Thursday, August 21, 2014

More testing required

I have been playing with a model for objects impacting the earth.  It is designed to let people toy around with various settings - size of object, speed, distance of observer from impact point, etc.  It seems pretty cool at first but they seem to have used some formulas and then forgotten to properly check for edge cases.  For example, if you set it up so that your observer is inside the fireball created by the impact it will give very incorrect answers as to how big the fireball appears.  If you posit that the object is bloody enormous, it will inform you that a new asteroid belt forms from the remains of the Earth, that there will be a crater 164,000 km wide (much larger than the Earth itself), and that the tilt of the Earth's axis will not be significantly altered.  Test that code more!

1 comment:

  1. I think all three of those things would happen in the opposite order stated.

    ReplyDelete