I love the noise it makes and how it manages to look like a helicopter and biology inspired. And the wing folded dive to get to the spice harvester is just fantastic.
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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The reason nature has no rotation is because you can't connect nerves, blood etc. So making something that flaps up and down because nature does it, where rotation is far simpler and more efficient, is odd.
For this reason I found them somewhat absurd to look at. From the slow and sluggish start up to the suddenly physics defying power they got out of them.
Most of the problems with an ornithopter are the difficulties of engineering rather than concept, which I think it's safe to say a society as far in the future as Dune's may well have sufficiently solved. Considering how brutal the conditions of the planet are - sand is horrible to any and all mechanical workings - and how there's only really one safe place to land, the fact that the ornithopters can effectively glide or even just keep flying if either of its two propulsion mechanisms fails actually offers a really good safety margin for that environment specifically.
I mean, obviously they were chosen first and foremost because it's a cool visual. But within the context they make some sense.
They used ornithopters in the books (though I don't think the specifics of the design were ever described); I don't remember if Herbert ever specified why he used ornithopters and not helicopters, or planes, or airships, or levitating ships, though; maybe they'd be less likely to attract worms, maybe he just felt they added to the alien / far future feeling of the setting.
Good point, maybe rotary seals weren't up to the challenge of the extremely sandy conditions on dune so they needed to go with flexible bellows for protecting the internal mechanisms instead of gaskets. Or something.
Sealing a shaft is far easier than those flapping mechanisms and sand has been solved for many decades now. It never has to move lateral to the sealing surface, very unlike those flapping things. That is what makes it so easy.
The flap surfaces themselves have to move faster during the stroke than a continuously rotating blade, so they will also suffer from more damage due to abrasion.
I'm talking about something like this, it won't need any gap between the surfaces. But obviously I'm not an ornithopter designer on dune.
Jep, if the range of motion is enough, the sealing surface does not move there too.
I get what you are saying but I think you can also just decide it is magic and in that universe physics works like that. I don’t think it matters whether it is efficient or makes sense, getting lost in that I think is to miss the point of how much incredible power came from selling spice that you could build any kind of military vehicle you wanted to. From the perspective of a normal passenger plane like a Cessna, a fighter jet is an absolutely horrendously wasteful machine dumping massive amounts of energy out for no reason (I.e. when just transporting someone). That is what the ornithopter represents right? That absurdity you mention I think is a purposeful attempt to make you FEEL how much energy is being forced out by this machine and how much an empire must exist to sustain that.
Of course we can do that. Suspension of disbelief, no problem. I still find them odd because they do not seem to follow one physic reality but instead different ones at different times.
I think dragon flies are a lot more agile than helicopters though. So if they've figured out how to fly like one, I imagine it would be the better choice.
They are more agile because they are tiny. Surface to mass ratio. One scales ³, one only ².