Father Christmas: An Engineer's Perspective

ciano

I. There are approximately 2 billion children in the world. Since Santa does not visit Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist children, this reduces the workload to 15 per cent of the total, or 378 million. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes.

II. Thanks to the diffenrent time zones and the rotation of the earth, Santa has about 31 hours to work with. This works out to 967.7 visits per second and a total trip of 75.5 million miles. So Santa's sleigh has to move at 650 miles per second.

III. Assuming that each child gets only a medium-sized Lego set (2lb), the sleigh is carrying more than 500,000 tons. A reindeer can pull no more than 300lb. Even if the "flying" reindeer could pull ten times that, Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload another 54,000 tons.

IV. 600,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each; they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vapourised within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or about the time Santa reaches the the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa would be subjected to a centrifugal force of 17,500 Gs. A 250lb Santa (which seems ludicrously light) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015lb of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs.

V. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now

santalives

it's all lies i tell you.

Pugsley

ROFL! whoever worked that out deserves a pat on the back, bloody great!
(but if your stil under 8 years old.... he does exsist, just these oul' fella's have no imagination [and arent as gullable as you are ])

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

bozzie

ROFL
man the guy who worked that out needs to get a life

Wolf

Stoopid engineer has he never heard of magical fair dust. Im going to put a Hex on him. Stoopid stoopid stoopid.........

Wolf

Originally posted by ciano
I. There are approximately 2 billion children in the world. Since Santa does not visit Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist children, this reduces the workload to 15 per cent of the total, or 378 million. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes.

Ah ha but how many of these are good children I reckon about 10 per cent all kids are little gits. So he only has to visit 10.8 million homes. Also in some contries the kids are all packed in one and they have to share gifts and so again reducing thses number its all gibberish I tell you.

TomTom

there is a longer version of that available somewhere.