The Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)

Flaps and slats are different, slats extend out from the wing under certain conditions while leading edge flaps simply alter the camber of the wing and add a bit of wing area. The JSF uses flaps.

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ckd

Thanks for the clarification on what the JSF is using. Most of my experience is on the commercial aviation side, and most jetliners would rather show up more clearly on radar rather than less....

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Heh, yeah, I know, I've worked both commercial and military aircraft over my career. Evan on commercial aircraft, you still need care in designing your slat installation, though; it took one major accident and one near accident to get the DC-10's slat system done right with irreversible drives both ways, deploy and stow.

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ckd

I often wonder what would have happened if the widebody competition had shaken out a little bit differently.

If Rolls Royce had been able to ship the RB211 on time and with room to grow, or had been so obviously out of their depth that Lockheed redesigned for the CF6 or JT9D instead, would the TriStar have beaten the DC-10? Would it have beaten it so clearly (taking the AA order might even have been enough) that the only real move for McDD would be to drop the trijet design and go for a smaller twinjet?

Now imagine a twinjet DC-10, with McDD no longer in a footrace to be first. They'd have more time to think about the slats (maybe using mechanical lockouts like the other widebodies), and they might be more willing to listen to Convair about the cargo door locking systems (especially after the pressurization test failure). Since there's no tail engine, we never have a UA232 because the uncontained engine failure doesn't shotgun all three (or, while we're daydreaming, four) hydraulic systems.

Added bonus for the US airliner industry: the Airbus A300 no longer gets to walk into an open market segment.

Yeah, I know; this is all a combination of hindsight and wishful thinking. Fun to think about, though.

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Actually, I've got it on pretty good authority that Lockheed was strongly looking at a redesign to use the CF6 when they got the loan that helped them stay afloat and Rolls to properly develop the RB211. Sir Stanley Hooker has some interesting comments about Rolls work on the RB211 in his autobiography, Not Much of an Engineer. As 'tis, Her Majesty's government recalled him out of retirement, the the competitor that Rolls bought out to keep them from participating in the JT9D, to help bail out Rolls. 'Tis a fascinating book, just like the autobiography of another British areo engineer, Sliderule by Nevil Shute Norway (yes, the same person as Nevil Shute, the novelist).

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As the others have said, they're leading edge slats. They're commonly used to improve low speed handling by increasing wing area.

See the wiki page here for more general info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_edge_slats

I've got some shots of fighters sporting these in several of my LJ galleries, you're welcome to look through them.

I like the icon, by the way. =)

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seawasp

Yes, I now understand their purpose.

And yes, THIS aircraft don't need no stinkin' slats! Or even Laws of Aerodynamics, for that matter!

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Heh. I saw a few episodes of Airwolf the other day. It was awesome when I was 10, but now its very cringeworthy. Of course, it was meant to be.

Theme music still rocks, tho.

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seawasp

Cringeworthy? I thought it held up pretty well, given its basic nature. MacGyver didn't hold up nearly so well when I re-watched it.

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dsrtao

No, cringeworthy. A helicopter with a ceiling of 100 Kfeet. That had guns which didn't just pop out, but their barrels extended. That could exceed Mach 1. That had a computer and communication system as unbelievably powerful as KITT. That was also whisper-quiet on demand. That apparently never had to be fueled. All that, and it looked like a Bell 222.

The plots were a mixture of Knight Rider and A-Team, but with more spies.

(Obviously I spent too much time watching it.)

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seawasp

I'm waiting for you to describe any of the cringeworthy aspects. So far you simply described the cool aspects.

It DID have to be fuelled. This was a plot point in several eps, in fact.

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i dunno... mach 1 in a helicoptor... wouldn't the roters (or however the hell they are spelled) be pulled off? is that not cringe worth?

the rest is awesome and is, in fact, part of the requirments for my "Taking over the world" kit. heh/

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roseembolism.livejournal.com

Aerodynamics are for the WEAK! Crom does not bow too mach limits!

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seawasp

Exactly. If I want it to fly, it will by GOD fly.

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kengr

I see the rotors are just to fool the natives. It's actually using contragravity for lift.

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all i can do at the moment is giggle.
i am receiving strange looks from my boyfriend over these giggles. i can't STOP.......

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dsrtao

It's worse than that.

Let's take a helicopter moving at 0.5 Mach. The forward-moving rotor(s) are travelling at a 1.0 Mach and inducing sonic shock. The opposite rotor(s) are moving at 0 relative airspeed. Ouch. (This can happen at pretty much anytime the forward motion of the helicopter equals the rotor tip velocity. It's just more dramatic with sonic booms.)

The experiments to date with transsonic rotor craft have largely assumed that the rotor was going to lock in position and pretend to be an X-shaped wing.

Air pressure at 100000 feet is about 10 millibars, 1% of sea level. To produce sufficient lift, the rotors would have to produce 100x as much downward force as they do at sealevel. Helicopters constrained by the laws of physics top out around 10,000 feet, at 750 millibars. They don't get to 450 millibars at 20,000 feet.

Can I posit a VTOL vehicle that can exceed Mach 1 and climb to 100,000 feet? Sure. Seawasp had drawings of a relative of it in his initial post :) Looks nothing like a helicopter.

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seawasp

Well,

1) As I said, the abilities of the Airwolf are simply the basic show postulates. If you won't allow THOSE, you can't watch Babylon 5, Star Trek, Doctor Who, or any other SF or fantasy show, because they ALL show stuff ranging from "ludicrous" to "Utterly Ludicrous".

2) What's the problem with the rotors? So they just have to be made of Super Alloy. I'm sure adamantium could handle the load just fine. Put some Flubber dampers on it and you even generate the power you need.

3) The Airwolf had (extremely powerful) jet turbines for forward drive, and when climbing to 100,000 feet was NOT doing it using the rotors. It did it by practically standing on its tail and hitting afterburners.

Besides, I'm sure if I crank the rotor speed up to say 100,000rps, I'll be able to lift off even AT 1% pressure.

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dsrtao

The problem is internal consistency. Airwolf didn't believe in science and technology, it believed in a magic ring shaped like a helicopter. If humans had actually built an Airwolf, the industries producing:

the lightweight, incredibly tough armor
the collapsing guns
the unlimited ammo supply
the engines
the rotors
the computer/comm system

would each have employed between dozens and thousands of people, many of whom would be able to re-create all of the critical production steps. These technologies should be showing up everywhere, not just as a single show's one-off enemy (being a repaint of the same vehicle).

Oh, and given all the magictech, Ernest Borgnine would not be able to maintain and/or repair it.

In order to have a fair story given these elements, there should be balancing elements. As far as I can tell, there weren't any. The bad guys showed up with no more than one or two conventional-tech aircraft; the climactic battle took 3 minutes. Airwolf and KITT are basically magic warhorses that nobody else has -- gifts of the gods.

Hrm. Airwolf vs KITT would actually make a decent matchup. Airwolf has maneuverability, but KITT could try to shut down the chopper's engine remotely.

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seawasp

Well, the Airwolf was supposedly the classic Creation of a Psychotic Mad Scientist. The real hole in the plot was that he was able to destroy all the records of how he did what he did, leaving the only records of the materials, design, etc., of all the components IN the Airwolf systems.

It's a technological superhero show. Like Iron Man.

Nit: it didn't HAVE an unlimited ammo supply; like the "never needs fuel", not only wasn't this true, the fact they had to resupply Airwolf comes up at least once or twice as a plot point. (I have both REAL Airwolf seasons on DVD)

Dom Santini had a touch of the same magic that Scotty did. Duh.

The most interesting "battles" for Airwolf were ones that weren't really battles. My favorite episode is probably the one in which String is tricked into flying the Airwolf through an arclight strike, which not even Stringfellow Hawke really expected to survive doing.

Airwolf VS Kitt? I dunno. I didn't particularly like Knight Rider so I only saw a few eps of it, but I didn't get the impression that Kitt's armor was nearly as indestructible as the Airwolf's, and hacking Airwolf's systems... I think you'd probably wake up Moffit's Ghost, which would be a Bad Thing (TM).

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......

i could have worked that out. i did once, not for a helicopter, but still. but i am LAZY, so it's enough for me to think "helicopter go BOOM!"

*I* want a VTOL. a VTOL car... fly over rush hour traffic, and still land in the parking lot perfectly...

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seawasp

The abilities of the Airwolf are part of the basic postulate of the show. Whether or not they're physically possible is utterly irrelevant. If I allow that to make the show cringeworthy, I might as well stop watching SF shows entirely, because they ALL use things vastly worse.

What surprised ME was that if you DIDN'T get hung up on "the Airwolf couldn't actually be built!", they did a pretty impressive job of writing STORIES for it. Which is much, much harder than one might think. By contrast, Knight Rider is trivial. It's easy to write stories in which the hero can make use of his talking intelligent and cool car and do so in a way which allows him to get away with it.

It's a LOT harder to create stories in which you NEED something like the Airwolf, and in which you can at the same time tell a story that isn't the SAME story all the time. There's millions of cars in a city, and people always drive them and so on everywhere. Copters, not so much. And if you didn't (as they generally didn't) want to put in Really Wierd SH*T -- magic, superpowers, etc. -- there were actually a really limited subset of those stories that you could tell that would not be immediately solved simply by sheer firepower (which the Airwolf had in spades).

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alright, i admit it. while i knew what everyone was talking about with the show Airwolf, i've never seen it... which is why my comment was limited to the one thing i could actually comment on...
really, almost the same with Nightrider - i remember an episode, i THINK, it was probably a later TV movie..

*I* need a helicopter. really. i can think of lots of things. sure, they seem stupid, but :D

maybe i will try to find Airwolf and watch it. i know i canNOT watch the new Nightrider.

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kengr

At 100,000 feet the air is just a *mite* thin for rotors.

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seawasp

Then you just crank up the speed of the rotors. You're worried about the rotors exceeding MACH? How about the rotors exceeding *C*?

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point. but i wasn't thinking anything beyond "helicoptor go BOOM!", really

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kengr

More to the point, once you get to "rotors destroy air molecules on impact rather than direct them downward", you're hosed anyway. At any reasonable *size* of rotors, I suspect you'll hit that point long before you hit get sufficient lift 20 miles up.

And then there's the fact that the crew needs to be wearing spacesuits (effectively) well before that altitude.

See, it's easier to accept major handwaves when they are supposedly using new scientific principles. Trying to have known tech (like rotors) do stuff like that is harder to get away with.

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seawasp

Why does the crew need spacesuits? At 30,000 feet most people would pass out, and certainly not be up to moving. Yet this doesn't happen in commercial airliners, and I'd think a super-chopper would be a tad BETTER at keeping a nice breathable atmosphere.

As I said in another post I just made, this is a technological superhero show. One lone genius made it work. HOW it works... the point of the show, in fact, was that NO ONE KNEW how it worked; it was clearly a quantum leap of all significant technologies. The only blueprints for it that were left after Moffitt blew away the secret bunkers where they'd built and tested the thing were the ones inside the Airwolf itself.

If it had been AlienChopper I doubt anyone would have blinked twice.

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Didn't they put Airwolf up against an F4U Corsair (modified with air to air missiles) for one episode? THAT was cringeworthy. Even if Corsairs are 9 kinds of awesome and made of win.

Looking back now, I see the very heavy use of stock footage for the flying segments, using MD-500s as the generic bad guy choppers (Russians, 3rd world dictators, rogue FIRM goons, one size fits all), and wince. I'll still watch it tho.

There's even a place near my parent's place in TN that had a replica. Check it out:

http://pics.livejournal.com/laptop_mechanic/pic/000g132k/g40

Somebody should remake the series, and now that Soviet block stuff is cheap to get on the open market, we can even have the Russians play themselves this time.

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seawasp

They put the Airwolf up against anything they thought they could manage to put on screen. Someone later on (actually, several someones) made videos of "Blue Thunder VS Airwolf" -- some had Thunder win, others Airwolf. Me, it's obvious the Physics Ignoring Supermilitary Chopper would whip the living hell out of Blue Thunder.

The important things were the soundtrack and the explosions.

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Again, no, they're flaps, not slats, and do not form a channel between themselves and the main wing as slats do (later model F-4's have slats but the F-35 in all its variants has leading edge flaps). The idea is as I've mentioned above.

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I stand corrected, then. Silly stealth planes and their silly RCS requirements...

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Heh, the JSF is way beyond what was done 20-25 years ago on the B-2 (I know, I've worked on both). It goes to show how much has been learned in the intervening time in a lot of different areas (nope, sorry, can't get too detailed).

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