> > > thinking of imagining building a balsawood airplane similar to the > > > people who invented airplanes > > > > now one of the tricks here is that it's quite hard to do finite > > element modeling without any experience in airfoil design in one's > > head > > maybe this is easy or interesting for some people, others are curious > > if planes can be made without airfoils > > maybe condensable to -- could we make a huge paper-airplane-style glider? > [uhhhh
this seems kind of reasonable! maybe condensable to a question of, how does the weight of the wings of a paper airplane relate to its success? does this impact change as the wings get larger? 0745 we could think about that -- what is ummmmmmmmmm oop the wings are pushing on the air, and they're pushing down. there's more air under the air so it pushes back. then it squeezes out the sides like squeezing the peanut butter and jelly out of a sandwich. the top slice of bread is the wings. the bottom slice of bread is the air underneath you. and then the glider glides because it's hard to squeeze the sandwich, the guts of which are the air immediately under the wings maybe ! 0746 so the wings work because ... so bigger wings may help. because then the air has to squish and travel farther. we could determine that arbitrarily heavy wings would successfully fly if they encased the hole planet. there is no way for the air to escape, nor any way for the wings to compress and fall (unless they start compressing under their own weight) what if the wings encased half the planet ...?
