-Supernova, Marissa Meyer
The question today, inspired by my recent listen to the conclusion of the Renegades series, is this: Can the recoil from a handgun send you flying into a stone wall? Nova locked her jaw around another scream and pulled the trigger. The kickback sent her flying into the stone wall. The gun blew out of her hand, ricocheting off one of the smaller bells with a resounding clang before it careened out of the tower window.
-Supernova, Marissa Meyer
A couple weeks ago I listened to A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, T. Kingfisher’s 2021 Lodestar Award-winning YA fantasy novel. I enjoyed it overall, but one sentence caught my engineer’s ear:
"Mercy!" said Aunt Tabitha, the first time she walked in and saw me standing over a pan of cinnamon rolls that had caught fire. She grabbed for the flour and dumped it out over the pan, smothering the flames. I’d heard of explosions in flour mills and had the general idea that flour is pretty flammable. Here was a chance to m̶a̶k̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶e̶x̶p̶l̶o̶s̶i̶o̶n̶ scientifically answer a question:
Is flour a good fire extinguisher?
In Part 1 I made the case that Amps are the electrical equivalent of a current of leaking Coke and Volts are the electrical equivalent of the pressure causing that Coke to leak. This was fascinating (I’m sure it was), but I ran out of time to address the original question: why did I nerd-cringe when I listened to this line from Marissa Meyers’ Archenemies?
Only the digital readings on its side indicated that amps were flowing through the system. Nova adjusted the dials, increasing the voltage.
She half expected the battery to flare to life with sparks and the sizzle of energy, but of course it didn’t. Only the digital readings on its side indicated that amps were flowing through the system. Nova adjusted the dials, increasing the voltage.
-Archenemies, Marissa Meyers I recently finished Book 2 of Marissa Meyers' Renegades trilogy. The books mingle some of the feel of the old Heroes TV show with the Avatar-like tension of infiltrating the enemy that may not actually be the enemy. The agonizing build of secrets and impending conflict is a lot of fun, but the action sequences, magic system, and technology are sometimes a little less than robust. Last week I listened to the passage above, had a little bit of a nerd cringe at the idea of “increasing the voltage” on a battery, and thought I’d talk a little bit about electricity.
This post concludes the quest for a non-magical equivalent of the elvish lembas bread given to the nine companions in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring.
Legend has it that one “very thin cake” could keep one of the “tall Men of Minas Tirith” on his feet “for a day of long labour”… which, we concluded in Part 1, translates to 6,000 calories of delicious waybread. In Part 2, calorie calculations concluded that you can’t get more than about 2,000 calories into a large 1-cup serving of food… and you can only do that if you use pure lard. Pure lard isn’t appetizing, while lembas was “baked a light brown on the outside, and inside was the colour of cream”... delicious enough that Gimli greedily gobbled (I'm really hitting the alliterations today) an entire cake by accident. In this post, I look at a few attempts to make the highest calorie edible lembas equivalent.
One cake of lembas can sustain a tall man of Minas Tirith for a full day’s march. Last time I decided that this must make lembas 6,000+ calories per wafer, and discovered that it’s impossible to get to 6,000 calories on carbs alone (unless you allow the lembas wafer to be the size of a birthday cake). Today we’ll see whether adding some fat to the recipe could get us closer to a march-sustaining meal.
Image: GameRant
Lembas bread is one of the most famous foods in fantasy, both for its wholesome properties and its ability to divide stressed hobbits. Today we look at Galadriel’s claim that one cake contains enough calories to sustain a full day’s march. Is this physically possible, or are there a few tablespoons of magical calories in the secret recipe?
"Eat little at a time, and only at need. For these things are given to serve you when all else fails. The cakes will keep sweet for many many days, if they are unbroken and left in their leaf-wrappings, as we have brought them. One will keep a traveler on his feet for a day of long labour, even if he be one of the tall Men of Minas Tirith." -The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien Today, for the finale of this 5-blog-series on dragon flame, we do things the old-fashioned way – experimentally.
No, I don’t have a full-size dragon, or a shield, or a knight… but I do have a kitchen torch, some pieces of sheet metal, and a Lego guy that my son tearfully sacrificed in the name of science. With some non-dimensionalization and slow-motion videoing, we can get a pretty good idea of whether all the mathing in the last post got us anywhere close to the right answer. To shield, or not to shield, that is the question.
This is part 4 of a 5-blog series on dragon fire vs metal shield. Last time we looked at how much dragon fire would heat up our shield via convection (answer – not much). Today we look at radiation, and we get some much more exciting results. |
Mechanical FictioneeringA fusion of fantasy and physics by author / engineer Travis Daniel Bow
Categories
All
Archives
April 2022
AuthorTravis is an avid writer, reader, and DIYer in the Reno, NV area. Blog Roll |