What is "relative wing area"

[numerobis]

There's a stat, "relative wing area" which appears on all the wing-shaped boards and control surfaces. What does it mean?

Mostly it's 10x the mass, but for some (the swept wing and most control surfaces) it's 5x the mass. The basic fin has it a bit more than 10x the mass.

[Crzyrndm]

It's the equivalent of the lift rating from the old aero (wing mass depends on wing area btw, not the other way around. See porkjets post here)

Edited January 25, 2016 by Crzyrndm

[NathanKell]

It's...the relative wing area. A wing with a relative wing area of 10 has double the wing area of a wing with a relative wing area of 5.

It's saying "I'm wing area, but not in any units you know, so you can really just use me for relative calculations."

[numerobis]

Ah, OK, so it's the area in a unit other than square meters. I got confused by the "relative" bit, made me think it was a factor to be multiplied by some intrinsic parameter (like drag used to be multiplied by mass, but lift wasn't).

[NathanKell]

The unit is somewhere around 4.28m^2, but not quite. It's a bit squirrely. It was kept for backwards compatibility with the old lift rating, rather than going to m^2 directly.

[numerobis]

Cool.

Thanks to CrzyRndm's link I'm starting to get the hang of this. In olden days, control surfaces were far more mass-efficient lift surfaces than wings, but that's clearly flipped. Good to know!

I'm confused why the swept wing is half as much area as you'd expect from the mass though (unlike the swept wing A).

Edited January 25, 2016 by numerobis