Domino's Pizza vs Armor Plating

You Be The Judge

These lads have thrown together what we Elves consider to be a highly scientific test of Domino's Pizza crust and armor shielding and how well they both stand up to an acetylene torch. They've also included a useful analysis of how said pies can easily be used as orbital reentry heat shielding at a fraction of the cost of other materials.

We're only sorry they didn't include pictures.

From dogcow@feeding.frenzy.com Wed Dec 18 11:17:18 1996
Message-Id: <199612181601.LAA02008@mayflower.merl.com>
Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 11:00:32 -0500
From: crash@merl.com
To: faust@access.digex.net
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.94.961218103006.7840F-100000@access5.digex.net>
(message from Doug Linder on Wed, 18 Dec 1996 10:31:11 -0500 (EST))
Subject: Re: sci fi channel

Doug says:

   Wouldn't flesh and even bone be a lot easier to cut through than
   hull-metal?

It's a LOT easier to cut metal than flesh with a heat weapon.

In actual tests, [Yerazunis, W.S. and White, D.J., 1986] we 
found that heat-based cutting systems were far less effective 
on cutting moisture-rich organic substrates than they were
on dry organic substrates or metallic substrates.

In actual experimentation, our heat source (a Sears Craftsman
Oxyacetylene cutting torch) burned through a flat mild-steel plate
1/4" thick in approximately three seconds.

The same torch took approximately eight seconds to burn through
a Domino's pizza, if you started from the crust side, and over three
times longer than that (twenty-eight seconds) to burn through 
the same pizza if you started from the cheese side.

Hypothesis: the high moisture content of sauce and cheese cause
cause a large heat-of-vaporization shielding effect;  until the
sauce and cheese are boiled dry and then burned away the crust will
retain full structural integrity and thus support the drying 
cheese and sauce, preventing breach for nearly thirty seconds.

Of course, if you cut from the crust side, the crust rapidly dried
and burned away, leaving the wet-but-nonstructural cheese and
sauce, which were rapidly blown out of the way by the evolving
steam plume.  Thus, breach occurred in roughly eight seconds.

The steel armor plate, on the other hand, had no such heat 
shielding effect and so rapidly achieved heat of fusion and 
resultant hull breach.

Extrapolating- it would take a thickness of roughly fourteen 
pizzas to provide sufficient heat shielding for a normal orbital
reentry (that is, from low earth orbit).

This would be both slightly bulkier and slightly heavier than
the "standard" single-use ablative coating, but requires a far
lower level of technology to achieve.

        -Crash
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Welch *  * 

There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that 
cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who 
just comes in to work every day and has a job to do. -- Terry Pratchett

My mother has a wood chipper. She keeps to herself a lot.   -- M. Welch
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Quoted with permission.

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