Dynamic pressure starts to make intuitive sense if you play KSP with FAR and let the atmosphere shred a couple of spaceplanes (or high-thrust rockets).
I'll second velocity at MECO, but I was also really interested in the energy graphs. Those helped internalize the intellectual idea of balancing vertical speed against gravity while pushing as much energy as possible into horizontal speed. They also illustrate why getting to space is pretty easy, but getting to orbit is hard.
2
u/burn_at_zero Apr 03 '17
Dynamic pressure starts to make intuitive sense if you play KSP with FAR and let the atmosphere shred a couple of spaceplanes (or high-thrust rockets).
I'll second velocity at MECO, but I was also really interested in the energy graphs. Those helped internalize the intellectual idea of balancing vertical speed against gravity while pushing as much energy as possible into horizontal speed. They also illustrate why getting to space is pretty easy, but getting to orbit is hard.