I heard this story at Rolls Royce. The story I was told was that the Chicken Gun was a Rolls Royce machine designed for bird strike tests on their aero engines. RR leant the gun to the train manufactures for the tests. Upon receiving phone calls claiming the gun must be malfunctioning and that it needed repairing they sent an Engineer to check the gun out - the HST (High Speed Train) rig had been destroyed more then once. Apparently they strengthened the windshield several times before the RR Engineer came on the scene and asked where they got their chickens from. For the Brits among you I believe it was during the design phase of the Class 43 diesel electric. Bear in mind that this was the story that I was told. Marcus Massey -----Original Message----- From: Dick Eaton [mailto:reaton@home.com] Sent: 19 February 2000 13:33 To: SeeSat-L@blackadder.lmsal.com Subject: FW: Sometimes it does take a Rocket Scientist! Scientists at NASA built a gun specifically designed to launch (dead) chickens at the windshields of airliners, military jets and the space shuttle, all traveling at maximum velocity. The idea was to simulate the frequent incidence of collisions with airborne fowl to test the strength of the windshields. British engineers heard about the gun and were eager to test it on the windshields of their new high speed trains. Arrangements were made and a gun was sent to the British engineers. When the gun was fired, the engineers stood shocked as the chicken hurtled out of the barrel, crashed into the shatterproof windshield, smashed it to smithereens, blasted through the control console, snapped the engineer's backrest in two and embedded itself in the back wall of the cabin, like an arrow shot from a bow. The horrified Britons sent NASA the disastrous results of the experiment, along with the designs of the windshield and begged the U.S. scientists for suggestions. NASA responded with a one-line memo: "Thaw the chicken." ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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