Nah…Mornington Crescent is much easier to follow.
Hey, I sympathize. I’d probably feel similarly if somebody deliberately destroyed a brand new robot.
As you acknowledged though, they were indeed trying to create a dramatic television moment, even though they surely knew what the outcome would be. I wouldn’t begrudge them that. It’s not as though these are unique, irreplacable works of art, after all.
Was it the last RC helicopter ever made or something? You know they probably spend more than $1000 on ballistics gel every week, right? Is it a problem when all that gel gets blown? Who cares what they do with their toys? You know as soon as you see any object on the show that it will either be blown up or set on fire before the episode is over. They’ve, quite often, just added more explosives to intact props just to watch them go boom, even when they’ve survived the tests themselves.
The crappy science, I can get behind you about. But destroying an expensive toy? That’s sort of why they’re there, man!
They filmed this one at my site, but nobody knew I was interested, so I didn’t find out until the production crew was leaving and dropped off their leftover breakfasts in our break room. A bunch of people from my office went and watched though, and said it was really interesting.
I know the results, but I’m not going to spoil it. Can’t wait to see the location though!
: sets TiVo :
What always bugs me about this show is the way they assume that one test (or even a small series of tests) is conclusive. There are times when this is true – for instance, if the hypothesis is that X can never happen, and their test shows it does. However, for most myths that they’re after, merely showing that it didn’t happen in their one test, means nada.
And for the airplane/treadmill, the calibration is going to have to be exact – remember that the hypothesis is that the one speed exactly matches the other speed. If synchronization is off by so much as an inch per hour, their test results will be irrelevant to the theoretical problem.
Besides, Cecil has nailed this one, so why bother? 
They’re obviously not going to use a real airliner, right? Not only ins’t there a treadmill big enough, the FAA goes nuts whenever those guys try to get near a real plane (remember their cell-phone in an airplane episode?) so anything they do is going to have to be performed on a model.
So why wouldn’t that be enough to invalidate their answer? The ratio between tire friction and engine power can’t be equitable with a model and a real plane.
But I want visuals. Did Cecil shred an airplane and/or conveyor belt? I want to see an airplane and/or conveyor belt get shredded.
Oh, yeah, and Kari’s clothes blown off too.
[MPSIMS]They used one of our Spectrum Analyzers on that episode. I felt so proud knowing something I helped manufacture appeared on this show![/MPSIMS]
The tidbit from the Discovery website says that the Mythbusters take a crash course in learning to fly RC planes.
This won’t end well. I’m still going to watch it though.
I’m so excited about this episode. It’s like the geek superbowl. The only way it could get better is if they had special guest narration by Leonard Nimoy.
Yeah, and the same spoilsports didn’t let them shoot out the window of an airborne passenger jet, either.
I’m not saying that the FAA isn’t being smart or wrong for covering their own ass (and the houses underneath a potentially crashing onto them), just that there is no way they are going to get a real jet on a real treadmill. I’m just wondering how accurate the scaled-down models will be, and if the difference is going to be significant enough to effectively invalidate their findings.
I’d like to see them try to do a loop-the-loop in a 747 simulator. That’d be cool. Come to think of it, Cecil wrote about that awhile ago.
Wasn’t that a staff report?
The little RC plane moved forward on the treadmill! I am shocked, SHOCKED, I say! The Mythbusters can’t get anything right! :rolleyes:
But Kari’s clothes are still intact.
Another thing the Mythbusters can’t get right.
An airplane simulator CAN do a loop-the-loop, at least from a visual point of view. It won’t be able to mimic the gravity, since the way these things are built doesn’t allow it (the hydraulics are all underneath the cockpit compartment). Besides, a commercial airliner has autopilot safeties that prevent a plane from doing these sorts of maneuvers (barring loss of control and an accident), and so the simulators have the same safeties built into them, to prevent the pilot-in-training from exceeding recommended bank angles or whatever. It is possible to turn them off, but that would be done pretty much only to screw around with the things!
So it would look exactly as you’d expect it to; it would flip the visuals upside-down, and I presume it would go to as much of an extreme angle as it can as well.
As for not showing the firey crash you’d expect when Adam and Jamie crashlanded the sims; you can have the sim on “crash” settings, which will shake and vibrate, though not enough to even cause whiplash, and the visuals show whatever you crashed into, a mountain or a field. They don’t show damage to things, but basically you see what ever is outside the window. Even if there was fire in a crash landing, it is typically from the fuel compartments/engines, which are behind the cockpit and therefore not visible from the windows anyways. When not on crash mode… well, I managed to skip the 777 across Puget Sound like a rock across a lake! I think I finally crashed into a beach, and then it stopped.
BTW- this is true of the FAA-certified D-class simulators built by CAE. Mythbusters used NASA built ones, but I doubt that they are that different, since the whole point is to accurately simulate a real plane.
No, I don’t work for CAE. But I want to.
Can you explain what happened? I know what should happen scientifically, but I’m a bit curious as to their setup and execution.
Maybe it’s on next Monday in Canada, I have no idea.