I mean like forwards/backwards. If you turn a wing around with a control surface it'll still work, just not very well. But what about the airfoil itself? Does that change functionally?
In case it's not clear, I don't know much about how the game's airfoils work.
@BaconEggs FT, of course.
Might as well ask me to speak to the Old Ones.
@WNP78 Jundrillion is now on my vocab list ToT
@Graingy observe it, funky tree output
@BaconEggs how would I check that?
Accurate to IRL ? Probably not quite. In game they do appear to work backwards without any xml modifications. Just invert control surface and make it larger and the craft will fly. I've built a number of ideas using all of the wing types. I've made my own turbines, Heli blades, and many other types of wild experiments. I would upload some if I didn't have a daily limit. Lol.
I've even tried to make an inverted plane where the body wrapped around the outside with all the wings incased within the hollow fuselage body, however as the game data states, the hole through the fuselage did not work as an empty space to allow any thing to pass through so it would not lift. I'm going to retry that with separate fuse pieces in the future. However, theoretically a IRL standard wing should still work backwards but the lift properties would be entirely different than a simple exact opposite. This means that they may need to be modified somewhat to work as intended and all specs recalculated for +lift. Another thought is that it may have to be inverted vertically as well as horizontally. Good thought though.
the lift / drag curve is slightly different, i like to use backwards symmetric wings to give flaps drag as it produces more than if it were facing forward. also check out what nacaprop wings do with lift when theyre backwards its pretty funny
It doesn't appear that they do actually.
@WNP78 The takeaway: Aerospace engineers are cowards.
We must make that four jundrillion.
Put a wing backwards, and make its liftScale = -1, it'll work based on my observation. Cuz I've been experimenting on wings for quite some time
I think they do behave a bit differently. Whether it's accurate or not I have no idea - the issue with cases like this is there is a lot of data on airfoils in the "normal" angle of attack region but very little existing performance data and methods on predicting the behaviour in these unusal cases. The typical aerodynamicist would I suppose respond to the question "what happens if I put the wing on backwards" would be something like "don't". Unless SP2 sells three jundrillion copies and we can fund the construction of a high-reynolds wind tunnel for development use then we just have to make up something plausible.
idk, I will try it if I get the chance