(Vaguely related to rocketry and in any case, a really interesting watch)
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYHCP3-mpxk
General / Off-Topic Pendulum fallacy
- Thread starter Chris Simon
- Start date
The saddest thing about this is that even people who should surely have known better have fallen for the same faulty logic:
This is rocket pioneer Robert Goddard, with one of his early designs. Note the rocket engine at the top, and the fuel tank below, protected with an asbestos cone. Did nothing for stability, and made the whole thing more complicated.
This is rocket pioneer Robert Goddard, with one of his early designs. Note the rocket engine at the top, and the fuel tank below, protected with an asbestos cone. Did nothing for stability, and made the whole thing more complicated.
And also many discoveries are the result of chance.Yup. I guess some things can only be discovered by trial and error.
I'd be quite astounded if mathematical proofs of the forces here didn't predate almost any form of rocket or self-propelled flying contraption.
Trial and error is there for people like me, who can't be bothered to learn enough math to get it right the first time.
Well, this case isn't as obvious even for somebody with major in physics. The fact that the weight below or above CoM doesn't matter as long as your thrust vector goes through it is really unintuitive.
Of course even Newton and contemporaries "knew" (in a sense that this kind of calculations existed at that time and before), but honestly, I wouldn't hold it against the first rocket and helicopter engineers to not realize this. After all, nobody before them has ever tried to hang a thing on a rocket engine or a rotor.
(Btw. the cyclic of a chopper rotor is another astounding and highly unintuitive invention.)
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