Captain Caveman 76:
From memory, it was Galileo who stated that an object’s mass doesn’t affect it’s rate of descent. That’s about 100 years before Newton. The biggest problem here on earth is air resistance. Two different masses with exactly the same shape will fall at the same rate. On the moon, that experiment demonstrated that with no factors other than gravity, objects fall at the same rate, proving that mass is irrelevant.As far as terminal velocity is concerned, that is simply the equilibrium of forces acting on the falling body. In effect, the acceleration due to gravity is cancelled out by the resistance of the air on the falling body. Clever aerodynamics can increase or decrease that value.
Great so an Abrahms tank has more aerodynamic drag than an F1 car and if we push them both out of a plane the F1 car will fall at a higher speed than the tank.I’d really like to see Top Gear do that stunt to bust the myth. 