[net.physics] Real-Life Problem?

merrill@raja.DEC (11/15/85)

'Pears to me that unless you have a perfect release of the egg-brick combo
it could rotate randomly, so you will have to use aerodynamics to make the
brick land on the bottom: give it a "tail" of feathers/paper about three
times as long as the rest of the package.  To get the length "right" would
require controlling the magnitude of the oscillation upon impact: the package
will be like \ then | then / then | then \ and so on.  You'll need the
velocity at impact, the moment of inertia of the whole thing, the aerodynamic
force on the "tail" (proportional to the velocity x surface area).  You can
then plug those parameters into the equation for a pendulum [which itself
can be derived from a dimemsional analysis of the parameters].

	Rick Merrill