Noted villian and general bad-man-about-town, Perfectly Beastly
Lionel (PBL to his henchmen), has a dastardly scheme to derail the
train of his arch-rival, Dudley Darecastle.
"I'll be miles away when the deed's done", smirks PBL,
"and have a perfect alibi!"
His scheme involves 'unspiking' a display cannon outside an RSL,
loading a shell and firing it to hit a pre-placed cache of
explosives under the tracks.
"All I need to do now is to calculate the trajectory I'll need
to hit the cache, then set up the right angle and muzzle speed for
my trigger shell...", muses the Beastly one, "Hmmm... now, what's
the drag coefficient... oh, I'll need to know the air pressure...
and the humidity... and the density of the shell... and the shape
of the shell will make a difference... and any rifling in the
cannon... and allow for Coriolis force and Earth's curvature...
DAMN IT ALL!"
He flings his "Artillery for Dummies" to the ground and decides to
ignore all the nasty physics and make lots of assumptions: it's in
a vacuum, g=9.8m/s/s, the altitude's the same at both ends, the
Earth is flat, etc.
So, setting up the cannon to point 45° up and at a bearing of
156° true, he puts in enough powder to give his shell a muzzle
velocity of 376.5 miles per hour.
"Now, all I have to do is wait until that do-gooder Dudley is
approaching the culvert with the explosives and then fire my
cannon!" gloats the dastardly PBL.
"I hope nobody's overheard my gloating and rushed off to defuse the
cache... Ah, but how could they possibly know where the shell's
going to land?"
There aren't really any explosives in the cache.
It's just a story.
Find the codeword on the logbook and go to
bearleft.mackereth.net