Talk:2973: Ferris Wheels

Where is the Cueball shouting "wheee!!"? Barmar (talk) 19:59, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

In the transcript I described how the cars are hanging, but I'm worried I've gone too far from transcript to explanation. Hopefully someone can improve it. Barmar (talk) 20:02, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

There's no category for "X fired me because" comics. There probably should be. Barmar (talk) 20:06, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

I once attached the motor of a Lego ferris wheel directly to its axis instead of the beginning of the gearing system. Not only did all the cabins fly across the room, the entire thing dismantled itself. Worth it! Fabian42 (talk) 01:03, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

Just HOW fast?

I was vaguely surprised to see nobody had done the math yet. So here it goes -- someone more confident in editing the main entry can feel free to adapt this if you think it's interesting enough (I doubt anyone would want to read the math as I wrote it). But first, someone please check my work. :)

I opened the comic in a pixel-level photo editor and took some quick measurements. The wheel on the left seems to be approximately 160 pixels wide, whiile the inner hub is about 14 pixels high.

So the gear ratio is 160:14 or about 11.04 Just for simplification, let's call it a 10x ratio.

The original Ferris Wheel took about 20 minutes to load and unload passengers, then ran for 9 uninterrupted minutes for another, full, rotation. So again, let's round up and say the wheel on the left takes about 10 minutes to go around once.

The middle wheel, then, would take a minute. And the last one, a tenth of a minute, or 6 seconds.

The original wheel (again) was about 265 feet​【80.77 m】 across, or a circumference of 832 feet​【253.59 m】. So if these wheels are the same size (why not?), any car on the right-most wheel would move about 832 feet​【253.59 m】 in 6 seconds, or 138 feet​【42.06 m】 per second, which is about 94 miles​【151.28 km】 per hour (151 kilometers per hour).

I can see why he was fired.

Taking the reverse: The rightmost wheel would take about 10 minutes for a rotation, the middle wheel, 100 minutes (1:40) and the left most, 1000 minutes (16 hours and 40 minutes).

Actually, if you move slow enough that the right wheel can load and unload (let's say 20 minutes, just like the original wheel), it'd take over a day to load the left wheel.

@[email protected] 172.70.175.87 20:58, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

This Amusement Ride manufacturer has a helpful diagram of rotational speed on their website: https://www.sinorides.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-ferris-wheels/#q11 The example wheel happens to have 18 gondolas, just like Randall's and appears to be roughly the same scale. The sample values they provide are a linear speed of 4 m/s at the edge of the wheel and a rotational speed of just under 3 revolutions per minute. My best guess at the gearing ratio of Randall's belt driven wheels is 10:1, so if the left wheel is being driven at normal speeds, the center wheel would be 40 m/s or 30 rpm and the left wheel would be 400 m/s or 300 rpm. This exceeds the square root of the specific strength of standard steel, so we'll need to hope that the right most Ferris wheel is made of a particularly strong alloy. 172.69.71.97 21:19, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

Ah, well, I started down my own road for calculations, based upon the assumption that they were 75 feet​【22.86 m】 diameter (from the height of the figures, assuming that the ones I actually checked definitively up to 6ft​【1.83 m】, give or take, although pixel-counts upon antialiased graphics can be quite inaccurate the fewer 'apparent' pixels there are). As a truck-portable/mounted fairground-style ride, it's probably quite a bit smaller than the 'original Ferris wheel' and many of those 'permanent' wheels (London Eye, theme park rides, etc) that are built specifically to be architectual 'statements'/tourist-magnets. I'm thinking more the kind that you'd see in Grease (though that one's 55-foot​【16.76 m】, apparently) or the one that 'Night Monkey' had to deal with in Spiderman: Far From Home. I also looked up actual specs (that's 35m, ~105ft​【32 m】 and 0.5rpm, so not too far off my initial assumptions). There also was a rather larger 60-metre (197 ft) semi-permanent transportable version with 13 minute continuous 'ride', but that'd be completely out of scale to those depicted.

If there are any actual 'carnies' out there who know what kind of thing actually gets used at County Fairs in the US, that might help. (Here in the UK there's currently a Fun Fair about a quarter of a mile from my house, at the moment - though I'm not there at the moment, but they have no 'big wheels' of that kind, only the more energetic types that do fling their riders around, like the "Terrifying Claw" and various other heavy duty hanging and/or spinning-seat rides.) ((Slightly ninjaed, now, by the above contribution.))) 162.158.33.197 21:37, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

I can't help but think of this as Randall wanting to make an upscaled version of Steve Mould's Spintronics video from a year ago... 172.68.50.126 21:54, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

Given that air resistance increases exponentially with air speed, this setup would actually act as its own speed regulator, with the main factor being the torque of the power source. Which wheel is powered would not matter much 172.71.118.167 22:05, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

If you powered the middle one, you'd end up with one moderately exciting ride, one normal ride and one really long ride, which would be highly impractical, but not overly dangerous (depending on the structural strength of the fast wheel). 172.71.142.88 23:08, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

The ratio is listed as 12.5:1, but then the calculations are done using a ration of 20:1. The 12.5 seems to be more accurate, given the drawing, but in the comments here, someone else measured the pixel ratio as 11.04. I think 10 or 12.5 would be fine, but it should be consistent. Knowing the ratio ahead of time would also make the rotation calculations easier to explain. We should probably use the pixel technique to estimate the diameter too. I don’t have access to measuring tools right now, but it’s about 20 times the height of the tallest person, so roughly 120’​【36.58 m】. --172.69.34.87 00:32, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

Are the transcript eds going to go into the speeds depicted?

Should the transcript involve the diameter ratios when explaining the speed depiction gray lines? 172.70.211.83 23:06, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

Such analysis is going towards the speculative. Perhaps we can say that the wheels are