In answer to ryano, who claims that his cat-array vehicle might be propelled by means a shirt/ketchup drive, I have only this to say.

  1. First dress the cat in your most precious and virgin-white shirt

    This is, of course, impossible. It is well-known that any cat worth its salt will resist any attempt to dress it up in this manner. As the cat is equipped with razor-sharp claws, the shirt will be ribbons before the scheme even gets off the ground.

  2. You now need to carefully affix a mechanism which propels tomato sauce in the direction you want the cat to travel

    Outrageous! The Law of Conservation of Energy does not apply to ketchup. My own experiments have proven that the amount of force required to extract even a tablespoonful of sauce from a bottle would draw so much energy from the cat/toast array that there would be no lifting power, and the whole scheme would be dashed before it gets off the ground. Ahem.

  3. Replace the wheels of your automobile with four of these cat/toast/white shirt/tomato sauce units and you have an excellent hover-car which should never need refuelling!

    Here, all his arguments fall down totally. The premise is that the cat will be drawn in the direction of the ketchup, which is, presumably, meant to be fresh (old sauce and Italian shirts have much less attractive power). This would require an almost constant flow of sauce, which surely, in the name of all that is holy (and logical) means that the sauce will require replenishment. Thus, the sauce itself is fuel.

    This always assumes that the torn and bloody shirt is still attracted to the ketchup in the first place.
The principle behind this, of course, is that expensive white shirts cannot resist being splattered with deep red tomato sauce

This underlying principle nonetheless remains true at all times. My hypothesis (as yet untested) is that even tiny amounts of sauce will be attracted, and thus, a simple gravity-fed ketchup feed might be arranged. Hang teflon-coated thread sufficiently far in front of the cat/shirt/toast array. Arrange for small amounts of sauce to drip slowly down the thread. The shirt will be gently attracted to the sauce as it drips off the end, gradually moving the vehicle forward.

Of course, this would not produce the same high acceleration as the original concept might have, but in the same way as the ion drive, this small acceleration, over a long enough period of time, would be enough to build up a tremendous speed.

 


 

I have discussed this with Dr. Ryano, who said "Very true! I urge you to node it", and present this to you for your serious consideration.