fluidity wrote: ↑Mon May 10, 2021 7:24 pm
I don't agree but that comes down not to the data, but to different ways we look at things. If you were to look up your own Myers Briggs type and compare it with mine of ENTP it would make perfect sense, we have skills and talents in quite different areas.
Rudders on aircraft are only designed for pointing the aircraft somewhere else, apart from that they are pretty much a waste of time except for compensating for the natural adverse yaw of a poor wing design. In air you can skip the rudder and fly with combo elevator/ailerons. Elevons we call them and I've slope soared gliders with them. On any delta shape they make a lot of sense.
Rudders are there to tackle adverse yaw of simple wings like the Wright brothers had and needed a fix for.
Since then, we've assumed we needed them so rudders are also used on landings to reduce side loads on wheels to (partially)compensate for cross winds.
So you can see I also have been guilty of judging Prandtl and other DELTA wings by a "need" to use a rudder to reduce cross wind landing side loads on wheels.
However it's actually a fallacy, "it's just the way things have always been done around here"
I think the advantages of a more efficient wing justify a modern reassessment of the landing carriage which is the real problem, not yaw of the aircraft.
And there's actually a solution!
I'll call it "Constrained castors for big stuff"
Let the wheels swivel for minimum rubber loss on landing and then deal with straightening the aircraft through steering as it slows down. Crabs walk sideways!
In current times we are a bit past the Wright brothers, we have computers, hydraulics, pnumatics, stepper motors, servo motors etc. If the Wright brothers had started with Prandtl wings this problem would have been solved too, it's just easier now.
Often what we "know" only holds us back. I see the Prandtl wiki is still out of date with it's subject, a new generation is coming through with the same half-story even now
The Prandtl based teachings and their missing components are going to go down in the history books, much like Luca Turin's brilliant overturning of the establishment to discover how scent really works and to use his discovery as a much more stable foundation for scent creation than previous beliefs.