Skip to main content

Efficient Acceleration

Here's a simple physics puzzle: suppose you're launching a model rocket. You want the rocket to go as high as possible. Is it better to design the rocket to:
A. Use all of its fuel very quickly, and then use its momentum to travel high
B. Use the fuel gradually over the whole duration of the flight

In other words, what is the fuel consumption rate that will maximize the height of the flight path? For this problem, we can assume that the thrust is proportional to the fuel consumption rate.

I'll try to post a solution to the problem in the future.

New posts every month - subscribe for free!
Labels:

Comments

  1. Ari WagenMarch 2, 2016 at 3:31 PM

    my bet would be using exponentially less and less fuel idk why but that makes sense bc rocket scientists are weird

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Which Hurts More?

212° F Let's play a little game. I'll list a bunch of possible actions. Each action will have 2 variations, (a) and (b). You choose either (a) or (b), depending on which would be safer (or less painful). Each of the questions will involve an oven hot enough to bake a cake (350° F), and a pot of boiling water (assume we're at sea level). So... would you rather: 1.     (a) Stick your hand in the oven     (b) Stick your hand in the boiling water   ... for a period of 10 seconds 2.     (a) Leave a fork in the oven     (b) Leave a fork in boiling water   ... for a period of 15 minutes. Then hold the fork tight with your bare hand. 3. Fill a jar to the top with cool tap water. Then:    (a) Place the jar in the oven    (b) Place the jar in the boiling water   ... for a specific, but unknown, period of time. Then remove the jar and put your hand in it. First see if you can figure these out yourself. They shouldn't be too...
Post a Comment
Read more

2014 in Photos

The year of 2014 is over; the year of 2015 has begun. Over the past year, I took a lot of pictures - more than 1200 photos of clouds, bugs, plants, rocks, and more. I deleted most of the low-quality and repetitive photos. Then, I selected 20 of the remaining photos which I thought were the most interesting or significant. In this post, I'll include those photos, in chronological order. Spring 1. Cold Hummingbird I took this photo after a late snowstorm in Spring. In the days leading up to the storm, it was warm and sunny and the fields were green, so the snow came rather unexpectedly. During the storm, one of the hummingbirds at our feeder was covered in ice and could barely fly. This hummingbird was more fortunate, but unlucky nevertheless. 2. Green Landscape I took this photo on the side of a biking trail. I didn't edit or crop the photo - this is how it looked. 3. Indian Paintbrush The Indian Paintbrush is an unusual flower. What appear to be flower petals are actually brigh...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nature Wallpaper

I collected 12 of the highest-resolution, best-quality photographs of nature I've taken over the past few years, cropped them to highlight the important parts, and then applied JPEG compression. Now I'm releasing them for my blog readers to enjoy as a desktop background. To download as a .zip file, click here . Note that the photos shown in this post are low-resolution previews. If you have any questions about the wallpaper, please comment! New posts every month -  subscribe for free !
Post a Comment
Read more