Questions tagged [flight]
For questions related to the act or process of flying through an atmosphere. Includes any means of propelling oneself through the atmosphere of a world, including biological or technological. Does not include flight outside an atmosphere (compare [space-travel]). Compare [aircraft] and [airships], which are about the machines themselves.
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Creature design - low gravity high atmospheric density world
I would like some help in thinking through what would life look like on a planet with slightly lower gravity (around 75% Earth) and a much higher air pressure (around 3 times). The goal is having a ...
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Flying hexapod with three wings
Let's say I was working on the evolution of hexapod creatures that are like a combination of a starfish and an octopus. If they climbed the local trees, would it be possible for every other arm to ...
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How far would a goblin-powered plane go?
There are a few flying questions lately and this got me thinking. Someone suggested that a centaur might power a plane via a bicycle. I don't think this would work out, since the centaur would be very ...
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Could you design a fighter plane for a centaur?
It's the Great War, and all the nations are having a good time of it, painting their biplanes flashy colours, as they shoot into their own propellers!
But over in the corner, lonesome and dejected, ...
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How fast would I have to flap my arms in order to fly?
Suppose I am a super-being. From the outside I look and act exactly like an ordinary human. My flexibility of limbs is the same as that of a human so I can't shape-change or bend my arms unnaturally.
...
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Could falcons evolve to become flightless?
I am writing a science-fantasy book series for adolescents (or people aged from 10 to 24 years old if you want) about a weird creature called Céleste Bizarre. One of their friends is an ...
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Humanoids with wings, how do they take off?
Remember when I said that flying creatures are a nightmare to design?
Well, looks like dragons and gryphons were just the beginning, we still have two other species to cover, and they're worse.
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How would a dragon fly, give it all you got, the dragon has 4 wings, and has an avarage (edited) 300Kg weight
The dragon's weight can be reduced, by a mixture of lighter than air gases, heated air, vacuums etc.
I have done some research, but I forgot the equation, this was for a 6000 kg bird, how large does ...
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Wind Powered Air Sailing Vessel
Using just one fantastical element (a rock that under certain conditions produces a strong buoyant force) how would sail ships in the air be designed? It doesn't need to look like a traditional naval ...
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Giant, flying fish? [duplicate]
I have this idea of giant, literal flying fish. About the size of a megalodon (if impossible, it can be smaller, I just want them to be really big), they fly at speeds of 70 miles per hour (again, you ...
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World conditions for Flying Humanoid Like a Human
Okay, so this is unrelated to every question I've made so far except a select one. I want to see how a race of sapient, flying humanoids that are essentially humans, but with wings and tails.
Here are ...
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Unique take-off strategies for six-limbed creatures?
So, dragons, gryphons, what have you. They're usually (before Skyrim and Game of Thrones in the dragons' case) depicted as six-limbed, quadrupedal creatures. Now, the thing is, staying aloft is much ...
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Can a robot which flies like a bat have telescopic wings?
Working as a continuation of the concept I mentioned in my previous question, my character is building a flying robot, which has wings which function much like those of a bat. The robot in question ...
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What's the scalability of this flying strategy?
So, a quick rundown:
Giant pterosaurs lived during the Cretaceous period before some a-hole wiped the server clean. These pterosaurs ranged in appearance and lifestyle from sorta-scavengers, like the ...
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Materials preferably available up to early 1900s ideal for mechanical wings
My universe is focused on a steampunk-esque atmosphere although with more modern technologies up to the early 2000s (yes I am aware of dieselpunk, atompunk etc, but in here the steampunk aesthetic is ...
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What is the smallest a planet can be whilst retaining a Venus-like atmosphere?
I am designing a science fiction world that involves the speculative evolution of large flying bat-like organisms with intelligence who are blind as their planet has an atmosphere like Venus, or at ...
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Logistics in a World of Floating Islands Sans Airships
The World
The setting is an endless sky of naught but pillowy white clouds and floating islands scattered across the skyscape. In such a world, how would the various nations, from small city-states to ...
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Would reducing drag be a good reasons for bird people not to wear much besides a loincloth when in civil?
I feel that most of my non-human civilizations are somewhat samey. While I could justify it with the fact that they were all the creations of the same two white fixers, I thought I should emphasize ...
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Why would adipose tissue be the most essential ingredient in achieving flight?
Witches have two means of achieving flight. One is through enchanting items such as broomsticks. The other is through a liquid referred to as "flying ointment". This ointment is made by ...
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Is my idea of Wyverns realistic?
I am an aspiring fantasy writer, and I wanted to include rideable Wyverns in my world. There will be a magic system in my world, but I still want to make them as scientifically possible as I can. Now, ...
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Would an evolutionary predecessor for winged quadrupeds start with four legs and gain wings? Or start with two legs and wings and gain extra legs?
Background
For a pair of games I am working on, I'm trying to work in a VERY basic evolutionary timeline for a lot of the more mythical creatures to set up design language of some of the creatures. ...
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How to build an airport at 30,000ft?
What differences might an airport runway and landing differences have on Mount Everest for airplanes at 30,000ft? The drawn line in the pictures is about 2 miles. This would be practical for hand ...
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How do I give human fighters a chance when fighting much faster and technologically advanced alien craft?
Human fighters in this instance are six WWII Spitfire Vs and one B-17 Bomber modified with two extra turrets. Each of these planes has been refitted with shields, which can protect from 2 shots on the ...
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Assuming the wing is strong enough to handle the forces, would allocating wing area towards the tip of a creature's wings help with flapping flight?
When it comes to pushing against fluids (such as water and air) you gotta get speed, demon speed! Speed is what we need! We need greasy-fast speed! It's rather apparent that slow-moving objects tend ...
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Humanoid avians with six limbs, how to modify their bodyplan so that their ribcage won't constrain certain movements?
Thundercats 2011 was great. I mean, it even had Thanos and infinity stones before it was cool. Such a good remake simply couldn't survive in final-stage capitalism, as those who worked on it didn't ...
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A missile that's launched from "small' flying dragons. How can it take advantage of that?
So, when I say small dragons, they're still around the size of a Clydesdale horse, of course. While this might seem small, that's because you're watching them on a small screen and because people ...
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Is there any way to estimate the carrying capacity of large fliers?
When it comes to the usefulness of large fliers in modern combat, the most important question is:
"How much can they carry before they can't take off anymore?"
It would be beneficial if you ...
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Parachute equivalent when there is no ground
In this world wandwavium machines fly around with glee.
But, between one flying island and another, there is no ground.
Beneath your flying machine the air only gets denser, and denser, until ...
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How would a horse-like animal fly using artificially engineered wings?
This animal is built similar to a earth horse. The bone structure is more like a deer or gazelle then a horse. The artificial wings were made by the people in my fantasy world, and they're more like a ...
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How could six-limbed dragons launch like vampire bats and giant pterosaurs?
So, birds have a rather significant disadvantage, Tthey "jump" into the air, which requires beefy legs that become dead weight in flight.
Bats and giant pterosaurs circumvented this problem ...
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A flying animal that would experience little to no drag?
I wanted to design a huge alien organism that resembles something like a jet.
It lives on a low gravity planet that has 60% earth’s gravity and a similar atmosphere to earth.
It would fly by ...
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Quadrupedal Flight
Ok, so, there is a character of mine that is a quadrupedal fox-rabbit-hybrid creature, and it has the magical power to sprout out wings of magical energy from their shoulders.
In order to make ...
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What Is The Best Wing Design For A Giant Flying Animal
What wing design is best-suited for gigantic flying vertebrates, and why?
The wing designs I'm considering are Bat Wings, Bird Wings, and Pterosaur Wings. I'm leaning towards Pterosaur simply because ...
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Would it be possible for humans to fly with mechanical wings?
This is something I’m thinking about. Now, these would be wings that are not powered by the person themself, since we do not have the strength for it (and I don’t want to use legs). They’d be powered ...
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Could Neopteran wings be supported by a flexible ribcage?
Could a small tetrapod fly using Neopteran-like wings that are integrated into the ribcage between the ribs and the spine, with the ribcage being flexible and containing flight muscles instead of ...
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What is the best form of powered vehicular flight within a McKendree habitat?
Background
A McKendree cylinder is a spinning space habitat in the style of an O'Neill cylinder (below), but orders of magnitude larger. McKendree habitats are hundreds of kilometres in diameter and ...
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Would a life-bearing Earth-like world with 3g average gravity produce more or fewer flying creatures than Earth?
On one hand, heavier gravity would make flying more difficult, owing to greater weight restrictions on the flying creatures' bodies.
On the other hand, the greater density of the atmosphere on our ...
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How many wings would a vertebrate-like hexapod have? [closed]
If there were six-limbed animals that were otherwise similar to vertebrates, I'm wonndering what's the most plausible way for them to evolve some of those limbs into wings would be. Would they be more ...
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What key technologies in today's world would not exist if flight was never discovered? [closed]
For an alternate world sci-fi novel, I'm trying to figure out which technologies they have.
I would prefer for flight not to exist. Would this interfere with things like computer technology? I ...
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Could the MUTO wing structure work in any way?
The male MUTO creature new godzilla movies has a very peculiar wing design: despite having leathery wings, those don't connect to the side of its body, but to two support "rods" that seem to come out ...
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How would gryphons go about defending themselves against humans?
So, let's start turning the tables. Previously, we talked about humans slaying gryphons, now let's talk about gryphons fighting back against humans.
Gryphons
Gryphons are hexapodal creatures, ...
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A dragon, a gryphon and a tengu are flying toghether. How can they actually communicate?
One problem, I think writers often overlook, is the problem of flying creatures communicating with each other. I call this the "I can't hear you over the sound of the f@cking headwind!"
For my world, ...
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So, how do I put the extra muscle, needed for flight, into a large flying creatures like dragons?
I've been thinking about this the whole day. At first I thought it was an easy fix, given my dragon's bones have a tensile strength of 3-6.5 GPa and an elastic modulus of 50-140 GPa, depending on the ...
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Can a "boneless" flying creature exist?
The creature was originally a human, altered by an external agent that basically remade its body (carbon based). The creature is roughly 2 meters and relatively light. It is humanoid and boneless, ...
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Flying commercial airliners with ground power?
A thought occurred to me, and I wondered if it could be made practical...
This video talks about the possibility of electrical battery powered planes, and in short, while it may be practical to build ...
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How can a dragon take off to the air silently?
Imagine a dragon as tall as average adult horse with a wing span of 12m long measuring from tip to tip. I wonder what evolutionary traits or techniques could allow the dragon to lift itself off the ...
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How would a bird's flight change entering the zero gravity axis of an O'neil cylinder?
This question on space stack begins to tackle how a bird could fly inside an O'Neill cylinder, https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/27665/can-birds-fly-inside-an-oneill-cylinder.
Here is the ...
user69935
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Humans with bird wings [duplicate]
So i recently found this site and it proved useful for many unanswered science question except for one big one I want to know: What properties would allow for bird wings on humans, NOT connected to ...
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Navigating a sea of sulfur hexafluoride
Sulfur hexafluoride is pretty awesome. It is a gas six times denser than regular air, and thus you can actually make tinfoil "boats" float on it. It also makes your voice deep when you breathe it in.
...
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Aerodynamics of propeller vs screw/fin based aerial propulsion
Would it make sense to use screw- and fin-like bending surfaces for propulsion (like what eels or the king of herrings have but in the atmosphere) instead of regular propellers or even flapping wings ...
