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by bigiain
3352 days ago
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Well actually... I suppose it's high-school-physics possible to fly a 1 gee helical path (the "barrel roll") centered around an orbital zero-gee trajectory... Imagine for a moment a zero gee orbital trajectory at a low enough altitude that you can still generate aerodynamic lift from the atmosphere. (Here we handwave away all the pesky frictional heating, because we're deep in the thought experiment world of perfectly spherical cows of uniform density.) Now imagine a helical "coil spring" shaped path with that orbital trajectory running through the center. "All" you need to do is get the diameter and spacing of those helical coils right so your acceleration around the coils needs to be 1G, while your averaged out path coincides with the orbital zero gee trajectory. <grin> (An aircraft with sufficient speed, fuel capacity, heat shielding, and whatever else I've glossed over - is left as an exercise for the reader...) |
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Imagine a fighter jet flying circles around an airliner as it follows it along - with the fighter pilot flying at just the right radius and speed that it's accelerating at 1 gee for the turn (so they'd be "feeling" 2 gee as they pass under the airliner, and zero gee as they loop over the top of the airliner) using a helical "barrel roll" path - and at the same time "keeping up" with the airliner along it's path, so if you were sitting in the airliner looking out it'd look like the fighter was flying circles around the long axis of the fuselage.
Now imagine the fighter pilot does the same trick following the vomit comet - as it flies its parabolic arcs which gives it's occupants 20-30 secs or so of "zero gee".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced-gravity_aircraft