In honor of another ongoing Knight Rider conversation, I repost ....
[5:46pm] bug_laptop: http://twitter.com/jknight - scroll down, its one of the last 10 or so
[5:56pm] slashmc: is the question over the calcuation of how bad you felt after watching 2 hrs of KR ?
[5:57pm] bug_laptop: haha
[5:57pm] bug_laptop: no
[5:57pm] bug_laptop: and i was wrong
[5:57pm] bug_laptop: but i’ll explain
[5:57pm] bug_laptop: at the end of the show, kitt stops and allows itself to be broadsided by a suburban
[5:57pm] bug_laptop: which immediately crumples against kitt, stopping virtually immediately
[5:58pm] bug_laptop: kitt never even budges
[5:58pm] slashmc: ah
[5:58pm] bug_laptop: so the question was, assuming the lack of magic, how much did kitt have to weigh to stop a moving suburban completely
[5:58pm] jbradley1: that is because when you weren’t looking kitt replaced himself with a giant chunk of lead
[5:58pm] hugbot: but that is a strange factoid, jbradley1
[5:58pm] bug_laptop: my assumptions were 100Km/h, Suburban weighs 6000lbs, or 2700 Kg
[5:58pm] jbradley1: he is a magical car after all
[5:58pm] hugbot: but he is in full psychotic rampage mode now, jbradley1
[5:59pm] bug_laptop: so last night, under the influence of wine, i used an F=ma calculation, and came up with 55000 pounds, assuming it took 3 seconds to dissipate the crash energy
[5:59pm] bug_laptop: but using a pure elastic collision based on momentum (m1v1 + m2v2)/m1 + m2
[5:59pm] lj left the chat room. (Read error: 110 (Connection timed out))
[6:00pm] bug_laptop: (m1v1 + m2v2)/(m1 + m2)
[6:00pm] slashmc: yeah, that’s not an elastic collision
[6:00pm] bug_laptop: but for the sake of the math
[6:00pm] bug_laptop: and m2v2 is 0
[6:00pm] bug_laptop: m1v1 is 72000 Kgm/s
[6:00pm] bug_laptop: m1 is 2700 kg
[6:01pm] bug_laptop: so m2 must be 69300 kg
[6:01pm] bug_laptop: converting to pounds, thats 160K
[6:01pm] bug_laptop: or 80 tons
[6:02pm] • slashmc will give it some thought just as soon as he can get the boss of this silly telecon
[6:02pm] bug_laptop: or about 12 tons more than an M1A2 main battle tank
[6:02pm] bug_laptop: also, about 78 tons more than a mustang
[6:02pm] bug_laptop: thats some magical nanotechnology
[6:03pm] slashmc: Kitt has to move a little bit
[6:04pm] slashmc: no matter how cool it is
[6:09pm] bug_laptop: well, yes, my calc. has final velocity at 1m/s
[6:09pm] bug_laptop: to make the math easy
[6:09pm] bug_laptop: and avoid divide by 0
[6:09pm] bug_laptop: interestingly, density of kitt at that moment, assuming that you just fill out the whole cube that kitt occupies, is only 5300 Kg/m3
[6:10pm] bug_laptop: about twice that of concrete, but only 2/3rds that of steel
[6:10pm] bug_laptop: and half that of lead
[6:10pm] bug_laptop: now, if you assume that kitt only takes up 2/3rds of the volume of the cube bounding its outer edges, then kitt basically transformed itself into a solid block of steel for the moment of collision
[6:11pm] bug_laptop: this conversation is getting posted on my blog shortly.
[6:11pm] hugbot: but this conversation is getting too politically incorrect, but I love it…, bug_laptop
[6:12pm] bug_laptop: if you assume that by VOLUME, KITT only takes up about 10% of the total space of the cube, and can’t transform air, then density jumps to 5 times that of lead
[6:12pm] bug_laptop: and 2.5 times the density of gold
[6:12pm] bug_laptop: sweet
[6:13pm] bug_laptop: not quite to neutron star yet, tho
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