- #1
Lancelot59
- 646
- 1
I'm sure many of you are familiar with this ship:
(Sorry, I couldn't find a smaller image that was any good)
I wonder if this ship would actually fly very well. One of the many things I'm interested in doing is RC aircraft, because I don't have the vast fortunes required to build these things full scale.
In normal flight mode I think it follow the jet fighter school of flying more so where it gets pushed through the air and guided along by the wings/control surfaces. The wings that go out to the main engines actually do have an airfoil shape to them. They have a very large camber, but I guess the big engines take care of the drag.
What I wonder about is stability while hovering. Some schematic type images place the wing mounts half way up the ship, and there's about an equal amount of ship above and below that point. As you can see in the picture only the cargo bay area which also has some other rooms is actually below the mounts. The rest of the ship rides above that, save the large rear end.
I was discussing this with my friend and he pointed out that with something like an osprey the lift force is well above the centre of gravity:
Which I think would be a big contributing factor to stability. Serenity's centre of mass is tricky to figure out without having a proper schematic, but it's safe to say the centre of gravity is much closer to the level of the lifting force. Also, with the osprey the lift force generated by the propellers is at the end of the engine nacelles. With jets where do you place the lift force?
Lateral axis stability would seem to be fine. To me it looks like the mass of the bridge and other stuff up front would be balanced by the huge rear end. Something else I see being an issue is that pretty much all your control would be derived from thrust vectoring. What do you guys think?
(Sorry, I couldn't find a smaller image that was any good)
I wonder if this ship would actually fly very well. One of the many things I'm interested in doing is RC aircraft, because I don't have the vast fortunes required to build these things full scale.
In normal flight mode I think it follow the jet fighter school of flying more so where it gets pushed through the air and guided along by the wings/control surfaces. The wings that go out to the main engines actually do have an airfoil shape to them. They have a very large camber, but I guess the big engines take care of the drag.
What I wonder about is stability while hovering. Some schematic type images place the wing mounts half way up the ship, and there's about an equal amount of ship above and below that point. As you can see in the picture only the cargo bay area which also has some other rooms is actually below the mounts. The rest of the ship rides above that, save the large rear end.
I was discussing this with my friend and he pointed out that with something like an osprey the lift force is well above the centre of gravity:
Which I think would be a big contributing factor to stability. Serenity's centre of mass is tricky to figure out without having a proper schematic, but it's safe to say the centre of gravity is much closer to the level of the lifting force. Also, with the osprey the lift force generated by the propellers is at the end of the engine nacelles. With jets where do you place the lift force?
Lateral axis stability would seem to be fine. To me it looks like the mass of the bridge and other stuff up front would be balanced by the huge rear end. Something else I see being an issue is that pretty much all your control would be derived from thrust vectoring. What do you guys think?