Originally posted by BlackCat
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Originally posted by Serb
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Trying to reason with him on this issue may indeed be about as effective and worthwhile as farting in a pond.
Synopsis: hypersonic speeds create an an enormous amount of drag at all altitudes below ~90km. Enormous drag can be managed by carefully engineering surfaces to minimize the drag and to control and manage the enormous stresses that such drag can place on an airframe. If the surfaces are damaged, enormous local stresses caused by the now poorly managed drag forces at the point(s) of damage cause near immediate structural failures at the point of damage spreading the damage until the airframe breaks to pieces. The pieces, which have a massively increased overall surface area, expend massive kinetic energy in hypervelocity atmospheric interactions and slow to subsonic speeds in seconds and to terminal velocity several seconds after that. If the hypersonic object was more than several seconds freefall from the ground at the start of the damage the pieces will impact the ground at each piece's individual terminal velocity.
If the above amounts to farting in a pond, that is Serb's fault.
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