallboys or a single Grand Slam than two Grand Slams (Grand Slam was the 22000 lb camouflet bomb; Tallboy was the 12000 lb version).
That oil spill would probably have reached my house. Well, so long as there was enough of the stuff to make the spill a good few hundred feet deep - we have a lovely view over (and, more importantly, down) towards the Boro area in the far distance. In fact, it used to be quite striking in the evenings if the various chemical plants and refineries were burning stuff off from their assorted chimneys and flare stacks.
For some reason, it usually made me think of the land of <Ian McKellen>Morrrr-dorrrrrr</Ian McKellen>.
Never mind the Luftwaffe, anyone want to add in the blast radius of some of the modern US bombs that got dropped on Baghdad so we can see the "progress". Might be an eye opener for some people to see what these things would hit if dropped in London. Go on, they've got a War on Terror section. It would fit right in. ;)
I suspect the range they've used doesn't adequately account for the fuel burned in actual combat, or the effect of flying at the speed of the bomber formation. Checking, the distance looks about right for a Bf109E without drop tank. For practical combat operations, you could reckon on losing as much as half that radius.
The Spitfire I had about the same range. And by the Battle of Britain the RAF was using constant-speed propellers (think of this as a gearbox for coupling the engine to the air).
Dimensions.
Also, I'd for one like to know what area/country/city would be covered by the 1.1Billion $1 coins that are needed to reach the ISS. and equivalent amount in pounds, then the equivalent number of pounds required to do the same. Inquiring minds and all....
Maybe after lunch break I'll acquire a calculator and work it out :D
That's not a Gulf-sized oil slick, dammit, it's the "area affected by the spill". That was *much* smaller than the entire Gulf of Mexico, and even the area affected wasn't all covered with an oil slick edge to edge.
For similar scale-boggling, if the Gulf of Mexico is scaled to become an Olympic-sized swimming pool, the volume of oil released from Deep Horizon scales to fill an eye dropper.
I know this, because a nice man on Radio Four told me so.
I supposed this was a UK-only thing at first --- I put in "edinboro" for a location, to see what it would do, and it *found* Edinboro, Pennsylvania (abut 400 miles from me). So then I put in my town of Bloomsburg, all 12,000 of us, and it found us too. Turns out the Mars Spirit rover could just about get out of town, but it went the wrong way to come to my house.
There's more than a passing chance that this might happen someday.
In fact, lets cut out the middle man and let the Register take over as director general. It would probably do a good job of getting rid of all the crap and comissioning more of what we want (including, mayhaps, a sucessful translation of the BOFH to the TV medium? - although this might destroy it, and I wouldnt even suggest it if Simon would write more often!)
in before "they already tried - Salmon Days." (hence "successful")
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