If by lateral lateral strength you mean shear, that’s actually the direction with the largest safety factor, and for a 1.25" shank that safety margin is measured in tens of thousands of pounds. They break because they’re already under tens of thousands of pounds of tension simply by being bolted in place - a 1.25" nut…

When you use a tow ball to tow a trailer, the forces are not that large at all. Very little shear, tension, or compression is added on any components. The tow ball is accepting the load of the trailer under shear - which for a 1 and 1/4" shank should hold 30,000 pounds or more under shear. Given a rolling resistance…

One thing to learn from this: Koenigsegg thinks 35-ounce steaks are normal things to buy at the supermarket.

There’s also a common mistake of over-valuing torque at the shaft, and under-valuing power at the wheels. Mind you, I’m a mechanical engineer, so I don’t blame people for doing this.

If you look at a shaft spinning at a constant power (like the output shaft of a perfect transmission), the torque tends to zero at…

Almost. They try to make the array of flags rectangular, and if that is not easy to do they will pad the list with a few ‘go to’ flags, like the MIA/KIA flag or UN flag. In this case, its 63 countries.

The coefficient of rolling resistance is very low; the coefficient of friction is close to 1 (on dry ground). ie: on dry ground, it’d take 100,000 lbs of force to skid a 100,000 lb trailer, but it’d only take 1,000 lbs to get the wheels to roll.

Exactly. Power doesn’t matter in a scenario like this, only tractive effort. There’s a reason why commercial tractors often come with sub-100 hp motors (with 60-80% of that earmarked for the PTO shaft, at that).

The actual hitch receiver is usually very strong, so depending on how this is implemented it could be fine. I’d imagine a D-ring hitch would be acceptable.

If you’ve ever pushed a disabled car off the side of the road, one that’s totally disabled and in neutral, you’d know it doesn’t take the ‘full 3500 lbs’ to roll a car ever.

The actual tractive force a vehicle can give is much lower than that. It doesn’t require 80 klbs of force to pull 80 klbs loaded on a trailer. The rolling resistance of a 100 psi commercial tire will be on the order of 10^-2, or in other words, it’d only take 800 lbs of force to pull an 80 klbs trailer on level…

At least where I live, you can leave the showroom floor with snow tires and a block heater. A set of snow tires are almost always sold with new vehicles here (if not as an option to tick off, then on the ‘accessories’ list or as a dealer incentive), and if you buy one in the winter they’ll be on your vehicle when you…

Uh, hi. I’m the uh, county password inspector?

To be clear, a back-door vulnerability implies that the software vendor was complicit in the attack. This is the complete opposite of a zero-day vulnerability, where a software vendor has no knowledge of the vulnerability until the day of the attack (hence, the attack occurs on “day zero” of preparation).

There is…

You can be pretty confident that China or Russia have gotten a peak before now. But military equipment gets updated on the regular, so they might have a few new items now to check off as ‘changed’ or ‘unchanged’.

A major hurdle here is that most nations already have engineering vehicles based off of their current (or their recently retired) armored vehicle hulls. Using a unique platform means a unique supply chain for spare parts, and unique training for technicians.

“Russian scientists...” is really the only way this article could have possibly begun.

And it was just yesterday that 300+ HP in a Mustang meant that it was a Cobra or a Mach 1. ‘Just’ 400+ HP in a GT is still hard to grasp in my head, and I’m in my early 20s.

The way the track is laid out, you cannot simply have a merge between the luge and bobsled sections of the Calgary track. The two sections coincide on turn exits in both cases - and so the ‘gate’ they crashed into was the rear side of the actual sliding surface of the bobsled track. One side must have such a gate down…

Stand your ground means you have no responsibility to retreat. Going on the offensive is prohibited everywhere.

I have a feeling it has to do with the Russian predilection for making sure everything can operate from austere locations if need be.