Insectoid Winged Flight Versus Zero G

[Spacescifi]

Studies I have read about have shown that houseflies give up in zero g and start crawling around.

Strangely bees get their bearings eventually and still fly around.

The scifi scenario: Assuming personal gravity inhibting personal devices was a thing on Earth and mechanical insectoid wings were attached to them, how well could a person fly wearing it?

 

For example, suppose a person wore a gravity inhibiting insectoid wing-pack.

The wings are based on bees and as long as his arms.

 

Would he fly fast or slow?

My guess is slow initially because insectoid wings are too soft to push air hard.

I think to reach faster speeds faster the wings would need to be harder perhaps?

Or maybe bird wings would be better I dunno.... your thoughts?

Edited April 22, 2022 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

B-52, the insectoid bomber with bending wings and chitin skin.

Spoiler

 

[KSK]

Depends how that person is flying. If they’re relying purely on wing flapping for propulsion then probably very slowly.

On the other hand it might be possible to let gravity do the work, depending how the antigrav pack works. If it’s capable of letting a person rise against gravity and can also be adjusted to provide various amounts of lift then it might be possible to go vertically upwards under antigravity power, turn the pack off (or ‘throttle’ it way back) and dive to gain speed, set the pack to neutral to avoid lithobraking and glide as far as you can until air resistance slows you down.

Repeat as necessary.

[cubinator]

9 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Studies I have read about have shown that houseflies give up in zero g and start crawling around.

Strangely bees get their bearings eventually and still fly around.

I have an idea as to why this might be. 

Bees can use all four wings for flight, while flies are of the order Diptera, whose hindwings are only small nubs on the ends of stalks. Flies use only their forewings to fly, while the hindwings are used for stabilization by spinning. If a fly were to try flying in absence of gravity, they might just start spinning around.

9 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

My guess is slow initially because insectoid wings are too soft to push air hard.

Insect wings are pretty sturdy, have you ever tried to eat one? They're like a tough, dry leaf, like a bay leaf.

Edited April 22, 2022 by cubinator

[darthgently]

54 minutes ago, cubinator said:

I have an idea as to why this might be. 

Bees can use all four wings for flight, while flies are of the order Diptera, whose hindwings are only small nubs on the ends of stalks. Flies use only their forewings to fly, while the hindwings are used for stabilization by spinning. If a fly were to try flying in absence of gravity, they might just start spinning around.

Insect wings are pretty sturdy, have you ever tried to eat one?

I'm going to guess that even flies, given enough time, would eventually get around in zero G just fine.  Natural neural nets are pretty amazing.  They would simply keep trying and learning until they succeeded finding food and water most likely.

Ok, I read back a few messages.  Maybe they don't keep trying, but that surprises me.  They are good at crawling though and maybe the inability to fly triggers them into a "high wind mode" where they just crawl around and stop trying to fly

Edited April 22, 2022 by darthgently

[Rakaydos]

can horseflies hover? Bees at least can conceve of motion in a single direction without regard to gravitational arcing. they just need to redefine "foward"

[cubinator]

1 hour ago, darthgently said:

I'm going to guess that even flies, given enough time, would eventually get around in zero G just fine.  Natural neural nets are pretty amazing.  They would simply keep trying and learning until they succeeded finding food and water most likely.

Ok, I read back a few messages.  Maybe they don't keep trying, but that surprises me.  They are good at crawling though and maybe the inability to fly triggers them into a "high wind mode" where they just crawl around and stop trying to fly

Insect nervous systems are very specialized, they have a lot of circuitry that's more hard-wired than ours. Many flies, for instance, have neurons that are fused together for faster obstacle avoidance in flight where other animals would usually have a gap between the cells. The circuitry to control the flight muscles is located in the thoracic ganglia, dense nerve clusters in the same part of the body as the wings. Commands to activate or deactivate them come from the brain (where large lobes are also responsible for image processing), but the action itself is extremely structured. 

Edited April 22, 2022 by cubinator

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, cubinator said:

Bees can use all four wings for flight, while flies are of the order Diptera, whose hindwings are only small nubs on the ends of stalks. Flies use only their forewings to fly, while the hindwings are used for stabilization by spinning. If a fly were to try flying in absence of gravity, they might just start spinning around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halteres

https://moviecultists.com/do-bees-have-halteres

 

[darthgently]

25 minutes ago, cubinator said:

Insect nervous systems are very specialized, they have a lot of circuitry that's more hard-wired than ours. Many flies, for instance, have neurons that are fused together for faster obstacle avoidance in flight where other animals would usually have a gap between the cells. The circuitry to control the flight muscles is located in the thoracic ganglia, dense nerve clusters in the same part of the body as the wings. Commands to activate or deactivate them come from the brain (where large lobes are also responsible for image processing), but the action itself is extremely structured. 

So you are saying that insect flight circuitry is highly canalized right from birth?  Very interesting

[cubinator]

6 minutes ago, darthgently said:

So you are saying that insect flight circuitry is highly canalized right from birth?  Very interesting

When you sometimes only have a few days to live your adult life, there's not a lot of time to fool around with having to learn how to do things.

[Nuke]

for zooming around inside pressurized spaces in zero g, i think a ducted fan pack would probibly suffice. pretty much a drone you wear on your back. would do the job but without being to high performance to be unsafe. i cant imagine a wing pack being better. 

[sevenperforce]

On 4/22/2022 at 10:53 AM, darthgently said:

I'm going to guess that even flies, given enough time, would eventually get around in zero G just fine.  Natural neural nets are pretty amazing.  They would simply keep trying and learning until they succeeded finding food and water most likely.

Ok, I read back a few messages.  Maybe they don't keep trying, but that surprises me.  They are good at crawling though and maybe the inability to fly triggers them into a "high wind mode" where they just crawl around and stop trying to fly

The moths and flies that went to space as adults kept trying to fly and kept failing. The moths and flies which were “born” in space, on the other hand, rapidly gave up on powered flight and learned to glide by simply shoving off surfaces and floating across to a destination.

On 4/22/2022 at 10:01 AM, cubinator said:

Bees can use all four wings for flight, while flies are of the order Diptera, whose hindwings are only small nubs on the ends of stalks. Flies use only their forewings to fly, while the hindwings are used for stabilization by spinning. If a fly were to try flying in absence of gravity, they might just start spinning around.

The first group of live bees which went to space on Columbia in STS-3 were ill-fated as they received insufficient nutrition and never learned to navigate in microgravity. However, subsequent missions which sent an entire hive into space showed much better results. In-colony, the bees rapidly learned how to fly straight paths in microgravity and worked together to define a “front” and “back” of the hive and hung out at the front and beat their wings together to create a consistent airflow path. They were hopelessly lost when it came to keeping their combs consistent, though.

Not as bad as spiders, though. The spiders that went up on Skylab proved utterly incapable of weaving consistent webs. I suspect that a spider’s intuitive orb-weaving instinct is highly algorithmic and thus extremely gravity-dependent. 

[darthgently]

4 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

The moths and flies that went to space as adults kept trying to fly and kept failing. The moths and flies which were “born” in space, on the other hand, rapidly gave up on powered flight and learned to glide by simply shoving off surfaces and floating across to a destination.

So something in their programming steered them to minimizing effort, but only if born there and no canalization had yet occurred or similar.  Really interesting

[sevenperforce]

On 4/23/2022 at 8:58 AM, Nuke said:

for zooming around inside pressurized spaces in zero g, i think a ducted fan pack would probibly suffice. pretty much a drone you wear on your back. would do the job but without being to high performance to be unsafe. i cant imagine a wing pack being better. 

Yeah, insectoid (and avian) wings are completely focused around resistance to gravity. In microgravity, there’s no “down” and speed is not necessary for flight.

In a future where it became necessary to traverse significant open corridors in microgravity, the most intuitive solution would probably be calf-mounted ducted fans, actuated by ankle articulation. That way your source of force is located near your feet, which is precisely what we happen to be accustomed to. 

[magnemoe]

On 4/22/2022 at 6:40 PM, cubinator said:

When you sometimes only have a few days to live your adult life, there's not a lot of time to fool around with having to learn how to do things.

Agree, its not much learning going on here, and for an fly having fast reflexes is much more important than being a bit smarter like social insects are as they interact with each others. 

[magnemoe]

3 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Yeah, insectoid (and avian) wings are completely focused around resistance to gravity. In microgravity, there’s no “down” and speed is not necessary for flight.

In a future where it became necessary to traverse significant open corridors in microgravity, the most intuitive solution would probably be calf-mounted ducted fans, actuated by ankle articulation. That way your source of force is located near your feet, which is precisely what we happen to be accustomed to. 

Agree with the ankle mounted ducted fans No need for much control except trust level inclusive reverse trust, you could fold them up then not in use. 
An purely muscle powered option would be an oversize monofin, that is an single fin powered by both legs, two fins would not work as they would hit each others as it would be multiple square meters. 

The Integral Trees by Larry Niven plays a bit with this,  take an super Venus and put in orbit close to an neutron star, atmosphere will leak out but would be bound by the gravity gradient of the neutron star so you get around one bar of pressure in the center of its orbit. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Integral_Trees
Yes its kind of semi plausible like doughnut planets  who is stable but is very very unlikely to form naturally. 

[kerbiloid]

They should first try to teach them fly underwater, in the artificial zero-g.

Edited April 25, 2022 by kerbiloid

[sevenperforce]

56 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

They should first try to teach them fly underwater, in the artificial zero-g.

We just have to first replace their book-lungs with hook-lungs for underwater utility. 

[kerbiloid]

34 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

We just have to first replace their book-lungs with hook-lungs for underwater utility. 

Or find chemical ways to make them spend less oxygen while diving.

Or take them to mountains for hypoxia adaptation.

Edited April 25, 2022 by kerbiloid

[Nuke]

22 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Yeah, insectoid (and avian) wings are completely focused around resistance to gravity. In microgravity, there’s no “down” and speed is not necessary for flight.

In a future where it became necessary to traverse significant open corridors in microgravity, the most intuitive solution would probably be calf-mounted ducted fans, actuated by ankle articulation. That way your source of force is located near your feet, which is precisely what we happen to be accustomed to. 

that could work, but i question the safety and comfort of a head first configuration. how long can you look directly up at the ceiling without neck strain?  you are going to need to do something like that to see where you are headed and if you hit something you are hitting it head first. it would certainly reduce your drag in situations where you have a lot of distance to cover or if its using some kind of guidance. an adaptive system capable of either might be a good idea. articulated mountings or multiple fans for full 6dof flight with some kind of computer vision system to avoid collisions and aid in guidance. 

[sevenperforce]

9 hours ago, Nuke said:

that could work, but i question the safety and comfort of a head first configuration. how long can you look directly up at the ceiling without neck strain?  you are going to need to do something like that to see where you are headed and if you hit something you are hitting it head first.

That’s a good point.

With calf-mounted propulsion, you need to flip around in order to land. Of course that’s not terribly hard to do; the hip+knee joint combo would make a fantastic (and, I suspect, very intuitive) gimbal. I imagine that rather than flying around looking straight up, you’d typically blast off in your desired direction, then flick your legs forward to rotate until you were facing largely in the direction of travel. Once you approached your destination, you’d flip further around and decelerate in order to touch down gently. Humans have fairly excellent binocular vision, so it would be pretty easy to get used to how fast you were moving relative to your destination and slow down as needed, accordingly.

I could see the usefulness of wrist-mounted thrusters to supplement, but I imagine most people wouldn’t need them for long. And they wouldn’t have to be ducted fans; they could be simple compressed air lines providing only a slight nudge of an impulse here and there.

Most microgravity habs would never be large enough to need this. However, it could be useful in a more-than-micro-gravity hab. If you have a large hab, it would be convenient to have a defined “up” and “down” and so you could have low rotation rates to produce a very slight artificial gravity gradient. Keeps things from floating all over the place, after all. In that kind of environment, the ability to hover and zip around would be really useful. 

[Nuke]

3 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

That’s a good point.

With calf-mounted propulsion, you need to flip around in order to land. Of course that’s not terribly hard to do; the hip+knee joint combo would make a fantastic (and, I suspect, very intuitive) gimbal. I imagine that rather than flying around looking straight up, you’d typically blast off in your desired direction, then flick your legs forward to rotate until you were facing largely in the direction of travel. Once you approached your destination, you’d flip further around and decelerate in order to touch down gently. Humans have fairly excellent binocular vision, so it would be pretty easy to get used to how fast you were moving relative to your destination and slow down as needed, accordingly.

I could see the usefulness of wrist-mounted thrusters to supplement, but I imagine most people wouldn’t need them for long. And they wouldn’t have to be ducted fans; they could be simple compressed air lines providing only a slight nudge of an impulse here and there.

Most microgravity habs would never be large enough to need this. However, it could be useful in a more-than-micro-gravity hab. If you have a large hab, it would be convenient to have a defined “up” and “down” and so you could have low rotation rates to produce a very slight artificial gravity gradient. Keeps things from floating all over the place, after all. In that kind of environment, the ability to hover and zip around would be really useful. 

would also work on surface bases on bodies with noticeable but weak gravity. where floating your way to your destination is complicated by deflecting towards the ground, the fans would cancel that out. another use case might be in zero gravity sports. 

Edited April 26, 2022 by Nuke