Bloodhound
image source:
http://www.bloodhoundssc.com/project/car
Full disclosure
(and for the record), I think the name
Bloodhound is a rather silly moniker for this
vehicle. Sure it sounds cool(?), but if
you know what a bloodhound (the dog breed this
time) actually look like you know what I'm
talking about. If you DON'T know what a
bloodhound (again, the dog) looks like, click here.
I digress, back to the car.
Bloodhound is essentially an aluminum and
composite chassis stretched around a turbofan
jet engine and two liquid fuel rocket engines,
with a pilot strapped to the front of it. It's
low speed power plant (turbofan) was scavenged
out of a Eurojet Typhoon, one of Britain's
fighter jet.
However that is not enough to break the 1000mph
mark, at top speed a number (two or three, the
number is relatively unspecified at this time)
specialized hybrid rockets will be employed to
provide the additional thrust required for top
speed.
It's a massive undertaking, thousands of man
hours and facing some pretty impressive
challenges, some that you might not think of off
the bat, like how to actually pump fuel to the
engines during acceleration and how to design a
nose cone that can withstand 138000 Pascals of
air pressure at full speed.
I
highly encourage you to look through the
Bloodhound SSC website,
it's quite good. As a side note, for a
paltry twenty dollars, you can get your name
plastered across the tail fin of Bloodhound.
All told, power source is capable of 135,000
horsepower at full power, and with a curb weight
is just under 17,200 lbs, you can imagine the
amount of kinetic energy present at full speed.
Or we could just
find out.
Vehicle
weight is 17,165lb, (or 7768kg, we are going to
move to the metric system) 1050 mph
translates to (at 1.6km to the mile) 1690 km an
hour.
By the formula for kinetic energy from
mass and velocity;
At full speed this
car will have a kinetic energy of about
854328000 joules.