"BTW, barnbwt. I am honored to be left off your invite list. If I were to join the team, you and Tuner would both have to play right field. And have designated hitters."
Sorry man, I tried to remember everyone (I'm a visual learner, and the no-profile-pictures format here precludes that) and listed all the posters that showed up on page...8 is it now? (sheesh
)
GLOOB:
"What some people here are having a hard time accepting is that conservation of momentum is real, and that it is always on. There is no timeout. There's no fudging for this or that (losses, heat, friction, pressure, etc) so that it balances out in the end."
"If you believe that conservation of momentum can be delayed or distorted by friction or anything else, you might as well believe in teleportation"
Beware of absolutist statements when in the presence of bored nerds.
There is also a little thing called Conservation of Energy which is a far more accurate (complex) representation of our world. When you slow to a stop on a sheet of ice, you have not sped up the world by a corresponding equal amount; you also evolved a chunk of that momentum transfer in the form of heat. Conservation of momentum only applies in a loss-less transfer of kinetic energy. Throw heat, electrical, potential, or even nuclear in the mix and bets are off. A bouncing ball will bounce forever without impact/aerodynamic losses. All that said, this paragraph is just me being a cute smartass, because our particular problem doesn't
happen to require a specific consideration for friction, because...
-we've already accounted for it in the momentum equations by using a real-world measured muzzle velocity for the bullet
-the gun's operation is effectively frictionless (slide motion, etc.)
-at the time of barrel unlock, the friction is no longer present since we've shown the bullet has already exited (absent the most wild of circumstances which
would probably result in unsafe operation)
-and I suspect we could show that even fully-loaded barrel lugs wouldn't develop enough friction to slow the link's authoritative camming force downward appreciably
Thus, the question we're asking about cam-timing does not require a friction term so long as we base our numbers on measured muzzle velocities; done.
"So when someone thinks that "oh there's not enough higher math or diagrams for GLOOB's explanation to be right,""
I'm inclined to think you are not accounting for all necessary factors. If the factors weren't necessary, they wouldn't result in the numbers coming out different (they don't in this case, but if we used a muzzle velocity estimated for a frictionless barrel, they would be 10% or so off; that is not quite 'negligible' by my standards)
"If you don't think COM explains enough... if you think there's a greater construct that more accurately describes the universe on a macro level... "
Equations are just tools, GLOOB, you have to determine which to use for the job. COM is the simplest, most basic description of motion between bodies, so it's good to start with (all jobs start with a big effin' hammer
), but you also need to construct your model to match reality as closely as possible, until adding additional factors does not change the result (your chisels, then scrapers). If we were firing an Americium bullet with a half-life of .0004 seconds or whatever, we had
better incorporate the mass change of the bullet as well as the hellacious amount of heat imparted to the driving gas if wanted to know what the gun would actually do (you know, besides melt and/or be vaporized in a nuclear explosion
). If we're interested in intra-black hole ballistics for some stupid reason, we'd need to account for Reletavistic effects. Personally, I see all 'what if' scenarios not grounded in practical reality as 'navel gazing,' but they can be illustrative of principles
TCB