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.
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.
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.
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.