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> There's nothing wrong with unstable airframes. For military purposes, I agree. There is an end objective to fighter jet development. To own the sky at all co
by qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
> There's nothing wrong with unstable airframes.
For military purposes, I agree. There is an end objective to fighter jet development. To own the sky at all costs.
With civilian aircraft, there is too much to lose. You can't have an unstable air frame for civilian commercial mass purposes.
- pps43 8y agoHelicopters are inherently unstable at low speeds, yet there are civilian models.
- macintux 8y agoAnd if they carried 500 people we’d think that was a bad idea.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 8y agoHelicopters scare the hell out of me because they resemble nothing that's natural.
- dreamcompiler 8y agoI guess you've never seen a maple seed then. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=maple+seed&t=ffab&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=maple+seed&t=ffab&iax=images&ia=im...
- Drdrdrq 8y agoMaple tree seeds?
- serf 8y ago(to other repliers) maple tree seeds resemble auto-rotation in a helicoptor, not powered flight. It's a nice mental model as to why you won't fall out of the sky necessarily with a loss of power in a heli, though.
- CydeWeys 8y agoWhy does that matter? There are plenty of natural things that are scary as hell, and plenty of unnatural things that aren't. The reason you don't see it in nature is that macroscopic organisms never evolved a continuously rotating joint. It's a hard problem for evolution to solve; how would blood vessels cross that boundary? But of course machines have no such constraints, and the wheel and axle is hardly a new (or scary) invention.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoYour shoulder comes close, on a ball-and-socket model rather than wheel-and-axle.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- CydeWeys 8y agoIt doesn't continuously rotate, and it's nowhere close to allowing so.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoIt will allow you to rotate your arm in the same direction indefinitely.
- CydeWeys 8y agoIt does not. Once you go through one rotation you've ripped all the muscles and ligaments off, ripped all your skin, and can no longer rotate it any further. Oh, and your entire arm will die in short order because you've ripped all the blood vessels delivering it oxygen. Is it possible we're talking about two different things? Making a circle with your arm isn't the same as rotating it, and just making a circle isn't particularly useful for flight or locomotion. Imagine attaching a wing to your arm and making a circle -- half the time isn't going to be attacking the wind the wrong way. This wouldn't work to, e.g., fly a helicopter. You need real rotation.
- vertex-four 8y agoMy home is filled with things that resemble absolutely nothing natural. It doesn’t scare me in the slightest.