Re: Xcelerator lead car pics now up on Screamscape

Mike R <mikedrobinson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
: On Sep 30, 9:25 am, steelforce <steelfo...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
: > check out screamscape the pics are quite dramatic, taken immediately
: > after the accident...
:
: Wow, looking at the damage to the front of the car it looks like
: soneone got very lucky.

I'm not so sure about that.

The assumption seems to be that the recoiling rope snapped back and smashed
into the front of the car and could have taken someone's head off, etc. But
when I looked at the photos last night, I reached a slightly different
conclusion.

When the rope broke, you will recall, the launch sled was still connected
to the train. This means that while the rope was under tension, the
relative velocity between the train and the unbroken end of the rope was
pretty much zero. Apparently the recoil caused the dead end of the rope to
snap backwards and end up overhead somewhere. Perhaps in the laps of the
people in the lead car, although there is no sign of that on the video.
The other broken end of the rope, the end attached to the winding drum, is
a non-issue as the drive system continued to haul it out of the way,
hopefully until it ended up inside the bunker.

What we see on the front of that train is a neatly-carved slot to one side
of the center of the car. It runs in a perfectly straight line, and there
is very little debris surrounding it, just a little bit near the bottom of
the car body broken away. I also see little or no obvious damage to the
car chassis. This suggests to me that the damage was not caused by the end
of the rope violently smashing into the nose of the car. Instead, the rope
went overhead somewhere, and then when the car disengaged from the launch
sled, the rope was pulled from beneath the train (actually the train outran
the rope, but if you were in the train it would look like the rope was
being pulled back). Instead of sliding over the "hood" of the car, it
appears that the rope basically sawed through the car nose as the car
started up the hill.

The damage to the brake fins in one of the photos is also instructive as
the damage is all on the uphill side of the fin. My guess is that when the
car went up the hill, the brake fins came up as usual, and then when the
car rolled back, it caught the loose end of the haul rope and started
pushing it backward, pushing it into the brake fins, which became mangled
as we see.

The more evidence I see, the more it looks to me like this incident did a
lot of damage, but that the damage was not done in the kind of violent
manner that we tend to expect from the appearances. To me, the car looks
sawn, not smashed, and that speaks volumes to the mechanism of damage.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

(of course, the most telling aspect of the whole thing is that Dragster was
not shut down as a result of the incident...)

--DCAjr
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