N810, I'm familiar with the swept-forward concept. It's pretty cool; it's also super-dependent on computer software... which, as a one-time programmer, makes me a little nervous.
But that's not what I meant when I was talking about atmospheric craft needing wings whose leading elements aren't flat surfaces.
Here's a good example of what caught my eye:
Theoretically, you could make something like this fly, just as you could make a brick fly... but in either case you're making the engines work harder than they have to for atmospheric flight because a flat leading surface interferes with aerodynamic lift.
Again: for spacecraft, I will quote the guy at the end of
Buckaroo Banzai: "So what? Big deal." For a spaceship in normal (i.e., significantly slower-than-light-speed) flight, you could make a ship that's a wing, or a cube, or anything in between -- its "flight" characteristics will depend on how its engines can move its mass distribution.
But if you're going to design a ship that looks like it could be efficient in atmospheric flight, you wouldn't undercut your design by imposing a low-efficiency wing design. And a flat leading edge is low-efficiency.
"Edge" is sort of a misnomer, actually; a wing doesn't have to come to a sharp leading or trailing edge. Because most aircraft are meant to operate at subsonic speeds, their wings (
airfoils is the technical term) use a rounded shape. True sharp leading edges are low-drag but tend to significantly increase the risk of stalling, so they're typically only seen on aircraft that are meant to fly in the
supersonic regime.
In general, then, what I'm suggesting is that if it's a flying thing that has bits that look like wings, the front of those wings shouldn't be flat. How many polys are required to achieve that look, I leave to the graphics experts.
lmaluko wrote: ↑Mon Dec 18, 2017 9:01 pm
Hey just wanted to contribute with something. Some people say that fighters in LT don't need to be streamlined because they are flying in space. I used to think that as well, but recently i read the "star carrier" series by Ian Douglas, and in it he made a few interesting points about space fighter shapes. In those books fighters accelerate to near C speeds, at these speeds the fact that space is a near, and not total, vacuum makes a lot of difference. That happens because at relativistic speeds even scattered atoms of hydrogen can create a lot of resistance, so streamlined designs, like atmospheric fighters, do make sense. And from the videos of LT I saw, the time it took to travel the distances between bodies, if scaled to real star systems, the ships would have to be moving at those speeds.
This is an interesting notion. With due respect to Douglas, it seems to me that if you're flying at only a very small fraction of c, you don't need a specialized shape to minimize the damage caused by hitting gaseous particles.
On the other end, at near-relativistic speeds, it seems unlikely that any shape is safe -- you'd require some kind of projected shield that prevents any kind of matter from slamming into your ship's hull. So if all shapes are equally unsafe, again, you might as well use any shape you want. (And then there's the problem of controlling a ship's flight when it's moving faster than any brain, organic or electronic, can think, requiring probabilistic navigation planning... but that's a separate thread.
C.J. Cherryh's books do a good job of describing what this might be like.)
So on balance, I'm still in the "ack, no flat forward wing surfaces!" camp.