>the house atraides mechanics when they're sent ornithopters that are 80% moving parts, on an entire planet of sand

I'm a helicopter mechanic and I gotta say, cool as those things are, the stresses on those wings/blades? Holy cow! CH-47s get cracks all over their fuselage and mounts from vibrations, but that thing??? It's cool and it's probably possible, but not with anything we have today. Not inorganic anyway.

In the Dune books the ornithopters are described more like what you showed with early planes modelling birds. They had flapping wings like in the movie but were also more like birds. I do really love Denis’ take on them though, the dragonfly style is so unique

Series goes on 20.000 years into the possible future where humanity is essentially drugging their pilots with magic sauce to traverse through a space-time anomaly for ever single interstellar travel. Im pretty sure there is some form of unobtainium that would withstand such high stress.

To be fair, in dune they also have jet thrusters

Anything that moves creates a point of failure.

Dragonflies are very capable flyers, but that flying ability comes at enormous energy cost. Dragonfly has the largest wing muscle of any flying insect by % of body weight, and it must eat 20% of its body weight daily to fuel its flying activity. Nothing's free

I dont know if there is even a material that can withstand that much vibration for that long

Kinda wild to just be scrolling through shorts and have the professor who's class I took last year explain the movie I am watching.

Helicopter blades spin on a bering and don't accelerate incredibly fast. Yes they move fast, but they don't speed up or wind down on a dime. What these dragon fly wings are doing it whizzing upwards and then instantly whizzing downwards and back again. No material we've ever invented would be strong enough at that scale

Small animal can fly with moving wings because of their small size and mass. If it is scaled into a hundred meter size, square cube law is going to ruin everything. The strength needed to withstand the acceleration is enomerous and the vibration is really wild

The problem with the dragonfly helicopter is that it would never work. What allows dragonflies and other insects to fly is the viscous force (a fluids resistance to flow). It is a frictional force that is quite dominant compared to other frictional forces for small objects but quickly looses that the larger an object gets. For larger objects, the dominant frictional force is drag, and that is the force we consider when making planes and other flying vehicles.

i guess theres a reason why dragonflies are only that size

fun fact: The main propulsion for the Dune ornithopters aren't actually the wings, they're jets. The wings are just there for the ornithopter's manuverability.

I'm pretty sure that in the Dune universe, there being casual anti-grav

I wonder if the design is intended to avoid the inevitable problem with trying to seal a helicopter rotor from the harsh dust and grit. The ornithopter wings have the benefit of not needing to rotate fully so you can actually fully seal the joint, which you can't do with something that rotates fully.

Insects also more or less ignore gravity between fluid dynamics and air resistance, they basically just sit on top of the air and their generally paddle-shaped wings make their motion less "flying" and more "maneuvering a kayak in three dimensions".

I was in aviamodel section in my 14, ornitopter was considered the most complex and hard to make, the real test for craftsmanship, and it's not the full size like in Dune, it's just a model

The most important factor is scale and distance between wings as dragonflies gain the same advantage as a blade less fan from air squeezed between each wing on each side.

Dragonflys are also the most efficiant killers with a 98% success rate