In one of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home's final scenes, Sulu gives an estimate of the crew's trip to the Bering sea from San Francisco in their old Klingon Bird-of-Prey at 12 minutes. Flying directly would result in a speed well in excess of the speed of sound, and while there are contemporary real life efforts to reduce the profile of hypersonic shockwaves, it is questionable whether this is a concern of Klingon spacecraft engineers. My question is whether the cloaking device somehow mitigates these effects, and what evidence exists to support that conclusion. An alternate hypothesis is that the craft makes a quick trip to space and back, but it is not clear to me that this trip can be made without exceeding the speed of sound firstly, at all, and secondly, within the amount of time Sulu quotes. What do you think?
tl;dr: What happened to the supersonic shockwave from the craft on the trip from SF to the whales?
Shanghai and all along the Yangtze river is flooded.
I understand that characteristics of airflow change when it becomes super sonic (Mach 1), but what is special about specifically 5 times that speed? Is it just that just a human label or is there a physical phenomenon at Mach 5?
I was in Gardner state park, Texas. I believe it was October of 2002. It was night and I was lying next to a cliff ledge looking up at the stars. I decided to try to locate a a satellite like I used to do with my father when I was a child. He worked at Lockheed Martin and NASA and like the best of fathers, he liked to feed my childlike curiosity and amazement at everything. Especially with the night sky. Think telescopes, rockets, satellites. Awesome nerd stuff.
Thanks to our tradition of locating satellites in the star-speckled skies of remote locations, I started searching for one. Once located, I tracked it across the sky as it orbited earth for several minutes. As a child I refused to stop watching them until they disappeared over the horizon and that was my whole hearted plan the night of the sighting. After about five minutes of zenning out with my satellite, it changed directions three times very rapidly at 30 to 45 degree angles before finally accelerating to a hypersonic speed away from Earth. It didn't disappear over the horizon but really seemed to have blasted off into space away from Earth, disappearing into the dark. I've never seen anything move like that or travel that fast. The speed at which it zigzaged was unnatural. (Each 'zigzag segment ' was about 10 cm long from my vantage point if I measured from about a 1/3 meter from my face.)
I haven't thought about until recently when I heard a story about Ronald Reagan seeing the same phenomenon only more closely ffrom a small plane while the ufo was in our atmosphere. Then I started researching "hypersonic ufo" as I heard it described and "zigzagging ufo" on Google where I found many stories describing what I saw. What I witnessed seemed to be in orbit. All others witnessed it more closely. So there it is, I've 'officially' made a UFO 'report.'
