I'm surrounded by Egg Drop geeks!

So the initial idea of an Egg Drop is pretty much BYU-Dorm-Group-Date-esque (a.k.a. inherently geeky, but fun anyway.) The host, after all, is an Engineering PhD student right now. Then the husband's gung-ho response to the challenge was pretty geeky too. But my brother gets the Uber-Super-Mega-Geek award for his response to this post.

I sent a link to the post to my family, thinking they'd enjoy a bit of a smile reading about a fun-but-geeky activity. My dad, an electrical engineer, gave his simple praises and added some not-so-funny-engineer pun to support it. Par for the course. But the brother sent this response: 

Very entertaining post, Anna.  Looks like [the husband] had a rather interesting idea that worked plenty well, well enough to "show up" the competition!  :)  Slowing/capping the rate of downward acceleration, smart.  The suspension thing would have been particularly fun to put together.

When reading the challenge, my inital thought of how to best do it was not by suspension, but rather by absorption.  Mainly because there's a point at which the impact force would cause the suspension to fail (for example when the upward thrust to throw the egg into the air vaulted the egg from its nest).  But because [the husband] coupled the idea with a parachute, the paratrooper egg worked out just fine.  Cool!

Now for the absorption idea:

Background idea (classic example):  put an egg in a tupperware container and shake your guts out - you get a messy container.  Put an egg in a container filled with water and shake and you get... a safe, protected egg (to some extent - water's not terribly great, but the idea is there).  The egg actually bounces off the walls of the container.  

Instead of water, I'd fill a rather large container with a super-jello type substance - something with a consistancy much thicker than water.  But unlike jello still fluid enough to allow the get to move around.... but much more slowly.  I don't mean jello like the kind you'd buy out of a box.  I'd think more along the line of thick oils.. shampoos (or thicker), something.

Because the impact will drop the egg from wherever it is crashing into the bottom of the container (that crashed into the ground), keeping the egg as high as possible at the time of impact is important.  That means the substance the egg is contained in should be more dense than the egg - again I'm thinking a nice, thick oil of sorts.

The only other trick to the problem is keeping the container as light as possible.  Because the force at which your contraption hits the ground is directly proportional to the object's mass, keeping the object as light as possible is very important while still .  So to keep the craft as light as possible and give the egg as much cushion as possible, I'd take a looooong tube and ensure that the tube impacted the ground on one of the ends (NOT the side).  To do this, I'd attach fins (making it into something like a rocket) or come up with a kind of "helicopter" contraption that'd cause the tube to spin.  Because the spinning motion not only keeps the cylinder's poles perpendicular to the ground, but also could be used to slow the egg rocket-o-doom down, I'd use the helicopter blades in conjunction with the fins - the fins being closer to the rear.

The impact nose could be a super absorption substance - styrofoam would work great, but might get destroyed after the first use.  Maybe duct tape the heck out of it so that chunks don't break off on impact.

Finally, the body of the tube is filled with the liquid (or possibly within a plastic lining) and the egg inserted into the liquid.  Cap off the rocket and you're ready to drop.

Of course, me being the mathy, geeky type, I'd actually do the math/physics to some degree to determine the correct length of the tube, the amount of force/pressure the egg can withstand by itself (or look it up?), the buyoancy within the tube to slow the egg's movement down (NOT so great that it actually prevents the egg from submerging!), etc. to more or less prove that the whole thing was going to work before I actually constructed anything. 

I could totally do this.    The hardest part of the project for me would actually be finding a three-story building here in Boise that I could drop the egg rocket from... lol.  What'd be really cool is if I could get the physics to work even without the helicopter blades - so that the impact would be as big as possible while still preserving the egg's life within.  If I could even get some firework boosters so that it'd propel the rocket into the ground in lighted, blazing glory AND keep the egg alive, that'd be the ultimate.  Fireworks... awesome (wonder if it'd burn my cardboard tube? haha, that'd be great)!

Hmmm, new competition - not only does the egg have to survive, the winner is he/she who's contraption connects with the ground with the most velocity with the egg surviving!!  Hmmmm, how long is it until firework season??  

The cool whip people kinda had the right idea... just their implementaion of it was kinda lacking.

Also, I don't know if your camera takes video, but you could have uploaded video of the drop onto youtube and link there from your blog (or even inline link so the video's actually on your page!).  After all, you went to the effort of posting the blog...

Very cool project!  The inner nerd in me rejoiceth!    Check out the (attached) quick paintbrush diagram I whipped up quick.  Of course, after I went through the effort of making the diagram I had some additional ideas, like dropping the helicopter fins and instead "dog-earing" or bending the fins so that the fins themselves cause the rocket to spin...

Yes, he even took the time to draw an original diagram. Click the image and read the descriptions of each step. Hilarious! My favorite comment of the message was "My inner nerd rejoiceth." Umm... inner nerd? Sorry Bro, there's nothing "inner" about the blatant nerdy geekiness of this response to my post.

I'm completely surrounded.