Quote:
Originally posted by Bozos of Bones:
Once. The blackhawk comes to the train, unloads a man, the guy goes to the connector between the locomotive and the cart sections and disconnects them. The locomotive thus moves faster because there is a sever weight decrease, and the carts slow because there is nothing to pull them. If there is an upslope, even better, cause the UH60 can use the low speed there to completely stop the carts.
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Well that wouldn't be fun anymore and it would rob us of such great films as Con Train or Under Siege 2.
So I'm going to solve it now:
answer: It probably can't be done
assume time to load the people into the blackhawk 3.33 min
assume they can be unloaded instantaneously
assume Chicago-Milwaukee is 90 miles (actual value) and straight (false assumption)
Blackhawk traveling speed 180mph (actual value)
Blackhawk fits 20 people (can actually take 11 fully equipped soldiers)
assuming you set your base at the best possible point which is obviously halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee.
If you calculate it through you get to pick up the last 20 people right at Milwaukee.
If you want to calculate it however with a base more far away and a higher speed (Blackhawk goes up to 225mph top speed)
you have to use a bit of trigonometry
you get 5 triangles
for every going back and forth you get one with the sides v*a (the way you go back from the train and v being the correlation between your speed and the trains speed: for 180 it would be 2) and v*b (for going to the train) with a and b being the distances the train covers while you fly
if you now draw a line x from your base to the point between a and b you can work with the sinuses as the angle #1 between 2a and x is 1/v the angle between a and x (same for b calling the top angle #2)
With that you can easily calculate the top angle between v*a and v*b taken that the neighbouring bottom angles are 180 degrees combined.
all five triangles are seperated by the distance 5 which is what you and the train cover while loading in the passengers. All you have to do now is to (via construction or calculation) show if and where it is possible to fit these 5 triangles together without exceeding the base (90miles Chicago-Milwaukee)