Awesome Speed

Whether you’re a snail or a gazelle, you must move around to survive in this world. In the latest comparison video from RED SIDE, they animated the vast differences in the movements of all kinds of animals, from ants to elephants and everything in between. Watch it in 4K if you’ve got the bandwidth, and find out if a human can outrun a hippo.

Red Side has compared the speeds of aircraft, spaceships, and other vehicles; now they’re back to show the differences in flying speeds of birds – or, in the case of penguins, chickens, and kiwis, how fast they can walk or run. Who here knew a seagull was faster than Usain Bolt?

Getting off the ground in an airplane takes a reasonable amount of speed. Still, there’s a substantial difference in each plane’s speed potential. This fascinating video from Red Side compares the speeds of all kinds of aircraft, from The Wright Brothers’ famed flyer to Mach-3.4 military jets like the SR-71 Blackbird and NASA’s rocket-powered experimental X-43.

The physics of Star Wars aren’t the same as our reality, so you have to take this video from RED SIDE with a grain of salt. But they did their best to convert science fiction to reality and calculate the relative speeds of various vehicles and spacecraft. Place your bets now on the fastest way to travel in a galaxy far, far away.

There are lots of faster ways of getting around than walking or running. Red Side put together this animated infographic that compares the speeds of various means of transportation, from bicycles to bullet trains to satellites in orbit. The sound effects enhance the experience, so headphones are recommended.

The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second. If you could travel around the Earth at that speed, you could do a round trip in 0.13 seconds. Benjamin Granville of Airplane Mode shows us roughly how fast that is by using Microsoft Flight Simulator to fly all the way around the globe in just eight frames of video.

Ever wanted to know how slowly a sloth moves compared to a rocket sled? This infographic video answers that question and many more. MetaBallStudios used lines of varying lengths to illustrate the relative speeds and distances traveled by various things, first comparing things slower than a human walking, then faster.

We shoot a lot of video inside of cars looking out the windshield. But the in-car footage often makes it look much slower than it felt zooming around the track. After watching this clip from Akiyoshi Kitaoka, we realize just how much of a difference having a wide angle lens makes when it comes to the perception of speed.

Austrian downhill cyclist Markus Stöckl recently zipped down a steep slope in the Atacama region of Chile to set a new world’s record for speed on a mountain bike – 167 km/h, or about 103.79 mph. It took Max about 11 seconds to reach his top speed on the way down.

(NSFW: Language) Having always felt inspired by the DIY attitude of the land speed freaks of the 60’s, Donhou Bicycles set out to build a bike with the express purpose of seeing just how fast they could go. That monster gear is so awesome.