Aircraft question

Peter2 wrote:Not the only problem – weather would be another. I seem to remember reading about some pretty vicious storms on Safehold, and balloons are very susceptible to high winds. Airships will be less so, but they are pretty slow, and unless one of the inner circle is on board to receive advance warnings of adverse weather, a storm is likely to be on them too quickly to be avoided. Weather was thought to be contributory to the crash of the R101, and the USS Akron broke up in a thunderstorm.
.

Please, probably a half of thousand airplanes was lost due to the weather conditions per one airship. Basically every aerial transport is susseptible to weather conditions, actually.

n7axw wrote:I don't see any reason that some nerd from the royal college couldn't discover the secrets of pitch and yaw by experimentation. That, after all is what the Wrights did over several years of part time effort. It is not really all that far beyond what Charis' current capabilities are. Also, beyond the notion of the idea of flight, I don't see a whole lot of direct connection between balloons and heavier than air winged flight. Kites are much closer.

Don

-

Simply speaking - without photography and electric lighting it's pretty hard to understand the flow effects around the wing. You need to visualise the flow in wind tunnel somehow, and capture the images quickly. And you need to control the pressure and measure the effects of flow accurately, which is pretty hard to do without electric elements.

Without understanding of the flow - no practical airplanes.

Dilandu:

Photography and lighting not really required. You can use colored smoke.

But further to the point, just understanding the concepts of lift, gravity, thrust, drag, and the basics of airfoil shapes I could easily come up with a SMALL prototype aircraft pretty quickly, then evaluate the performance empirically (in fact, I built model aircraft and model rockets that way when I was growing up, and before I went to college and "learned" about it all - "OHHH... So THAT'S why it works...").

With a "working prototype" in hand, I could "play with it" to improve the performance until I'm satisfied (remembering that "better is always the enemy of the good enough"). Then scale until you get something the size you want, testing along the way.

Consider me old school - before we had NASA, we had NACA... And their work was pre-computer and probably (in some cases) pre-slide rule empirical testing. I've still got an old book from college that was done by NACA and consisted of nothing more that airfoil shapes and their respective performance characteristics - all empirically derived!

WeberFan wrote:Dilandu:

Photography and lighting not really required. You can use colored smoke.

Er... we could use, but without the photography it would be useless. We would not be able to save data.

Dilandu wrote:

n7axw wrote:I don't see any reason that some nerd from the royal college couldn't discover the secrets of pitch and yaw by experimentation. That, after all is what the Wrights did over several years of part time effort. It is not really all that far beyond what Charis' current capabilities are. Also, beyond the notion of the idea of flight, I don't see a whole lot of direct connection between balloons and heavier than air winged flight. Kites are much closer.

Don

-

Simply speaking - without photography and electric lighting it's pretty hard to understand the flow effects around the wing. You need to visualise the flow in wind tunnel somehow, and capture the images quickly. And you need to control the pressure and measure the effects of flow accurately, which is pretty hard to do without electric elements.

Without understanding of the flow - no practical airplanes.

Probably not true. Wrights did a lot of their experimenting with kites. Also they studied birds and developed a wind tunnel. Their efforts were accomplished without modern precision and often fell into the category of the intuitive. All of it was eventually refined as time went on. But as crude as it was, they were successful in launching the first powered controlled flight.

I don't recall photography placing a big role in the story.

But I suspect that Safehold is not far away from primative cameras and darkroom photography. You see pictures in this country dating back to tha American Civil War.

Don

-

n7axw wrote:But I suspect that Safehold is not far away from primative cameras and darkroom photography. You see pictures in this country dating back to the American Civil War.

A quick google search reveals that photography came to the US in 1839:

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/art-music-and-film/essays/photography-nineteenth-century-america wrote:Photography came to the United States in the fall of 1839, when word arrived from France of Louis Jacques Mandé ’s marvelous invention, by which nature herself seemed to inscribe her own image on a sensitized sheet of silver-plated copper

The photographs by Mathew Brady and others of the Civil War are best known but photography was a thriving business at least a decade or two earlier. The basic principles involved were known centuries earlier but never put together. Safehold just needs a Daguerre to kickstart the technology.

Dilandu wrote: WeberFan wrote:

Photography and lighting not really required. You can use colored smoke.

Er... we could use, but without the photography it would be useless. We would not be able to save data.

Even without photography, the experimenter can simply remember the results, or he can sketch the results. Slow motion photography is certainly useful but far from necessary. Leonardo Da Vinci din't have photography available, but he drew incredibly detailed images of birds' wings.

Even without photography, the experimenter can simply remember the results, or he can sketch the results. Slow motion photography is certainly useful but far from necessary. Leonardo Da Vinci din't have photography available, but he drew incredibly detailed images of birds' wings.

Basically the serviseable heavier-than-air aircraft became possible only after the fluid dynamic were developed in early XX century. I agree, that the first flights were conducted without the full understanding of flow theory, but until it became apparent that early Newtonian-based theories aren't completely right, the airplanes have quite a lot of problems.

Of course, Merlin&OWL could just again pull the trick "forget everything about scientific method, we'll just force the knowlege into stupid natives, er, Safeholdians", but this would clearly be too much. They already are dangerously close to the edge, when their actions just started to confirm the Langhorne's teaching: that only the selected few could be blessed with refined, perfect knowlege from Heavens. If they crossed this trechold, their future aqctions would be tremendously hampered.

Beacuse really, look at things from the outsider point of view:

- The few "selected ones" (i.e. the Inner Circle members) could produce perfectly refined knowlege without any intermediate stages or long-therm faliures.
- The other "mere mortals" could not invent anything without a lot of testings, intermediate stages and imperfections.

The logical conclusion for the righteous follower of Holy Writ would be that the first group obtained knowlege exclusively as divine inspiration. And inside the Langhorne's teaching this would be just right. So they would just sit and pray and wait the divine knowlege to descend upon them.

Dilandu wrote:Basically the serviseable heavier-than-air aircraft became possible only after the fluid dynamic were developed in early XX century. I agree, that the first flights were conducted without the full understanding of flow theory, but until it became apparent that early Newtonian-based theories aren't completely right, the airplanes have quite a lot of problems.

The Wright Brothers' first flight was in 1903; you can't much earlier in the XX Century.

I don't expect OWL and the inner circle to pass on fully fledged technical data on aerodynamics to budding aeronauts. I do expect a hint or two about building wind tunnels and Bernoulli's principle. Hints that guide research without bypassing the basics.

Weird Harold wrote:
The Wright Brothers' first flight was in 1903; you can't much earlier in the XX Century.

And as I recall, the understanding of fluid dynamics were still unsufficient)

I don't expect OWL and the inner circle to pass on fully fledged technical data on aerodynamics to budding aeronauts. I do expect a hint or two about building wind tunnels and Bernoulli's principle. Hints that guide research without bypassing the basics.

Currently they tended to force perfected solutions, even when it isn't actually important (like sudden charge toward triple-expansion engines, bypassing everything before). I.e. exactly "don't-invent-just-do-as-we-say" method of Holy Writ)

ewlandmine99 wrote: I'm not certain anyone has ever put a diesel engine on an airplane or not.

Finally, bombs, not rockets. I've already mentioned the issues with launching rockets from a dirigible. The early airplanes were made of wood with lacquered cloth covering the wings. We did not start shooting rockets from airplanes until we had advanced to all metal aircraft.

1) See the "Junkers Jumo" series of airborne diesel engines deployed by the Luftwaffe in several aircraft types during WW2
2) See the use of "Le Prieur" rockets from Nieuport fighters against balloons in WW1
3) See the "Fairey Swordfish" for the use of RP-3 Rockets from a "sticks and string" Biplane - originally a torpedo bomber latterly equipped with radar and rockets for use in an anti-submarie role in he Mediterranean Sea and the North Sea