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Yes, I know, it's only a game. And a hyper-unrealistic one at that. With that said, I'm looking at the wings of my brand new Valkyrie and I'm wondering why they're even there. Certainly not to provide lift. Same thing goes for all the Imperial aircraft. The Thunderbolt looks a little more plausable, but don't get me started on the Thunderhawk, or god forbid, the Aquila.

The Tau appear to have a better grasp of aerodynamics. The Eldar have perfected anti-grav technology. The Orks simply will their technology to work the way they want it to. But how do these blocky Imperial aircraft get off the ground? Magic? The Emperor's Will? Suspensors (which I hear are in short supply in the 41st millenium)? Has this been explained in the fluff? Is my grasp of aerodynamics flawed? What are your thoughts?

Massively overcompensating vectored engines?

By overcompensating, of course

The Valkyries are deployed by the Imperial Navy, right? I'm not completely sure, but I think they are able to operate in orbit, if not deep space. Whatever technosorcery they use for that, it would probably be almost enough to keep those things in the air while in low-altitude flight above ground on a planet - maybe the wings are just there for some minor additional aerodynamic advantages. And don't forget, you can store fuel in wings and mount weapons under them!

The ad mech doesn't need such thing as aerodynamics....they have prayers and their faith in the omnissiah.

OK, imperial vehicles still need fuel and also may benefit if the crews read their manuals ( recite the prayers ).
IIRC those transports do not land on a runway. They land on "skyshields" and other landing pads.
The flyers will suffer from lack of aerodynamics tough, so blocky concepts like the thunderbolt are some sort of a victory of
army design over functionality. Maybe it is a drawback of resin models and FW was not able to add stable wings if they
aimed for realistic sizes.


But seriously most designs of the imperium/mechanicum have been proven wrong IRL and draw heavily from the fantasy aspect of 40k.

If Valkyrie plummets from the sky light more incense.

Thats how I got my old car to work. Prayer and incense.

It fits the Imperial VSF/WW1 Grimdark™ design aesthetic.

Actually WW1 aircraft were often graceful designs and can be replicated to very high standards using modern methods.

Witzkatz wrote:The Valkyries are deployed by the Imperial Navy, right? I'm not completely sure, but I think they are able to operate in orbit, if not deep space. Whatever technosorcery they use for that, it would probably be almost enough to keep those things in the air while in low-altitude flight above ground on a planet - maybe the wings are just there for some minor additional aerodynamic advantages. And don't forget, you can store fuel in wings and mount weapons under them!

Nope. Valkyries are exclusively atmospheric, with massive amounts of modifications required to make them able to work from orbit. Valkyries are brought down from orbit in bulk landers, just like any Imperial ground vehicles.

The Aquila Landers are, however, able to work from an orbiting craft.

In the modern world, as computer technology gets faster, aircraft rely less on good ol' fashioned aerodynamics.

The F-117A Stealth Fighter and more recent (and pointless) Eurofighter Typhoon are both massively unstable and cannot be flown without the computer-controlled stability assisting systems in full swing.

It's fairly safe to assume that similar is true of the Valkyrie and so on. If the Machine Spirit is appeased, the monsterous engines will keep you in the air.

Forget that incense, though, and you're squig food...

Miraclefish wrote:In the modern world, as computer technology gets faster, aircraft rely less on good ol' fashioned aerodynamics.

The F-117A Stealth Fighter and more recent (and pointless) Eurofighter Typhoon are both massively unstable and cannot be flown without the computer-controlled stability assisting systems in full swing.

It's fairly safe to assume that similar is true of the Valkyrie and so on. If the Machine Spirit is appeased, the monsterous engines will keep you in the air.

Forget that incense, though, and you're squig food...

Going off this, I think it may be rather like computer science. Back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s we worried about taking certain things into account like memory management and function call overhead. It was a huge worry and colored the programming practices of two generations of programmers.

Today we have so much power we just ignore it and brute force our way through 99% of programs, focusing more on "important" things like user interface, letting computers handle all of the trivial stuff that used to be so important. As Miraclefish mentioned, this is happening in flight technology as well.

I would guess they have just reached the point where advances in computer control, engine power, and various kinds of shield technology have made aerodynamics a rather trivial concern. Like a helecopter or a rocket, they don't fly because of airfoil lift, but through other methods. These methods are apparently powerful enough that there is little benefit in designing for aerodynamics.

Apparently the greater concern is ease of repair and weapon load out, and the designs reflect that. Most imperial vehicles seem to be designed to use some fairly standardized parts and armor.

riplikash wrote:

Miraclefish wrote:In the modern world, as computer technology gets faster, aircraft rely less on good ol' fashioned aerodynamics.

The F-117A Stealth Fighter and more recent (and pointless) Eurofighter Typhoon are both massively unstable and cannot be flown without the computer-controlled stability assisting systems in full swing.

It's fairly safe to assume that similar is true of the Valkyrie and so on. If the Machine Spirit is appeased, the monsterous engines will keep you in the air.

Forget that incense, though, and you're squig food...

Going off this, I think it may be rather like computer science. Back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s we worried about taking certain things into account like memory management and function call overhead. It was a huge worry and colored the programming practices of two generations of programmers.

Today we have so much power we just ignore it and brute force our way through 99% of programs, focusing more on "important" things like user interface, letting computers handle all of the trivial stuff that used to be so important. As Miraclefish mentioned, this is happening in flight technology as well.

I would guess they have just reached the point where advances in computer control, engine power, and various kinds of shield technology have made aerodynamics a rather trivial concern. Like a helecopter or a rocket, they don't fly because of airfoil lift, but through other methods. These methods are apparently powerful enough that there is little benefit in designing for aerodynamics.

Apparently the greater concern is ease of repair and weapon load out, and the designs reflect that. Most imperial vehicles seem to be designed to use some fairly standardized parts and armor.

I'd buy that for a dollar. Very interesting.

Not that it's what the model designers intended, but it makes sense that Imperial technology would satirize modern technology. Considering how many aspects of the Imperium are caricatures of contemporary society (unwieldy faceless bureaucracies, fundamentalist dogma, exploitative colonialism) it follows that Imperial technology would hyperbolize the typically wasteful, impractical, "brute force" technology of today.

Maybe I should have titled this thread "In the grim darkness of the far future, finesse totally went out the window".

Elusive71 wrote:

Maybe I should have titled this thread "In the grim darkness of the far future, finesse totally went out the window".

Yea, that sounds about right.

Though I'd correct you on the impractical part. Brute force techniques are a valid, and sometimes preferable, practical approach for situations where you have more power than you realistically need, or for when the alternative "elegant" approaches do not offer significant advantages. Again comparing to computer science, is a C++ or java program anywhere near as efficient as an assembly code program? Heavens no, not even close. Do we care? Not really. Once technology passes a certain point there are more important things to worry about. Its all about maximizing where you spend your time.

So for imperial ships I'd say, no they aren't very elegant, but they most likely get the job done with minimal effort and training.

Ah, I see your point. Maybe inefficient would have been a better word choice.

Generally speaking, would you say the trade off when using brute force techniques would be efficiency? It seems to me that forcing something to work requires more effort and therefore more energy than a more subtle alternative. Not that the Imperium thinks twice about efficiency when they have limitless bodies and resources to through at a problem.

Elusive71 wrote:Ah, I see your point. Maybe inefficient would have been a better word choice.

Generally speaking, would you say the trade off when using brute force techniques would be efficiency? It seems to me that forcing something to work requires more effort and therefore more energy than a more subtle alternative. Not that the Imperium thinks twice about efficiency when they have limitless bodies and resources to through at a problem.

Yay, algorithm and complexity theory . I'm a computer engineer if you didn't notice. Hope you don't mind this little rant.

Brute force, despite its course sounding name, is actually a technical term for a certain category of solutions in engineering. When we choose a brute force solution over a more subtle or elegant one we are usually trading one type of efficiency for another.

For instance, in computers lets take sorting. Lets say we have to keep a list of 100 items sorted. Brute force is the obvious method. Look at each item, compare it to the one next to it, and if they are out of order, swap them. You can implement that algorithm in about twenty seconds flat. Other sorting algorithms (quick-sort, merge-sort, etc.) may be orders of magnitude more efficient! But they can take days, weeks, and sometimes months to implement and tweak. But if a computer can sort 100 of both in 20ms, what do we care how elegant the solution was? We would rather save hours, days, and weeks of time than get a response improvement so trivially small as to be unnoticeable (usually).

The same thing happens with physical engineering. A brute force approach to load bearing is to use lighter and/or stronger materials. An elegant solution is to use domes and arches. 2,000 years ago domes and arches dominated because stone was the only viable material. Today we have lighter and stronger materials. Even though using lighter and stronger materials like treated wood, steal, and aluminum falls into the category of "brute force" solutions, would you say it is inefficient to use them in place of arches and domes? Obviously not, it is actually more efficient. But the benefit of using arches and domes today is negligible in all but the largest of constructs.

Brute force solutions are actually preferred (and can even be considered elegant!) when the cost of implementation outweighs the benefits provided by alternative solutions.

Presumably then, whatever technologies the imperium uses to achieve flight have made whatever benefits may be gleaned by aerodynamics trivial. While they may lose, say .25% in speed or maneuverability, they gain an aircraft that is easy to reproduce, simple to repair, uses the same parts as their other vehicles, robust, and easy to pilot. Obviously I'm pulling numbers out of thin air, but I think it demonstrates the principle pretty.

More importantly, seeing as how in space mass makes precisely bugger all difference (not Gravity like) how come the bigger the ship, the bigger the engines, and the slower it ges? I get that it would require larger and more numerous power sources for non-propulsion gubbins, but surely a set thrust would shift a space ship of any size to exactly the same velocity, as they are ultimately all of equal mass in a non-gravitic vacuum?

Then again, christ knows how I passed my GCSE physics all those years ago, and other than a rudimentary ability to subconsciously obey the laws of physics, I have even less knowledge of them now.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:More importantly, seeing as how in space mass makes precisely bugger all difference (not Gravity like) how come the bigger the ship, the bigger the engines, and the slower it ges? I get that it would require larger and more numerous power sources for non-propulsion gubbins, but surely a set thrust would shift a space ship of any size to exactly the same velocity, as they are ultimately all of equal mass in a non-gravitic vacuum?

Then again, christ knows how I passed my GCSE physics all those years ago, and other than a rudimentary ability to subconsciously obey the laws of physics, I have even less knowledge of them now.

Um, no, not quite. Mass is independent of of gravity, it is weight that is not. Gravity is simply an extra attractive force to be dealt with. It is still harder to move a more massive object. And it isn't that larger ships are slower, it is that they are less maneuverable.

So no, a set thrust does not shift any size ship at the same velocity. It takes exponentially more thrust to accelerate a larger object at the same rate as a smaller one.

Ah fair enough. But surely given it's increased size, and assuming a set ratio of thrust nozzles is common to all ships of a specific race, they'd all be equally manouverable, as any gain in mass is compensated for by a like increase in manouvering thrusters?

Not so. Kinetic energy = 1/2 mass times velocity squared.

So a small increase in mass actually becomes a huge increase in inertia.

Man, I need to visit the Background boards more often. I learn things!

And vice versa, as an object gets larger it does not take a linear increase in thrust to achieve the same acceleration you had before. It takes an exponential increase in thrust.

Think of it like how ants can lift 10 times their weight, you can lift your own weight, and an elephant can lift half its weight.

You also have problems in stress put on materials. Even if you had the thrusters necessary to achieve that level of thrust (which have to be several orders of magnitude more powerful than those necessary for smaller craft), the amount of stress put on the ship as it tried to turn would be rediculous. You would snap the ship inn half. Think of dried spaghetti. Pretend a small (one inch) piece of spaghetti is a small ship and rotate. You aren't to worried about it breaking.

Now imagine you have another one 100 feet long. Could you move it at all without it breaking? Perhaps with a LOT of help, but even then you would have to be incredibly careful. And to rotate at any decent speed would require the helpers on the end to be sprinting at incredible speeds, while the person at the center of the rotation would be hardly moving at all.

When you start talking ships that are kilometers long you are talking about huge levels of mass and stress. A large ship is by its very nature less menouverable than a smaller one.

Absolutely.

There are Earth-borne examples which perfectly illustrate this point.

A motorcycle with a 100bhp engine accellerates much, much quicker than a train which has a 10,000bhp motor.

I got it.

The ga-zillions of heretical and xeno souls killed in the emprah's name provide the "lift" for spacecraft of the Imperium to move. The stubby wings are vestigal at best. When still need physics to move around, but when the number of souls floating around reaches a point of saturation, vehicles will be floating around without even needing airfoils to help them steer and move.

Praise the emperor.

Miraclefish wrote:In the modern world, as computer technology gets faster, aircraft rely less on good ol' fashioned aerodynamics.

The F-117A Stealth Fighter and more recent (and pointless) Eurofighter Typhoon are both massively unstable and cannot be flown without the computer-controlled stability assisting systems in full swing.

It's fairly safe to assume that similar is true of the Valkyrie and so on. If the Machine Spirit is appeased, the monsterous engines will keep you in the air.

Forget that incense, though, and you're squig food...

That's not bad aerodynamics it is a form of control which assists the human pilot in keeping a plane stable which is inherently unstable.

The wings they aren't made of bricks and girders.

What about those ork fighters,do they just work because ork belief makes it so.

Miraclefish wrote:In the modern world, as computer technology gets faster, aircraft rely less on good ol' fashioned aerodynamics.

The F-117A Stealth Fighter and more recent (and pointless) Eurofighter Typhoon are both massively unstable and cannot be flown without the computer-controlled stability assisting systems in full swing.

It's fairly safe to assume that similar is true of the Valkyrie and so on. If the Machine Spirit is appeased, the monsterous engines will keep you in the air.

Forget that incense, though, and you're squig food...

Actually, they intentionally make planes unstable because with the computer helping you out, this makes your plane quite a bit more maneuvrable, since by nature the plane will be wanting to shift and move, so it will take less force to make it do so and it will do so better.

Imperial Guard= enough firepower will solve anything
Imperial Navy=enough thrust will solve impossible flight physics?

Commisar Wallacej5 wrote:Imperial Guard= enough firepower will solve anything
Imperial Navy=enough thrust will solve impossible flight physics?

Well, yes, but again, it isn't impossible flight physics. Airfoils are just ONE way of getting something into the air. There are numerous other methods. Helecopterrs use pull, bees use some kind of crazy vacuum effect I think, blimps rely on being lighter than air, rockets use thrust, and there are certainly numerous other methods that we haven't even discovered yet.

All we know is that imperial craft do not use airfoils to create a low pressure zones above the plain to create lift. We don't know what method they do use. Thrust? Perhaps. Some sort of exotic effect? Could be. Maybe those massive rotors just suck in air, or perhaps they are rotating some sot of exotic material, or perhaps like an electromagnet rotating them produces some sort of effect. Perhaps the ship has some kind of energy envolope. Perhaps they only act as stabilizers while some other mechanism provides lift.

All we know is they don't use airfoils and aerodynamic designs do not provide any kind of significant benefit in flight. Often Imperial tech LOOKS low tech on the serface to allow for ease of maintenance, but the actual principles involved in their operation are millennial ahead of our current understandings of physics.

Helicopters work by the main rotor forming an effective circular wing. It isn't straight pull like a corkscrew.

A lot of Imperial equipment seems to work by Handwavium.

Kilkrazy wrote:Helicopters work by the main rotor forming an effective circular wing. It isn't straight pull like a corkscrew.

A lot of Imperial equipment seems to work by Handwavium.

ALL future technology beyond the most immediate works by handwavium. If we understood the principles it by modern technology, not future.

I'm not saying your wrong, just that it is a disingenuous argument. Of course when illustrating technology from 38k in the future it doesn't appear to work in a fashion we can properly explain. The best we can do is speculate using principles that hopefully are a little more permanent than technology. Human nature, some foundational physics and engineering principles.

Star Trek tries and their explanations come off as silly even being only 400 years in the future. Warhammer is 40k years in the future. The engineering principles at work are guaranteed to be far beyond our comprehension.

Decomposition of motive is the best we can hope for, and is certainly more informative and entertaining than saying "Rule of COOL" and "it might as well be magic".

Valkyries are able to hover and can take off vertically. They don't need any airspeed at all to remain aloft. According to Codex it uses vectored engines to do this. So basically they have enough thrust to make a brick fly.