Posts tagged flight
I imagined a person who's scapulae is overly developed and extruding outside the shoulder girdle like an elitra or fixed plane wings. They can be moved by shrugging the shoulders or rotated by rai...
This is something I'm thinking about. Now, these would be wings that are not powered by the person themself, since we do not have the strength for it (and I don't want to use legs). They'd be power...
Background A McKendree cylinder is a spinning space habitat in the style of an O'Neill cylinder (below), but orders of magnitude larger. McKendree habitats are hundreds of kilometres in diameter a...
On one hand, heavier gravity would make flying more difficult, owing to greater weight restrictions on the flying creatures' bodies. On the other hand, the greater density of the atmosphere on ...
I've been thinking about this the whole day. At first I thought it was an easy fix, given my dragon's bones have a tensile strength of 3-6.5 GPa and an elastic modulus of 50-140 GPa, depending on t...
One problem, I think writers often overlook, is the problem of flying creatures communicating with each other. I call this the "I can't hear you over the sound of the f@cking headwind!" For my wor...
The creature was originally a human, altered by an external agent that basically remade its body (carbon based). The creature is roughly 2 meters and relatively light. It is humanoid and boneless, ...
A thought occurred to me, and I wondered if it could be made practical... This video talks about the possibility of electrical battery powered planes, and in short, while it may be practical to bu...
Imagine a dragon as tall as average adult horse with a wing span of 12m long measuring from tip to tip. I wonder what evolutionary traits or techniques could allow the dragon to lift itself off the...
On my world there is a creature that has a 'split' in the plumage of its wings and tail. Instead of having a singular D-shaped surface (when viewed from above, the bird facing to the left), it is ...
This question on space stack begins to tackle how a bird could fly inside an O'Neill cylinder, https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/27665/can-birds-fly-inside-an-oneill-cylinder. Here is the ...
I have been making a future colonization scenario where people have vast colonies on Mars and cloud top bases on Venus. These things are unbelievably large. I've already thought of a way to travel ...
Sulfur hexafluoride is pretty awesome. It is a gas six times denser than regular air, and thus you can actually make tinfoil "boats" float on it. It also makes your voice deep when you breathe it i...
Would it make sense to use screw- and fin-like bending surfaces for propulsion (like what eels or the king of herrings have but in the atmosphere) instead of regular propellers or even flapping win...
I am designing a cold-blooded dragon about the size of a house cat with a wingspan of 3 metres from tip to tip. It will climb on top of rocks at noon when there is ample sunlight overhead. I need i...
Throughout the ages, The Summoners were a prominent family of mages (but technology is magic here), who possess the ability to call forth creatures from cards. Of course they can only summon creatu...
I have seen people saying that humans can't fly even with wings because our arm muscles aren't strong enough. Given that one of the uses of powered exoskeletons is to increase strength, would th...
I'm working on a tabletop roleplaying game about witches. I have most of the mechanics of broomsticks worked out, but I'm having trouble deciding on top speeds. Speed limits are not a result of how...
"They fly now?" "They fly now!?" "They fly now" One of the most iconic characteristic of dragons is their ability to fly, on top of that, my intelligent (human level) dragons also use a fu...
I've been designing an an intelligent, bat-inspired avian race, and I've been struck with a question that I need answered. Now, I want to have these bats to fulfill different types of ecological n...
So, the dragons of my setting were inspired by several things, which include D&D dragons, a mockumentary and Asian water monitors. Now, dragons look something similar to this: They glide for...
Taking into account the some limitations of the square-cube law, biology, and aviation, I have tried to make a dragon-like creature and a hominid that participate in a symbiotic relationship. For ...
As you know, mythical animals like the gryphon, dragon, wyvern, roc, etc can carry things as they fly. For a big creature to fly, it either needs to massively increase the spread of their wings or...
This character has a set of dragonfly-like wings. These are not normal for her species, and would normally be something of a birth defect requiring amputation. But through liberal application of Cl...
The robot in question is a large, worm-like mining robot built for digging tunnels. It has electromagnets positioned throughout the segments of its body, for the purpose of pulling metals out of th...
How plausible is a six-limbed flying animal roughly the size of hatzegopteryx to be aerial? In this case, an aerial animal will be defined as a creature that solely inhabits the sky. I will call t...
Ignoring the plausibility of their evolution and sources of food, could a whale-like creature which internally consists largely of hydrogen bladders/gasbags realistically stay aloft? If these cr...
I am working on a habitable planet that orbits around a red dwarf star and it is about 1.5 times bigger and more massive than the Earth. Gravity there is stronger and the atmosphere is thicker. No...
How would a planet need to be changed (gravity, air pressure, air makeup, etc) to allow for the realistic flight and take off from a small hill of a gryphon with a human rider? You can assume the ...
I'm working on a sci fi story where one of the species has batlike wings and comes from a moon around the size of Titan with roughly the same atmospheric pressure as Earth. Initially, I thought the...
I need my jet-propelled squid to be an efficient glider, something similar to an albatross but he's built in the canard configuration like a real flying squid (below). His combined weight is 5 k...
How plausible are naturally-evolved, biological, fixed-wing flying creatures? Could such a creature plausibly evolve in Earth-like conditions? If so, what method would it be most likely to use fo...
One of the Stack Exchange's most popular topics is remaking mythological and fantastical creatures with realistic, believable anatomy. Usually, the answers go that for an angel's anatomy to be bel...
NOTE: I previously asked the same question regarding wheels, because I thought that the answers would still help me and that wheels were more applicable to a wider audience than propellers. However...
Perhaps you've flown in a plane on an especially cloudy day when all you can see are clouds beneath and above you. It's a beautiful sight, strata'd white all around. So what if the plane were flyin...
If there were people with wings, who didn't want to be naked all the time, what clothing could they wear, without it interfering with their flying? Note: I am assuming arm-wings, like birds, but y...
Generally, when someone uses telekinesis to fly, it's either by riding an object that can be levitated, or by applying the power to their body. Would there be any advantages to alternative techniqu...
In a world where the development of internal combustion engines had been seriously delayed (for whatever reason), would it have been possible to power heavier than air aircraft by steam propulsion?...
How could a vertebrate animal evolve for extended flight before evolving land adaptations? Is that even possible at all? By extended flight, I mean breathing air and spending most of their time in...
I'm currently designing a world for a story that I'm writing that is based on a system of magic that deals with barriers, specifically domes. To get to the point one key characteristic is that thes...
So, to quote pterosaur.net: Unlike the wings of birds, the wings of pterosaurs would have tended to change shape under aerodynamic load - something often referred to as 'passive cambering'....
The Scenario: Airships are awesome, but in the real world airship design is greatly constrained by the problem of lift. It seems like this, above all else, is what makes the elegant and compact s...
Sequel to this question. Basically, I've been designing an intelligent avian race based on bats. After reading through some of the answers for the linked question, I've decided that these bats wil...
I want to make a human able to fly, much as Superman or any other superhero can (meaning without wings or any other non-human physical characteristics), but respecting the physical laws otherwise. ...
I'm not a professional at world building or character building, still starting out, but I do want to make an attempt at having my fantasy character be somewhat realistic. He's 11 years old, 4.8 f...
So, there are birdpeople/birdfolk in my setting. They're ~170 cm tall bipedal humanoids with a pair of functioning wings, slightly below the shoulders. They're covered with feathers, except for the...
I wonder whether the birds or other flying animals heavier than air could evolve without trees of other protruding objects?
What would it take to build helicopter blades that can fold in several parts? This is the continuation of a question on Aviation. Unfortunately, there have been no use case for this for existing h...
