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Re:United Airlines will buy 15 planes from Boom Supersonic by onlyrealcuzzo on Thursday June 03, 2021 @02:50PM (#27385687)
Why is there suddenly a lot more drag once you break the sound barrier?

I would imagine drag increases linearly or exponentially with speed - not as a step function once you cross the sound barrier.

Or are you saying because it's going to be flying twice as fast?

Re:United Airlines will buy 15 planes from Boom Supersonic by genericone on Thursday June 03, 2021 @03:05PM (#27385902)
I understand this is probably an honest question, so I'll just point to this wiki article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag-divergence_Mach_number#:~....

[Increasing Mach Number] can cause the drag coefficient to rise to more than ten times its low-speed value.

I only know this because of a number of fluid-dynamics courses that are only required for Mechanical and Aeronautical engineering majors. Barely anyone else is expected to know this information. Mach numbers represent fluid-flow discontinuities. If there is fluid flow in a varying inner-diameter tube and there is a Mach number change from <1 -> >1 at any point in the tube, as long as the Mach discontinuity is there, fluid flow characteristics before and after the discontinuity are decoupled from each other, they no longer influence each other if the Mach discontinuity is present.

Re:United Airlines will buy 15 planes from Boom Supersonic by carabiner on Thursday June 03, 2021 @04:06PM (#27386617)
It actually IS a step function. A shock wave by definition is an instantaneous change in fluid properties. At the molecular level, the change in properties is observed as occurring within a mean free path length (average distance a gas molecule travels before colliding). Imaging that shows the jump: https://phys.org/news/2015-08-schlieren-images-reveal-supers...