I am not a Pirate...aaah... I am a Pirate! Wait,

I mean, I am an acquisitions agent and salvage specialist.

The people accompanying me are union assistants.

The ship was burning when we found it.

The rum was already gone. The damsel was undressed...ahh, in distress! 

When we found the rum thought Partee and Parlay sounded close enough.

That's our story and we're sticking to it.

**********

All of this stuff has been pilfered and plagiarized from all kinds of places

and gathered here so if you see something that may belong to you,

 and you would like the fame and notoriety let me know otherwise, sorry.

I make no money on this.

Its just a way of spending some down time, creatively, from my daily routine

flogging the crew.

No. But they weren't the envy of his friends, either.

At least one set contained animal teeth,

a tooth made of hippopotumis ivory, lead, springs and bolts.

Fortunately, folks seldom smiled in portraits of that era.

Imagine how our $1 bill would look.

Puts new meaning in beauty in the eye of the be'holder!

(Thanks Marilyn vos Savant)

Real Acceleration

Some of us may think we have experienced acceleration g forces,

but read this to get a grip of what real acceleration is.

But first, some useful info-

One Top Fuel dragster 500 cubic inch Hemi engine makes more horsepower

than the first 4 rows at the NASCAR Daytona 500.

Under full throttle, a dragster engine consumes 1 & one half gallons of nitro methane per second-

a fully loaded 747 consumes jet fuel at the same rate with 25 percent less energy being produced.

A stock Dodge Hemi V8 engine cannot produce enough power to drive the dragster supercharger.

With 3000 CFM of air being rammed in by the supercharger on overdrive,

the fuel mixture is compressed into a near-solid form before ignition.

Cylinders run on the verge of hydraulic lock at full throttle.

At the stoichiometric 1.7 to 1 air-fuel mixture for nitro

methane the flame temperature measures 7050 degrees F.

Nitro methane burns yellow. The spectacular white flame seen above the

stacks at night is raw burning hydrogen, dissociated from

atmospheric water vapor by the searing exhaust gases.

Dual magnetos supply 44 amps to each spark plug. This is the output of an arc welder in each cylinder.

Spark plug electrodes are totally consumed during one pass.

After half-way, the engine is dieseling from compression plus the glow of exhaust valves at 1400 degrees F.

The engine can only be shut down by  cutting the fuel flow.
 

If spark momentarily fails early in the run, unburned nitro builds up in the

affected cylinders and then explodes with sufficient  force to blow cylinder heads

off the block in pieces or split the block in half.
 

In order to exceed 300 mph in 4.5 seconds dragsters must accelerate at an average of over 4G's.

In order to reach 200 mph well before half-track, the launch acceleration approaches 8G's .  .
 

Dragsters reach over 300 miles per hour before you have completed reading this sentence.
 

Top Fuel Engines turn approximately 540 revolutions from light to light!
 Including the burnout the engine must only survive 900 revolutions under load.
 

The red-line is actually quite high at 9500 rpm.
 

The Bottom Line-

Assuming all the equipment is paid off, the crew worked for free, and for once NOTHING BLOWS UP,

each run costs an  estimated US $1,000.00 per second.

The current Top Fuel dragster elapsed  time record is 4.441 seconds for the quarter mile (10-05-03, Tony  Schumacher).
 The top speed record is 333.00 mph (533 km-h) as measured over the last 66' of the run (09-28-03 Doug Kalitta).

Putting all of this into perspective-

You are driving the average $140,000 Lingenfelter "twin-turbo" powered Corvette Z06.

Over a mile up the road, waiting, a Top Fuel dragster is staged, and ready to launch down a quarter mile strip as you pass.

You have the advantage of a flying start.

You run the 'Vette hard up through the  gears and blast across the starting line and past the dragster at an honest 200mph.

The dragster hasn't moved yet.... You're already doing 200mph.

The 'tree' goes green for both of you at that moment. The dragster launches and starts after you.

You keep your foot down hard, but you hear an incredibly brutal whine that sears your eardrums

and within 3 seconds the dragster catches and passes you.

He beats you to the finish line, a quarter mile away from where you just passed him.
 
Think about it, from a standing start, the dragster had spotted you 200 mph and not only caught,

but nearly blasted you off the road when he passed you within a mere 1320 foot long race course.
 
That, folks, is acceleration.

And....

gets up and going 0 to 100 mph in less than .8-second?

leaves the starting line with the same force of the space shuttle when it leaves the launching pad at Cape Canaveral?

travel more than four football fields in less than five seconds?

accelerate faster than a jumbo jet, a fighter jet, and a Formula One race car?

that it takes just 15/100ths of a second for all 7,000 horsepower to reach the rear wheels?

The flame shooting from the exhaust stacks burns at 7,050 degrees.

We picked these fun facts for You!!

In 2003 Michael Schumacher raced his Formula 1 Ferrari F2003-GA against a Eurofighter Typhoon jet.

The F1 car won at 600 meters (.37 mi.) but lost at 900. However, the plane only beat Schumacher by 0.2secs

in the 900m dash - with a time of 13secs compared with the Ferrari's 13.2secs.

A formula 1 (F1) racecar's top speed is about the same as an Indy car, but it has better acceleration, braking and cornering.

They can go 0 - 100 mph and back to zero in 4 secs.

It can go from 185 mph to 0 in a little more than 2 seconds in a distance of 85 metres (278 feet).

Anything more than about 4 - 6 positive Gs will black people out, unless they are trained to fight it.

Trained military pilots in G-suits can sustain up to 9 Gs. Higher G forces can be tollerated for fractions of a second.

An average person could momentarily experience eight to ten Gs by plopping down onto the couch to watch TV.

A woodpecker experiences 10 G of deceleration when its beak hits a tree.

Birds outperform man-made aircraft in aerobatics, with some able to handle forces of up to 14 G's.