Nah if I remember correctly it’s a physics problem. The energy needed to accomplish it ramps up really fast, while the weight to lift ratio craters.
You can’t simply make a very large dragon fly, and expect it to even fly. None the less perform the same way.
Mimicking those capabilities is not neccisarily best done by mimicking the dragon fly itself, or possible to do that way.
@Brainspore mentioned he felt the books were more describing the wings as control surfaces than the source of thrust. So that might just be more of the same.
And that is more in the practical thing we’ve learned from animal flight. The shapes of lifting bodies, and shape or movement for control.
I haven’t read enough of the series to make a call on that.
Major damage. If the Herbert estate wants to keep sonny boy’s name front and center on the Anderson-written “collaborations” (as if to give us the impression that sonny boy is channeling Daddy), then fine… but they should have chosen a team of better writers (as the Asimov estate has done with the 2nd Foundation Trilogy with Bear, Brin, and Benford).
Absolutely!
I can believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast, if the story is good enough.
But here I was focussing on surface area: if the wing is generating both thrust and lift, there’s no way it’s not going to be huge, air has a well known density and viscosity.
In a winged aircraft one can trade lift for thrust - fighter jet: large engines, small wings vs. gliders: large wings no engine.
Doing double duty seems scarcely feasible, regardless of material.
Yeah but why? Cause we also see that they solved this a different way for every other flying machine we see.
Besides whether that specific conflict caused momentary dissonance for me isn’t where we started.
This was an article discussing if it’s possible, and largely arrives at “not really”. To which I added, if it was possible. Why would it be preferable? Cause in a bit of media where interstellar space travel is possible, because of drug addled fish men. I don’t think feasibility is really the thing.
You keep going back and forth over “it’s cool!”. Which we can all acknowledge it’s cool.
I was absolutely fascinated by ornithopters as a kid. Had a half dozen different wind up and rubber band run toy ornithopters from different museum gift shops.
This is the difference between hard and soft sci-fi in a nutshell. The former needs a basic grounding in plausible physics for its fans to be happy, whereas the latter does whatever seems cool and their fans accept it.
Personally I lean more on the hard side, as it takes me out of the world if something is gravely implausible or silly. But to each their own. A little of that is fine- I don’t think these vehicles would ruin the whole movie or anything.
I think you’re conflating wing loading and aspect ratio.
Fighter jets have big engines and high wing loading 'cos they’re designed to move fast.
Gliders have low wing loading and high aspect ratios in the interest of efficiency.
Low flying birds have low aspect ratios and high wing loading which gives them speed and maneuverability at a cost of efficiency, with soaring birds it’s vice versa.
Articles like this are fun, i am curious about why such a design would be suitable for Arrakis and how you would achieve it but you’d think materials science many thousands of years in the future is so far beyond our ken that you may as well just accept it as a bit of world building and hope they visualise it properly. For me personally, i was mesmerised every time they were on screen and it never took me out of the story.
To be fair Rabban did say they were in a storm with winds in excess of 800kph and they seemed to be flying an older model (which has its own charm) that had seen better days.
and in the first dune movie we see the baron himself flying around with some sort of belt if i remember right…
putting those together, id assume they have some tech to offset gravity so that flying becomes more about maneuverability or maintenance than about lift
i just hope there are people inside like on old ships, rowing, rowing, rowing, trying to keep those wings flapping so fast
Reminds me of Ghost In The Shell, there is a “winged” helicopter that seems to function similarly. With the moving wing serving as an adjustable surface. Would like to find a clip of the scene i have in mind but i doubt that Youtube is going to have exactly what i need
No, I actually don’t think it is all that cool and I hope to be surprised at the movie. My argument is that dragon flies maneuver better than any single machine I have ever seen. That is inspiration enough for me to believe they would make good piloted vehicles.
We actually do that with some helicopters. Stub wings are common as mounting points in military helicopters, which lead to them also being lifting bodies. If I’m remembering it right control surfaces are often mounted on them.
They’re there for added lift and/or stability I think, especially on fast moving or heavy lift helicopters.
It was a clever way to handle it. From the one time I read the original book, Dune is exposition heavy. Seems very explainy overall. Which tends to make people run with voice over. That was a better way to handle it.
Seeing as we’re straying into other Sci-Fi realms an’ all…
I always imagined the ‘flappers’ in PKD’s The Penultimate Truth to be a bit like this thing…
Note that this isn’t a helicopter. Only the forward facing propeller is powered. The rotors are spun up to speed using a PTO from the motor, but thereafter they’re kept in motion by physics’ one weird trick!
Every time I think about fast helicopters I start geeking out about dissymmetry of lift and how inventive people have to get to make fast choppers. Physics is beautiful yet utterly merciless.
