This assumes the airspeed is True Airspeed in MPH.

I leveled off a hair under "3,000" on the altimeter directly over the South strip and jerked into a dive, maintaining 180 on the airspeed indicator.

At 60 mph straight down your rate of descent is 5,280 feet per minute or one mile per minute. This makes my rate of descent 15,840 fpm.

Time to smack into the runway = 64 seconds or 1.07 minutes.

This makes the "3,000" reading of the game's altimeter 16,949 feet by this method of calculation.

So who is correct? Nobody, and everybody!

Here's a treat for all you nerds: When you bail out and hit the ground, your tank is waiting to the south of you. Every time

Enjoy!!

I'll do spreadsheets with you all day. You're baking my noodle on this one though. I'll leave ya at it.

Maybe your experiment works out to 3000', if 3.1 reality seconds = 1 game second. Perhaps because the game space is hurtling through our universe at close to the speed of light. After all, the game space is all electrons
Manfred

HOw does it come out using knots instead of MPH?

Yes! Manfred's got the idea. Radical weirdness, and choose your own adventure. Even just erase the numbers on the guages if you could! Jacob, add %15 to get in in knots, and I like the thought, because, what did the actual WWI guages say for each country's guages? Kilometers? Statute or nautical mile? I bet the Britts put fuel in by the Imperial gallon!

Air density surely is a factor in this simulation; above 4,000 you get very slow, and mushy. I'm starting to wonder if true airspeed (basically your speed over the ground) is higher when your altitude is high. This makes me want to compare a low vs. high altitude run timed between bases.

Sometimes when I lose connections a lot, I wait it out doing little experiments.

Pictured is a live game of BTC, srry blues, for buggin out. Anyways, "4,000" on the guage looks like 40,000 when I'm lucky enough to have a window seat on a jetliner.

How high does this look to you?

Whosethisguy wrote: This assumes the airspeed is True Airspeed in MPH.

I leveled off a hair under "3,000" on the altimeter directly over the South strip and jerked into a dive, maintaining 180 on the airspeed indicator.

At 60 mph straight down your rate of descent is 5,280 feet per minute or one mile per minute. This makes my rate of descent 15,840 fpm.

Time to smack into the runway = 64 seconds or 1.07 minutes.

This makes the "3,000" reading of the game's altimeter 16,949 feet by this method of calculation.

So who is correct? Nobody, and everybody!

Here's a treat for all you nerds: When you bail out and hit the ground, your tank is waiting to the south of you. Every time


I'll try knots and see what happens


Enjoy!!

Thx for the topic guys i have been stuck on this all day now. I cant figure it out.

This will make it EASY to figure out:

www.math.uiowa.edu/~stroyan/CTLC3rdEd/Pr...oyan/cd/45/index.htm

www.anthonycairns.com/Helicopter%20Flyin...es/R22_altimeter.jpg
It appears that every time the small fat hand move around once, that equals 1000 ft
And the small hand equals 100 feet.
So here it reads 300 ft

why not drop the bomb and use gravity to figure it out

Since the vertical position would be given by:

y = v(init)*t - 1/2g*t^2 where v(init) is the initial velocity of the bomb, t is time, g is acc due to gravity. V(init) is 0 so it becomes
y = - 1/2 g * t^2 ignore the negative since we are only interested in the magnitude. Time it and plug into the equation it will tell you how high you are.

SnidleyWhiplash wrote: Since the vertical position would be given by:

y = v(init)*t - 1/2g*t^2 where v(init) is the initial velocity of the bomb, t is time, g is acc due to gravity. V(init) is 0 so it becomes
y = - 1/2 g * t^2 ignore the negative since we are only interested in the magnitude. Time it and plug into the equation it will tell you how high you are.

Although if you test it from any appreciable height, air resistance will increase in magnitude to the point of causing terminal velocity. I wonder if Z put in that effect. Anyway, if he did, the measured time would exaggerate the altitude.

Manfred

3000 or 30000 ft should not be enough to hit terminal velocity of a bomb...it is somewhat aerodynamic so I neglect wind resitance besides all wea re looking for is an order of magnitude

Besides if you watch the bomb it looks like it hits terminal velocity after only a second or two then it's constant speed from there on

Has anyone tried climbing to the highest altitude? Is there a cap? I went up atleast 40K (altimeter cycled 4-5 times) before I reached the Red base, then it was too tempting not to go back down I hate math, but appreciate the geekyness factor at large here.

The highest ive been able to get is about 4100 on the altimeter.

The airspeed indicator in the game behaves as though it's displaying true airspeed or TAS. In a vertical dive at high altitude we are able to achieve speeds on the gauge that are faster than possible at low altitudes.

Were the gauge showing indicated air speed, or IAS, we would observe a gradual increase in speed on the dial during the whole descent, while in actuality we would be decelerating as the air density increased drag.

Real airspeed indicators show indicated airspeed. The way it works is ram air flowing past the aircraft hits a tube called the pitot tube and via an air line, expands a diaphragm which in turn makes the needle on the gauge move. There are half the air molecules at around 18,000 feet or so (this changes with the weather.)

So on a windless day if our ground speed was 100 mph at sea level, we would see 100 mph IAS on the dial. If our ground speed was 100 mph at 18,000 feet we would see about 50 mph IAS on the gauge, but our TAS would still be 100 mph.

Imagine we drop a brick 1000 miles above the earth. With no air to slow it, it would accelerate at 10 meters per second squared, building up tremendous speed before hitting the thin upper atmosphere where it would begin decelerating. If the brick had an airspeed indicator, it would read zero until hitting some air molecules. Recently Red Bull financed a stunt where a skydiver actually broke the speed of sound by getting out of a balloon at about 100,000 ft. Skydivers under 10,000 ft fall at about 120 mph or 10,000 feet per minute.

Thanks for your interest folks, I love pondering these things and the whole goal is to learn everything we can about the DogfighT world we love to play around in. (We could just ask Zup what he wrote into the world he created, but he's busy and that's no fun anyhow.)

Paul, ssshhhh that formula is a secret, and I'm able to do it in my head real quick, enabling me to hit the middle two hangers 9/10 times!! Lol!!

Whosethisguy wrote: Imagine we drop a brick 1000 miles above the earth. With no air to slow it, it would accelerate at 10 meters per second squared, building up tremendous speed before hitting the thin upper atmosphere where it would begin decelerating. If the brick had an airspeed indicator, it would read zero until hitting some air molecules. Recently Red Bull financed a stunt where a skydiver actually broke the speed of sound by getting out of a balloon at about 100,000 ft. Skydivers under 10,000 ft fall at about 120 mph or 10,000 feet per minute.

Assuming of course the brick has already hit its terminal velocity when it hits the atmosphere or at some point during the descent. Otherwise it wouldn't decelerate or have negative acceleration but just have a decreasing rate of acceleration that would increase as the density of air does.

I wonder did the red bull dude have to wear some kind of lance like the supersonic jets to pierce the sound barrier or would the air be so thin you wouldn't need it? I always wanted to get the courage to use one of those Wiley E Coyote style flight suits like Jeb Corliss.

Check out

Cool vid whiplash! I wouldnt have risked the balloons!

Yup to your reply except there is no terminal velocity without drag. Only acceleration.

I've been watching Corliss vids ever since I got my GoPro camera. I won't do anything like THAT, but the cameras sure are cool even for the tame stuff that normal people do.
Manfred

This may help with the problem solving. Not as exciting as
LASH'S.