How does fire make tea bags fly? 🔥☕️
Alex Dainis demonstrates how lighting a tea bag causes the air inside to heat up, expand, and rush out. Just fold open a few empty tea bags into tubes on a baking sheet, then light the top with an adult and a fire extinguisher handy. The now-less-dense air inside sends the bag rocketing upward, similar to how a hot air balloon works, except this one's a one way trip once it burns.
Always great to hear from Dr. Prentice. Hopefully, remote operating and autonomous capabilities will prove essential in reducing risks and costs, which will lower the high barrier to entry for transport airship prototyping and experimentation.
Additionally, the lack of a crew and their various systems will mean more payload, which makes smaller airships more viable.
I have been going down the airship rabbit hole, and just read “My Airships” by Alberto Santos-Dumont.
I loved it. I wanted to get a better sense of what it was like to do the flights and scenarios that he described in detail in his book, especially since I am unfamiliar with the locations he describes.
So, I made a Alberto Santos-Dumont 3D in browser flight simulator based on the information in his book, topographic and open street map data.
Over the past few days I added multiplayer and VR to the game so people could try flying his airships around 1901 Paris too. There are scenarios he described in his book that can be re-flown and also time trials based on ones he did himself. In multiplayer mode there are races and also other game modes. It works on mobile, desktop, and in VR.
The game is at http://myairships.com.
My goal is to get it to be as realistic and accurate as possible. I need to work on the keels and I couldn’t find any good pictures of the control setup he used so I took liberty there. If anyone has this information I would be extremely interested.
If anyone tries the game and sees anything off there is a bug button in the top right corner that sends a screenshot along with a user provided description of the problem.