7Aug/095
Wings
by Jeff
Image meta text: Please do not try any of this and die or get arrested.
This comic references Titan, a moon of Saturn which has 14% of earth's gravity. Because the gravity is less, it takes less lift to fly on Titan.
Also, the main character uses hot glue on his wings, similar to how Icarus of Greek Mythology flew too close to the sun with wings made of wax. Just like Icarus, the character falls after subjected to high levels of heat. In the comic's case, the heat was applied by a heat lamp from xkcd's resident troublemaker "Black Hat".
July 9th, 2010
His problems are not very serious, however.
The maximum height he can attain is about 24 m. Counterbalanced by 91% of his mass, he initially accellerates at 0.46 m/s/s. Even neglecting air resistance and pulley friction, he impacts after 10 s at 4.7 m/s. This is the same speed obtained after an unconstrained freefall of 1.2 m and is unlikely to cause significant injury since he has time to reorient himself legs downward. At lower heights, he has insufficient time to reorient, but the equivalent freefall distance is then very small (e.g. 27 cm at 5 s, 10 cm at 3 s).
May 15th, 2011
your math has inspired me
December 25th, 2011
The fact that I suck so badly at math leaves me in much more amazed by posts like this.
December 29th, 2011
>The maximum height he can attain is about 24 m
I’m curious to know how you calculated this.
May 15th, 2011
I love black hat