Proof you can be propelled down-wind; FASTER Than the Wind

submitted by doogle

1 decade 3 years 8 months 1 week ago

No. I don't know what the hell this video was supposed to be demonstrating, but it clearly has fuck-all to do with sailing downwind faster than the wind.

Krupo

says...

If a solution is posted on the internet and everyone calls you an idiot, is it still a solution?

Rick figured that although a nut traveling DDWFTTW might be the simplest form of such a device, replacing the threaded rod with a wheeled vehicle would be more compelling – and possibly even less intuitive. He conceptualized replacing the device’s keel nut with gearing from a drive axle to a propeller shaft that would replicate the kinematic constraint perfectly. With the problem solved as far as he was concerned, he posed the new brainteaser on two internet forums, one for radio controlled helicopter pilots, the other for kitesurfers. Given the solution, Rick imagined people would find this clever.

Instead they considered him an idiot for ever imagining such a thing to be possible.

This is where the pointless brainteaser took on a life of its own. Science, physics and aerodynamics forums exploded. Sailing forums exploded. Flying-related forums exploded. It was silliness traveling at the speed of electrons. Turns out it’s serious business when someone is wrong on the internet, and boy did the internet ever believe Rick was wrong.

One interesting factoid emerged from the chaos. We learned that a Michigan University student posed this same non-problem – and a solution identical to Rick’s — in the 1940s. The student’s paper surfaced at Douglas Aircraft in the 1960s. Apollo M.O. Smith, the company’s chief aerodynamics engineer, and wind tunnel engineer Dr. Andrew Bauer went at it like Rick vs. the Internet. Bauer said it would work. Smith wasn’t convinced. Bauer bet Smith a dollar and went to work.

Read More http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/08/ddwfttw/all/1#ixzz0y2H81thY