Your first one gets me puzzled. Normally, you take the shorter time to the full hour. Nobody says 'fünfundvierzig vor zwölf', for example. I never said or heard 'fünfunddreißig vor zwölf'. Before half past an hour everyone says '... nach elf'.
Me too. I know. Doesn't change that it sounds plain wrong to me. I guess probably how "dreiviertel X" sounds to you and others. Germany isn't uniform and only a nation state for some short time.
If I try to rationalize it, it is probably that a quarter (to me) is not a distance or difference, but a single thing. So my internal parser expects a Genitiv or another thing after it, not a preposition like 'vor' or 'nach'. 'Zehn Minuten vor/nach X' sounds fine to me, 'eine viertel Stunde vor/nach X' too, but 'viertel vor/nach X' just doesn't.
Still subsonic speeds can produce a lot of lift. I mean jet aircraft weighing 200 tons lift off at about 160 mph. But googling wing tip thrust, jet engines are probably more practical than rockets.
I am not convinced. There are no two equal things in nature. Numbering things, say apples, is a completely human abstraction over two different things.
