How do you prevent the sphere or capsule from tumbling?
In the real world for the people who do extreme height sky diving, their biggest fear is starting an uncontrollable tumble. In the thin atmosphere there is no way to stop it and by the time you hit thicker air, you have been rendered
unconscious.
However, humans are very far from spherical (well most himans, anyway :-) a sphere would be less likely to tumble, I think. But if you’re not just wearing a suit, and are rising in some sort of encapsulating enclosure, at OTU tech levels cheap disposable
attitude adjustment would certainly be readily available. Odds are you could do the control part today for a few dollars. The thruster part might cost a little more.
I can’t imagine that a hypersonic airflow makes this any easier to manage.
On Wed, Jan 31, 2018 at 12:18:39AM -0500, Caleuche wrote:
> Could you explain that last part (" 50% margin for the harder to
> model variation of forces over the sphere") - do you mean with
> respect to the ability of the internal pressure of the sphere to
> keep the sphere rigid and spherical?
I mean that the drag comes from an average over the frontal surface,
and the pressure on the sphere near the stagnation point will
generally be greater than that further out. The exact magnitude of
variation depends upon all sorts of surface detail factors that are
extremely annoying to model and may vary in reality anyway. So I
allowed an extra 50% margin to cover these.
- Tim
-----
The Traveller Mailing List
Archives at
http://archives.simplelists.com/tml
Report problems to
xxxxxx@simplelists.com
To unsubscribe from this list please go to
http://archives.simplelists.com
--
-----
The Traveller Mailing List
Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml
Report problems to xxxxxx@simplelists.com
To unsubscribe from this list please go to
http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=SVsSnnCJk1ACiTghqxnWgr8yCl9WeXKi