Timeline for Could one fire a bullet with sufficient speed to leave the Earth?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 14, 2023 at 21:47 | vote | accept | Simon S | ||
| Jun 16, 2015 at 19:05 | comment | added | CuriousOne | We have seen meteors enter at up to 26km/s. Large enough iron meteors survive that just fine and the heating only melts off a thin layer of their surface. A tungsten nose cone will survive just fine, although in reality one would probably use a pusher design which would create a near-vacuum tunnel in front of the actual vehicle and the exit of the electromagnetic accelerator would be far above sea level, but these are minor engineering considerations. | |
| Jun 16, 2015 at 18:53 | comment | added | WhatRoughBeast | @CuriousOne - Sorry, I meant "experimental data". 60 kps would be a pretty ambitious wind tunnel, and depending on altitude that's in the Mach 50 regime. And shock tunnels aren't much for durations over a few milliseconds. Not that the atmospheric flight duration would be all that much greater. | |
| Jun 16, 2015 at 18:47 | comment | added | CuriousOne | You are basically in a deep shock regime where nothing else but the material right in front of you matters. A cone will simply shove those molecules out of the way in a purely kinetic way. There is an additional loss term due to ionization, but I thought those things were rather well understood. Since the exposure to the atmosphere would be very short, less than a second, there is no significant heat transfer in the nose cone, so one does not even need an ablator. The forces on the vehicle would be very strong, though, so in order to keep it intact, it would have to have a high density. | |
| Jun 16, 2015 at 18:35 | history | answered | WhatRoughBeast | CC BY-SA 3.0 |