Reel Physics: The Avengers - Helicarrier Pages PREV 1 2 3 4 NEXT | |
For the record, I'm not a citizen of any English speaking country. Most other languages add that i in -ium endings, because that's what the name on the table of elements is for this element. You said so yourself, the cientific community accepted that name, and that's what it's called. It doesn't matter what could have happened, it just matters that its real name includes an i in the ending. Just pronounce it. It's like the units system. Almost everybody other country in the world uses the metric system (or is officially used) but the US seems defiant to concede to international concensus. Anyway, it's no topic to get hung up about, almost petty. I guess I was in a combative mode yesterday. | |
It's magic, shut up. MYSTERY SOLVED | |
I think your missing the point of the show ..... | |
We need a show where you calculate Scarlet Johanson's hotness. (The Maths is there.... somewhere ;) | |
Late to the thread so forgive me if someone already posited this, but I assumed the motors were electric and they had used batteries charged by the Cosmic Cube as the power source in the same way Hydra's weapons were powered. Add an ultralight hull and no need to carry extra fuel due to the spacemagic batteries and you can fudge the numbers quite a bit. | |
As far as I know aircraft carriers aren't designed with lightness in mind, there's a lot of solid steel beams and bulkheads because they're displacing such a large area of water it almost doesn't matter how much it weighs. If however, the entire thing was redesigned from an aircraft perspective: hollow tubing and thin panels, it just might take off. Of course it would be flimsier than a paper airplane. | |
No, I'm not. You're missing the point of my post. | |
No, your missing the point. The point of the show is to see it it would work in real life, and in making those calculations, you can't cherry pick what facts you want to use, and you can't just ignore the fact the Helicarrier can stay aloft with 3 turbines functional because it doesn't fit your math. never mind the fact that every one watching the movie knew ahead of time it wouldn't work RL, it runs on comic book science. | |
I think they made a fair few errors in this. Most notably, the fan rotation speed. It's not the same design as a helicopter, it's in a better support frame by being secured at the top and bottom and would probably be allowed to reach higher rotation speeds. Factoring in a stronger, if heavier, material, you could easily reach higher rotation speeds under strain. Maybe if they used a maximum rotation speed of a fan in a wind tunnel (or a fan of similar design) we would have given the helicarrier a better chance. Another MASSIVE error is the wishbone. did you see how much of the center of the ship was missing? i'd say that would shave 30-40% of the weight off alone not to mention other weight saving tricks for a carrier they built with the intention of flying it. They didn't just buy an old carrier and add fans. I think they were bias in wanting this to fail, or at least were a bit cruel in their assumptions despite a lot of evidence in the movie that they could have used to make some more generous assumptions. Also, no comparisons to the Valiant? | |
Oh wow, I laughed so hard at these outtakes. You need to include more puns in the actual show :D | |
Yes, your original post did seem rather combative. Something on your mind? Anyway, thing is, there are plenty of nations around the world that use similar units of measure to what the United States uses. We're certainly no "defiant" anomaly. Also, I think you missed the point of my post. I wasn't saying that the word could have been aluminum. I was saying that, thanks to several factors, both aluminum and aluminium are accepted spellings and pronunciations. Neither is more right or wrong than the other. I still think it's incredibly pretentious for anyone to tell everyone else how their nation is supposed to pronounce a word; or rather, to imply that anyone not pronouncing a word exactly the same as it is in ones native tongue is an egregious error. The beauty of language is it's variety and fluidity. If it was all homogenous, it would be bland and boring. | |
The blades being unable to spin at supersonic speeds wasn't a matter of material strengths, it's to do with the "sonic shock wave" each blade would create at those speeds. In simple terms, this shock wave effect would create severe instabilities in the blades, drastically reducing their efficiency, effectively making them useless for flight. Controlled flight, anyway. So, even if all four of the turbines had the power to generate the appropriate amount of lift, spinning at those speeds would either tear them apart or cause the entire structure to wobble and fall out of the sky. Besides, I think they were rather generous with their assumptions. They gave a lot of leeway in regards to certain factors. | |
Why would you use Blackhawk rotors as the base of your calculations ? Why you didn't mentioned that coaxial rotors have much higher lift efficiency. | |
I study physics myself, hence why i didn't suggest the speed of sound, just "faster". I'm aware of why having a blade generating a shock wave from breaking the sound barrier would cause issue with its ability to stay both structurally sound and not mentioning the effect it would have on the movement of air around the blades. I'd bet it would render about 20% of any lift generated mute by cascading air laterally rather than horizontally. But they used a speed of ~400mph, speed of sound is ~730mph (drop it down to ~600mph if you want to consider the slower speed in less dense materials, i.e. higher altitudes), still lots of mph to go before even considering a shock wave. that's a 1.5 increase on speed with its effect multiplied by 8 turbines. Indeed, Iron Man can break the sound barrier, but he definitely wouldn't have been doing it within the turbine. My point about generous assumptions was that they could have been even more generous and still validly justified those assumptions in my opinion, mostly about the weight of the carrier i feel. I mean seriously, they took the weight of a vessel that was never designed to experience lift, you would imagine that the helicarrier would be lighter because of this, along with the visual evidence of the wishbone. You said it yourself, they were already generous with some factors, why not all of them? If they wanted to be generous to give the some aspects of the physics a chance, i would have liked to have seen them give it the best chance possible. Because if it still didn't all add up, then it would have indeed been reel physics. In fact, i think a rounded overview of my feelings can be summarized by what they did in previous videos where they showed examples of what you would need to pull it off (fast five vault analysis). Such as, what fan blade speed would you need to lift a 1,000,000 ton aircraft carrier? or what blade radius would you need? They did it in some sense with mixing up the material but that's not the only limiting factor. I know the helicarrier is fiction but these questions interest me and would have made this a better episode in my opinion. | |
there's a mathamatical formula for the attractiveness of an ass, so i guess the rest must exist somewhere http://www.cracked.com/article_19360_7-questions-you-didnt-know-could-be-answered-with-math.html i was going to link you the fox article, and then i realized.. fox XD | |
I think I just watch this series to be intimidated by the numbers and nod like a chimp. | |
I like the outtakes... goofs! OT can you guys tell us in the "Reel" results what would have taken to make the stunt feasible? For example, if the Helicarrier was made of carbon fibre and were 1/3rd of its size and have the 8 rotors, it might be doable. I'd like to see that :) | |
Nimitz-class carriers are already nuclear-powered. | |
So, aside from the notation that we're talking about a universe A) with Tesseract-derived power sources and B) the blades move faster than Iron Man's suit, i.e. the speed of sound, I wanted to note two more things: 1) If the rotors (the entire housing, not just the individual blades) can be rotated at an angle, about a 45 degree angle, they could act as hydrofoil-style propellers when in the water. This would more than make up for the drag they'd create when in the water. Even if this wasn't enough to lift the carrier into a hovercraft-like state, it would create enough lift that it would raise the carrier as a whole at least somewhat out of the water, which would reduce drag on the hull and should increase speed overall. So no, this SHOULD be more efficient in the water, though it doesn't appear in the movie that they're actually doing this (as big as the rotors are, if they were at an angle, we'd see the leading edge above the water at least.) 2) There is no reason to assume this thing is the size of a Ninitz-class carrier, which is the second largest class of military vessel on earth, second only to a George Washington-class carrier. A real Nimitz-class could park planes 12-long side-by-side on the rear portion of the forward-facing flight deck. The SHIELD carrier seems to park only 3 with room for MAYBE 2 more. This means it should be around HALF the length of a Nimitz, and considering as how the shape is largely the same, we can fairly assume that the width, depth, and thus overall volume of the thing is HALF, if not less. Mass, then, should be half OR LESS of a Nimitz. Considering this, we don't even have to resort to Carbon Fiber - the number for Aluminum will already lift (barely) more than half the helicarrier's Mass, thus Aluminum would lift one if we assume the correct size, EVEN if we disregard the way-too-slow rotor speed calculations. And before anyone says otherwise, no, the length of the flight deck being halved doesn't prevent the launch of aircraft. The only craft we see take off or land while the carrier is in the water are the SHIELD VTOLs, whereas the only fixed-wing aircraft, the (looks like) F-35 with the Nuke, takes off after the carrier is in the air. Though it would experience significant drop, it would still have enough speed upon reaching the end of the flight deck to fly and not stall, losing only 500-800 feet of altitude first (which is acceptable in the air because, yanno, you aren't 80 feet away from the ocean any more.) Also, downwash isn't an issue. Clearly this thing is only intended to fly over water, and at around 10,000 to 20,000 feet. At that altitude, it could be using controlled nuclear detonations and nobody on the ground would notice until they developed a cancer cluster. (NASA and DARPA have both done detailed simulations on this very topic, nuclear propulsion, and it would indeed work.) So no, this is ABSOLUTELY real physics. But I think it highlights how a single number can very, very rapidly ruin an otherwise solid set of calculations. That said, when we take into account the smaller size of the rotors, now that we know the entire thing is smaller, we may well require the faster-than-sound speed rotor movement in order for this to work. But I'm not a mathematician :P | |
Totally forgot about Thor's Hammer. Nothing like having a mountain sitting on the ship lol | |
PREFACE: Get ready for the most epic post these forums have ever seen. I challenge you guys to find a post as a response to more people or with more information. I swear it took me longer to write this and quote everyone than it did to make this episode. HA! Hey gang, not sure really where to even start here. Obviously everyone here in the Escapist community is very protective of their favorite franchise, this clearly being a local favorite. I kind of expected this from the Dark Knight but it had nowhere near this level of interest. Everyone has had a ton of questions about this week's episode and for good reason. Let me address some of those here: First and foremost... please remember we are discussing the idea of a FLYING AIRCRAFT CARRIER. ;) Secondly, Colby and I are working from movie scene clips and use whatever research and knowledge we have at our disposal to compliment our skill sets and personal engineering knowledge. Our engineering backgrounds are somewhat credible since we both work at a robotics company for a living designing custom engineered robotics and automation equipment. We kind of know a little bit of stuff... regardless of how goofy we might come across. ;) Having said that, we clearly aren't experts in everything, but we do understand the basics of even foreign concepts and ideas of how most mechanical things work along with how those same contraptions interact in regards to gases, fluids, and other solids. That brings me to my next statement. ::::CORRECTIONS TIME:::: We didn't make any math mistakes but I see how many of you might have thought we did, to the point of even changing the episode outcome. What really happened is both Colby and I made separate verbal mistakes that really affected the reception of this episode. At 3:12-3:35 in the episode we discuss getting the swept area of a single blade (1809 sq meters) and then calculating the entire swept area for 18 blades * 8 rotors * 4 nacelles. So the ENTIRE SWEPT AREA for 144 blades is 260,000 sq meters (1809*18*4*2=260,000). Here's where Colby said something out loud that is inaccurate. His dialogue is "Using that tip speed as a basis, we can find the thrust for ONE of the helicarrier rotors." This is stated incorrectly and was hard to catch at the time because of the way we cut the episode down to make it watchable. What we should have said there was "...we can find the COMBINED TOTAL THRUST for ALL of the helicarrier NACELLES." So 64143kN is accurate for the total thrust of all 4 nacelles for the helicarrier, but we stated it wrong and confused the hell out of everyone. To make matters worse, I exacerbated the issue at 4:55 by saying "...our four rotors make a thrust of 64,000kN..." and what I really meant to say was "...our four NACELLES make a TOTAL thrust of 64,000kN..." As you might have guessed, neither of us discuss the in's and out's of blade element theory versus momentum theory on a daily basis. Also, daily discussion of nacelles, rotors, and total swept areas are not exactly lunch conversation (though it's probably not far off.) So basically, at the time of the recording, it was easy for us to slip up and say the wrong word during the recording and neither of us pick up on it at the time. So, all in all, sorry about that gang. Based on the kind of content we provide, I am pretty proud to say even with this small bit of misinformation, we have held up extremely well so far. This was our first little blunder and most likely won't be out last, but this certainly taught us a lesson. And that lesson is... MAKE MORE MISTAKES AND MORE PEOPLE WILL WATCH OUR SHOW SO THEY CAN CORRECT US!!! ;) Hooray for the internet! ::::END CORRECTIONS:::: By the way, I could tell who the few people are who actually followed the episode along pretty well (in spite of our mistakes in our dialogue) because they understood the overall math and concepts and were the ones who defended the episode and tried to correct others who complained of faulty math. Thanks for that by the way. Consider yourselves smarter than the average bear. As for all of the other chatter about this episode (and boy there was a LOT!!!), let me address some of that here real quick. 1.) We assumed Iron Man cannot break the speed of sound in a 50 foot diameter circle, so neither can the tips of the blades on these rotors. The G-force alone would make him pudding, but that's a discussion for another episode. ;) Also, check into rotor speeds and you will see stability and efficiency problems that arise once you hit the speed of sound. As we said in our first episode, LOOK IT UP! :) Once again, I sincerely apologize for the misleading dialogue that clearly impacted the enjoyment of the video this week. Also, I am only willing to argue about any of this if your post is longer than mine. ;) Thanks again to everyone for all of your feedback. This week was insane and it's nice to know people are watching us and also are passionate about the topics we cover. It seems you guys are just like us! Thanks for watching and supporting the show! Jason Dean and Colby Dane | |
Thanks for posting and clarifying some of the maths, the rotor blade issue is spot on. I cant argue on the maths but I am fairly well educated about helicopter design and understand that rotor blades simply don't work at supersonic speeds, this defeats any argument that the rotor speed was going faster than the speed of sound. I think another fun set of maths to debunk the hellicarrier would be the amount of fuel those rotors would consume, even if it could fly it wouldn't fly for long unless they where powered by alien tech or something similar. The only way the hellicarrier could really fly is it it had some kind of alien/advanced tech to reduce either its mass or the effect gravity had on it and also to power the rotors. Personally I think a flying carrier is silly anyway and it had no cloaking device or anything and is too obvious and a massive target, if you really want a secret super carrier you need a submarine carrier. | |
While I'm not sure it could get by with only 2 active (as i recall 3 kept it in the air, but left it 'dead in the water' so to speak), I'm good with the corrections. Its a good show, why wouldn't I watch it :D | |
Just letting you know, you should probably edit your post and snip the huge quote in it. It's stupidly huge and people may get annoyed if they have to scroll past that wall of snips twice. Anyway, cheers for the clarifying post. I didn't notice any of the little errors the first time round, but after some of the posts on the forum I had to rewatch the vid a couple of times to properly make sense of it again, and even then I wasn't entirely sure on whether you'd meant to say rotors or nacelles or what. Moral of the story is: try to follow the math and ignore little slips in speech. | |
Whoo-ee, that's quite the clarification! The public response is sort of to be expected, I suppose. After all, your audience is also reasoning about these things in their own head. I don't think it's anything to do with "defending the franchise" as much as it is, "defending your own thought process". The show is aimed at a very.. peculiar crowd, and when this much banter gets stirred up it is a good thing. Re: losing people on calculations; I don't know how feasible this is, considering your time constraints and all, but one suggestion I would make is: make more comparisons. Whenever I'm teaching students anything and their eyes start to glaze over when confronted with formulas, drawing clear conclusions and parallels usually gets things back on track. As an example, in this episode I sort of missed the fact that the Nimitz carrier stats that were used were already very forgiving. Reiterating that during your conclusion and stating outright what would be needed to make it work would help clarify things (i.e. "SHIELD would need to have built the thing from a substance 4 times lighter than carbon fiber or have 16 nacelles for this to be plausible."). Still, it's very admirable to see you guys taking the time to clarify any misconceptions people may have. It shows you guys are over-analysing things just as much as the fans are when we argue amongst ourselves and you win metric tons of respect with that attitude! | |
Good idea, I was phone posting at the time so my post was fairly basic. Sorted it out now. | |
Chill brother chill. IMO its a tough call even if you finagle the numbers by 30% it still fails. Its when you go over 40% it becomes more plausible, but even so the more you guesstimate past that point you wind up getting into unconfirmed hypothesis of the build and power output. So for the very most part you guys called it right. | |
What you do is: 1. copy the page sources for the three pages of this discussion into Vim It only takes a few minutes! | |
it wasnt ment to insult (any of the things your calculated or presented). throughout the marvel history the helicarrier always went critical and on collision course with anything whatsoever whenever one narcelle "misfunctioned". its was just another stupid plot device to bring in more tension in the story. but at the same time it made any reasonable person in the world question the existence of a massive, easily to shoot down flying target, which effectiveness was barely shown in some comics and moreso in the avengers movie. in other words, the S.H.I.E.L.D. organisation spend a lot of money for Awesome, but Impractical and people trying to defend it by saying its made of some sort of alloy with vibranium, which is not only super light and can absorb massive amount of forces but is also pretty rare. or it has also an allow of adamantium which is even heavier than steel. which still makes that S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier pretty much useless since even when all the narcelles went offline simultaneously, the carrier would experience critical damadge/total loss if it were to hit the ground no matter of what bullshit, all forces absorbing almost infinite durability alloy it would be made of. in short: your episode was nice as always. my complain was just another example of "comics are weird". also the more people discuss (and perhaps complain) about an episode, the more they care for your show. so thats a good thing? and to "We already lose people with how far out our calculations are and we don't want to complicate the show any further.", well thats something people have to deal with it if they are trying to calculate something that doesnt even exist and is made out of made up materials. | |
so you just watched the big bang theory.... | |
Just about every other element is "-ium", and I used to spell it "aluminium". Then one day I got corrected because I live in a red-neck 'murrican state. Oddly, when I was typing up the episode, I ALMOST spelled it aluminIUM as a joke. From now on, it's aluminium. Also.
AND I'M COLBY DANE | |
I've only seen a few episodes of the first season and that was enough for me. It's purely coincidental if it is in the show, because I've honest-to-God thought of the hammer thing when I saw the movie for the first time. | |
I can accept a flying helicarrier. The part that always bugs me is when ironman is pushing the rotors in a circle so fast he is becoming a blurred circle. He was pushing perpendicular to the rotor radius, but the centrifugal force is absent. | |
Correct me if im wrong, and i probably am, but they calculated the lift force for ONE of the motors, thus forgetting to multiply it by 4. In such case, the carbon-fiber one would actually lift off. barelly, but it would. Also, they used hover speed of rotors. What if the rotors were faster, like, say, 5 times faster, that would lift the Alluminum one.
and that explains me being confused. Still how about faster spinning? | |
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First things first, this is a lift Fan(like the kind found in VTOL jets) not a helicopter blade.
Lift fans have a far greater surface area due to wider blades and spin a lot faster then helicopter blades.
Why is it all of a sudden bigger then another carrier?
And what's with this Aluminum crap? Titanium.
I'm also sure that a nuclear reactor powered carrier would shave quite a lot of the weight off.