Recent content by MESM

If you are interested in this stuff there is a really good Sandy Munro interview with NowYouKnow here .

It is better than 1.8 to 60 according to the test driver. In an early model I experimented with Bernoulli for 0 to 30 because in that regime you are friction limited - at (some) higher speed you will be traction limited. If you still like the pure thrust story then a similar argument could be...

@AirKuhl Thanks for that. I am hoping that he will announce the car soon.

Read and make your own mind up. This supplements Elon's Tweets.

You are right - Elon might be using actual thrusters that can push and corner a two tonne car but I also think that you are right to guess that that solution might not be road legal. My bet is still for suction using an air curtain rather than small directed nozzles. In the last month or two I...

Ah - we might see a Roadster with the SpaceX option tonight so here are the results of the calculations using everyone's best guesses about the mechanics inserted into my model (These are for my Bernoulli theory). For the velocity of air in the curtain I am predicting 130 mph (though that will...

By the way - thank you to everyone who contributed to this forum. It has been great fun. I predict that Elon will reveal some of this stuff before the end of March because Tesla would like to have a better share price when some of their debts mature; if the share price is high then the debts...

Elon’s latest tweets seem to favour this version of the Roadster 2020 SpaceX options: (a) 2 thrusters on each side of the car (b) 2 front and back (c) 2 under the car (that gives us the ten promised thrusters) Given his latest comments it now seems to be that the thrusters on the front and...

@BioSehnsucht thank you for your comment – I loved the Draco rockets. They should have played some music. I am not so sure about any kind of temperature change to the COPV gasses unless it happens slowly. I find it hard to think of fast heating of the air as it is released – my Uncle worked on...

I like your comments - I would be interested in your opinion of this Speculative Aerodynamic Model of Thrusters

I think that they have a design studio that does special versions - normally for a special price but try to see if they would help here. They turned out a bunch of surf boards that fit into their other cars. Elon gets a kick out of helping people; if you look in the margins you can see him doing...

Pebble Risks and Thrust As promised (@Pmac727 and @Joerg ), I have looked at the possible exhaust velocities of the curtain and thrust versions of the SpaceX options package. My preferred thruster model is still the suction model (as you will know by now!) but I also cover the...

@Pmac727 Could I try and convince you otherwise using this video ? I see where you are coming from but the experiment in the second video does not have the downward flow that you saw in my original demo (It is hard to build a convincing demo with cardboard and a glue gun!). One of the demos...

I think that playground rides are limited to 2 or 2.5 g. I think that the SpaceX options put the car in that range for several seconds; I think that it is initially limited by grip and then later by maximum power) For example 2 g at 60 mph is ~ 1,000,000 Watts (assuming low losses) At zero mph...

@Joerg great video; I had not been able to get anything like it. I could be wrong about them reusing the exact design because they know a lot about this stuff - here is a video about the BFR that I liked . Interesting to see how he reuses the SpaceX tech.