This has actually been done, although normally air is pulled out of the wheel and not in (since you normally want to draw hot air out of the engine bay more than you have brake cooling issues). Advantages are slim versus ducting, and they do add weight. Here’s an example:

I know this is a bad image, but it shows the two intended configurations of the QE class:

Given an appropriate transmission, power is everything. If you have the right power, and an appropriate transmission, you can make whatever torque you need at the wheels, at the speed you need it. The power tractors need is very low, because they’re usually limited by maximum tractive force, as opposed to power.

It is a high-school dynamics exercise to show that a vehicle accelerating at a constant power will have infinite acceleration at zero velocity. That is to say, available torque is infinite and you’re ultimately limited by your tractive effort. Hence “tractor”, a device used to produce a large tractive effort, as…

Just here to give an idea of scale. Canada has two major fighter bases: CFB Cold Lake, and CFB Bagotville. Using CFB Alert as a point in Canada’s northern frontier, where intercepts of Russian aircraft are increasingly common, Alert is 4000 km from Bagotville. Oslo, Norway, is just a 25% further trip, 5000 km. To put…

dummy lightweight democratic frontrunner campaigns in a van (stupid!)

Well, had a guy at the controls of a computer that steered every axle individually one would hope. I can’t imagine a job that would be simultaneously both as monotonous and as difficult as doing that manually.

If you go to Google Images and search for “Mammoet Alberta Highway 14” you will see that this is not an uncommon thing at all - and that’s just one moving contractor (Mammoet) and one route (Highway 14). In addition to the cost of moving tooling and equipment to site, quality control, and so on, one big issue is…

Good thing C4 is so stable, then.

I wish I could delete this post and not just edit it, because I commented before I realized you kept going on about supersonic farts and I was going to criticize your fart nozzle design.

Indeed. $35,000 paid upfront is a hell of a lot more money than $35,000 paid in installments. If someone is willing to finance you something at zero percent, people seem to view that as “I’m paying nothing extra”, as opposed to reality, where it means “they’re discounting my cost at the inflation rate”. Forget about…

In Vanilla, one of the things to do if you were bored (and if you were level capped and BWL wasn’t released, you were bored) was to sneak into the unfinished Hyjal by all manner of hijinks. A GM once removed me from there, but no longstanding issues. :D

Even if 600 passengers in an A380 each had a 50 kg carry-on, that’s only 30,000 kg - just 5% of the total vehicle weight at takeoff.

The smallest noble gas is helium. Next one up is neon. Nitrogen isn’t all that ‘stable’ in the noble gas sense, or NOX wouldn’t be a combustion product. While O2 is heavier than N2, the oxygen molecule is physically smaller, and therefore permeates the tire wall more readily resulting in greater pressure variation.…

Probably because industrial quantities of high-purity nitrogen is cheap as hell. $1 will buy about three hundred cubic feet (when expanded to atmospheric pressure).

I wonder how many other manufacturers offer an armored version of their vehicles as a factory option? I know Ford used to offer an armored Lincoln Town Car, but that’s been since dropped from production. The Audi A8 and BMW 7-series also have similar options. Is that it?

Supplemental information: explosive cords are used as they are vastly more reliable than mechanical latches. This is why space agencies love pyrotechnic bolts: latches stick.

Of course, diplomatic immunity only applies, if it does at all, if your home country is willing to defend your behavior. If you do something illegal for your home country, like spying, they’ll stick up for you. If you do something minor, like double park, they’ll stick up for you. The worst that can be done is the…

Indeed, the classical role of the battleship disappeared in WWII. Any modern use would be essentially as mobile artillery to support a landing, or something of that nature. And in that respect, NATO armies have felt no need to get rid of the howitzer; artillery is something that is still needed. When we see pictures…

And 30 minutes of that are breaks in between periods. You get about 1:00 of game time in 1:30 of wall-clock time, which is pretty high by most sports, I’d imagine.