I Built a Simulated Ornithopter and the Results Surprised Me 

"*Starts designing ornithopter*" "*vision of how to solve design issues comes to you in a dream*" Must have been a coincidence.

Messier: _gets the solution to the thopter wings in a dream_ *Lisan al Gaib!*

While MANNED ornithopter aircraft taking off (har-dee har) is next to never going to happen due to practicality reasons, ornithopter drones are probably very likely to have reason for existing, mostly in the civil and spy senses

As we all know, Ornithopters are just cats purring. Love the fluff!

The "flapping wing" motion that gives the Ornithopter it's name is technically also it's biggest 'Achilles' Heel' while it's technically possible to create a manned ornithopter, we simply do not have the sufficiently advanced technology and strong enough material that can withstand the high frequency flapping motion of the wings and the insurmountable amount of aerodynamic forces that it has to endure every couple milliseconds.

If the physics of Flyout is good enough you can try positioning the blades behind each other in a certain way so that the blades can ride off of each other's vortices to create more lift. Sort of like what bee's wings do.

No offense, but ornithopters in Dune (at least in the books) have a jet engine too for horizontal flight. They do flapping only at low speeds.

I like that Flyout makes it look like the pressure waves coming of the wingtips are so bad, they create shock-wave condensation. Who needs the sound to be generated as audio, when you can literally SEE it ;)

One big advantage for the ornithopter used on Arakis is that, assuming they can use some space-age-tech internal energy storage and transmission system, they can operate without air intake. And do you have any idea how horrendously bad desert air is for jet engines? Not having to get sand in your engine sounds like a huge plus to me.

Fun fact, the "twisting" part of the motion is only necessary at low speeds. Once you get some airflow past the wing, a pure flapping motion generates thrust because the angle of the relative wind tilts the lift vector forwards during the downstroke (and aft during the upstroke, but the lift magnitude is smaller during the upstroke). That may be why your design produced little thrust at low speeds, rather than anything to do with "power bands".

0:11 Glad to see I'm not the only guy who nicknamed this type of orni "mantis" instead of "dragonfly"

>unlike a helicopter this thing can taxi on the ground Helicopters can absolutely taxi on the ground. Hinds and Hips routinely taxi to runways and do rolling takeoffs, for an example.

"Spastic washing machine" is crazy

You missed one detail from the Dune books. The ornothopter has jet engines for forward thrust at high speed and can fold the wings along the body reducing drag and allowing it to fly balistically like a rocket for very high speed dashes. I'd love to see a follow up design with jets added.

Those wings really be going spastic. Every time I look at them, I think my brain has a minor aneurysm

I just finished rewatching the first part of dune, since I’m going to see part two tomorrow, and I see this as the first video in my subscriptions What a coincidence

I’m not sure if I should be more impressed with you or the game itself for the fact that you managed to not only get this working but working this well.

Cheers m8. That thing is so lovely in flight, and the Dune MS paint kills me.

There was an Ornithopter that was gonna be made by the french in the 30s called the Riout 102T Alérion. Blew up during wind tunnel testing and was canceled.

Mechanic that maintains that thing is damned good... has it purring like a kitten.

The ornithopters in Dune actually... Don't have mechanical engines, canonically. Instead, there's a genetically-engineered living creature that filters air particles for food which lives inside the 'engine' housing, and the aircraft uses the muscles of the creature itself to flap the wings, with the controls seemingly prompting electrical impulses to tell it what to do. Upside is technically they don't require fuel. Downside is the creature can get tired, injured, and you need to store ornithopters somewhere with constantly circulating air or the 'engine' will starve to death / suffocate. That lore was also, mind you, written back when they flapped more like a bird, and less like dragon flies, so not all models may operative on such a principal.

The biggest issue with this design in terms of making it IRL is that I don’t think there is a material that can exist that you could make the wings out of. This design only works for things like dragonflies or humming birds because they are small. When you scale things up, the volume scales exponentially, and with more volume comes more mass, and with more mass the laws of momentum and inertia become a lot more important. Little creatures have wings so light that they can flap that fast without the momentum of the wings ripping them apart. On top of that, when you scale up that drastically, you may even need to account for the speed of sound of the wing’s material. You can only propagate a motion through an object at the speed of sound for that object. If you had a steel pole a light year long, and moved one end, it would take 58,783 years for the other end of the pole to move. Obviously that’s an extreme example, but the speed of sound is so fast that at the scale of a creature’s wing, it may as well be instant. Scale it up a few hundred times though, and now you may have to worry about the speed of sound of your wing material. Not to mention that repeated motion may cause resonant frequencies to tear apart the wings, the aerodynamics of turbulence generated are totally different on that scale, and I’m sure there is even more to consider. Long story short, I don’t think it is possible for us to create a material that is strong enough to move like that at that scale. Not even just strong and light enough, but I mean strong enough period. To hell with weight, build it out of the strongest nano carbon tubes or whatever fancy metal alloy you want to build them out of, and I think it’ll break. However if someone happens to do the math and finds that some material would work, please let me know cause that’s be intriguing.

Look up if that wing "collective" has ever been done on an ornithopter before. If not, patent that shit immediately.

I've known for a long time that angled counter rotating joints produces the ornithopter flapping motion, since the Besiege days. But a collective joint to control the throttle without changing the RPM? That's just genius, will definitely try that in all the games I play now

I wonder if one could recreate the Harkonnen Command-ornithopter from the second movie. I really liked the unconventional look of that one. A sort of big ball-shaped superheavy ornithopter, in the role of an armored gunship.

Hmm yes, a 3:00AM EST post Goddammit man now I'm staying up for hours trying to make my own. Edit: I actually passed out half way though. Will use the audio files to counter mild insomnia going forward.

Hello Snickers! You are a Good Kitty.

I LOVE ornithopters, I have built them in almost every aerodynamics capable game I have played. They just make me happy. Also seeing a name I recognised: Decofox - was very surprising because I learnt a lot from his stormworks ornithopter designs. The way you made ornithopters work in Flyout seems very cool. When it comes to real world applications the forces on the wings and frame are not really worth it, but if you ignore that because you are working in a rigid physics simulation without flex, what about the benefits? I think that they may be useful for stealth purposes, I assume that the flapping wings wouldn't be great for stealth but they could be made with a radar absorbent coating which means that you don't have to worry about a big heat signature from a jet thrust exhaust or big jet intakes ruining the radar signature. Of course the vehicle would still probably be jet powered but with smaller intakes and exhaust like a helicopter. Also VTOL/STOL capabilities are cool. As opposed to a helicopter you wouldn't get retreating blade stall at high speeds. As opposed to a fixed wing propeller aircraft you can have completely variable prop angle depending on speed. (this would require programming tho, so not in Flyout) If you harmonise flapping with wingtip vortices you can probably come close to eliminating them altogether, kinda like how fish are so efficient because they swim in sync with vortices in the water coming off their tail. Thrust vectoring. Wings folding back completely good for carriers + vtol. Spool up times should be fast. But You probably can't go supersonic. And it is probably loud, I don't know if it would be louder or quieter than helicopter rotors.

That audio footage playing in Portuguese really caught me off-guard lol

is that a SAND the movie reference???

this is really cool! I love the design, and I might use it for inspiration for my own writing and sci-fi projects! the sound-design work for the montage is really well-done, too! keep up the good work, Messier-Al-Gaib!

wonderful, love the video It also seems that by spending a lot of time tinkering with the design of the mechanism you unintentionally performed a technique whose name i forgot, where right before going to sleep you focus on something really hard so that it appears in your dream or your brain subconsciously performs problem solving regarding that topic. Some people who mastered that technique claim to be able to enter lucid dreams on command to continue studying or working on whatever it is they were struggling with. I wish i could link you an article but I cannot recall the name of this phenomenon. Either way, great build and video, I'd love to see a luxury civillian version too.

I love that these vids keep getting more and funnier subtle edits. It gives it a Game Theory type funny-scientific vibe that I enjoy a lot. Keep up the good work🗿

I love to see how much your video quality has evolved and gotten better, hope to see more in the future👍

micro fractures IRL: that's a nice wing you have there. be a shame if something were to happen to it.

Its not that the concept of the Ornithopter isn't sound- its just that sound is so loud it blows eardrums open- and Dragonflys are scary. Also, we've known this since the science fiction novels of the 50s.

That's actually so wild, 13:26 Back in the days of Simple Planes, we not only did the exact same thing, and built extremely basic Ornithopters, but we even delt with damn near the exact same limitations. We also had no scripts, so we had to make purely mechanical flapping mechanisms from the joints of SP, known as Rotators, and they used the almighty Piston, set to cycle mode. They worked off of magic power as well, meaning you could fly forever with no need for fuel so long as you could get off the ground, and this meant you could use them to cheese all the fuel efficiency and gliding challenges/missions, which was always fun to do. An specific issue we ran into was that the flapping motion barely provided any thrust with how the physics engine worked, but so long as you used huge wings and made sure the thing was basically a glider with next to no drag, you could slowly hobble along the ground, get just enough speed to take off, then you'd retract your wheels, and then that was it, you were flying. We also tried collective like control systems too, but ran into issues with parts not having strong enough connection physics, so they'd stretch apart and brake. Ultimately helicopters didn't work (until they added a dedicated helicopter blade part) you couldn't spin a wing on a rotator and have it make lift, so really even if we got it to cycle properly, which we never really did, the physics were just were not good enough, and as a result it pretty much ended there. Very few working, non modded Ornithopters exist in that game. Anyways it's super cool to see essentially the spiritual successor of SP solve some of these issues, but still leave you guys stuck with most of them. Some day we'll eventually get an aerodynamic/physics simulation sand box good enough for it to work, but I get the feeling I'm gonna have to learn to code, develop a physics engine, and then build an entire game myself before someone actually solves it all in one nice package with multiplayer, and some form of story that actually gives your builds purpose. Right now I'm excited because it seems SP2 is gonna be a thing, releasing some time next year, and there's gonna be multiplayer, which is a huge deal, but idk what the Andrew, the SP dev has in store for the physics, right now it seems to be still on the same game engine as SP, but there's clearly been improvements so all I can really do is hope.

Given the advances in materials over the lat few decades, I'm glad to see the idea being revisited. I know the big problem back in the day is that they wings were just to heave, and took to much energy, to make it efficient.

Congratulations on 50k! 🎉🥳

I'd put that rear fan on a gimble so it do everything from turning the vehicle to providing thrust (Forwards, backwards, ...). Well done & thank you for sharing.

I know nothing about planes which is exactly why this is interesting. It also brings me back to the "simpler and calmer" military videos

It's crazy when you dream of flyout

Amazing work sir! This looks like it can be built in real life!

this is like porn but for responsible people

Alot of things are possible, but many suffer from impracticality. Like mechs, probably the biggest one might ever get (assuming power issues are resolved/disregarded) would probably be akin to titanfall, but smaller being more like super exoskeletons. And even that size comes with a lot of drawbacks and that's considering more civilian uses before even thinking of any kind of frontline operation. Still cool to see these things as feasible, even if impractical. Maintenance on that Ornithopter would get the loon bins full in record time I bet.

Wingtip vortices are the least of your problems. The tips of the wings will break the sound barrier, generating sonic booms felt by the aircraft *and* crew (unlike those generated by ordinary supersonic aircraft), *while the craft is on the ground preparing to lift off* and getting worse in flight. Keeping tip velocity below the speed of sound means more wings flapping slower which means more weight… Supersonic wings require a rather different profile from subsonic wings which makes blade design more complex. As amplitude increases more of the wing will go supersonic though. I can’t see a good way to alter blade profile in flight. My SWAG (scientific wild assed guess) is that roughly the distal third of each wing will be supersonic in flight making the booms much louder. The thing will sound like constant thunder, deafening anyone within hundreds of feet. Sufficient sound insulation to prevent permanently deafening the crew will make the aircraft skin thicker and heavier but if the crew is lucky the felt sound will not be in the “brown note” range. The shocks generated by each wing will interact with those from the other blades on each side of the craft. That will also do bad things to lift generation. It might be possible to tune blade length and flapping amplitude to make the combined shocks assist lift but likely only at one particular value of amplitude. Then there’s heating. Pushing pointy things through air faster than sound is bad enough but doing it to blunt objects is much worse. The wingtips will be glowing dull red even before liftoff. See “blunt body dynamics”. On the plus side electrostatic effects as seen with helicopters flying over Earthly deserts will create pretty vertical bands of light for each wingtip.

Man, Great video. I wish you had more views.

A correct Ornithopter doesn't flap like that. Its not a vertical wobbling motion. You're close using a collective control though. You need a continuously pivoting joint at the equivalent to a birds humerus. The wing sweeps "forward" quickly at a low AoA, generating lift. At the end of the forward sweep the AoA is rapidly increased as it starts its rearward motion, paddling the air down and back to generate forward thrust with some vertical component. Generally you would generally have it sweep "down" and "back" at the same time since you want to correlate the direction of motion to the continuously variable AoA, The rearward speed and throw needs to be scaled with True Air Speed.

19:09 Brazilian portuguese. Interesnting choice. Congratulations for 50k! Keep the excellent work! 🎉

Messier you never cease to amaze me. Great work.

This is epic, very good job!

Cool design. I've been wanting to see this done in Fly Out.

This is awesome, the engineering and style is great. It would make a nice model kit. Maybe higher airspeed mode would have the wings stop and sweep back with the tail fan rotating 90 degrees to provide thrust. Pitch control reverting to the elevator. A flying rc model would be great, what you have done here shows a system of amplitude control is a way to do it. Perhaps independant control of flap angle and blade pitch amplitudes with engine RPM governing frequency.

Super cool video. Thanks for sharing.

i was half expecting super unconvining mouth helicopter noises after your hype. got a good laugh out of the idea. great vid!

Came to this the day after I watched Dune part 2. That's awesome. based on your dreams I'd say you had some spice the night before.

Awesome stuff as always!

Thank you for the great work ! It's cool the game forces you to find mechanical solutions instead of programming. (I mean, cool in the sense "feels more based to me as a lazy audience")

I've been pretty busy lately, but I think I need to make some time to work on a couple projects in flyout! Thanks for the inspiration, your videos are the best!

Dune! Ornithopters being designed and made! Coolest thing I have ever seen.

I also just watched dune and now i know what ill be spending the next few days designing and building

I’m new to the channel but I think this is an absolute masterpiece!

One of your coolest projects so far! Have you considered making a ground-effect vehicle in Flyout?

For the in-universe application in Dune there is something wonderfully plausible about the whole thing, and the ornithopters manage to be both fantastical and extremely grounded. With a setting 21,000 years in the future and a planet where gravity and air density could be a little different, the material science issues with the strength and durability of the wings and joints seem entirely solvable. There's also oodles of time available for the designs to have been refined over the centuries, quite reasonable to assume they'd have coordinated the wing movements well enough to keep vibrations under control. I'm not quite sure what level of fly-by-wire system is allowed before falling foul of the post-Butlerian Jihad rules, but if they can build paracompasses they can make it controllable.

You do a great job giving credit when it's due. Nice job

One of the biggest problems in reality would be vibration, but I wonder if you could shape the tail as a bell tuned to the frequency the blades put out so it'd cancel out the vibrations

Aw poor Snickers, I hope she's comfortable for the remainder of her life.

That cat purr sound is so distinctive!

I knew this had DecoFox written all over it! I'm loving this colab

I would be afraid those blades would just snap. But nice work!

Some disadvantages I see about designs like this is fuel loading , asymmetric thrust, and wing conflict. fuel loading: basically in a helicopter you can just put your tanks under your prop shaft making weight distribution centered, in a plane you can load your wings. in this the only real spot you got is the tail , which is not the most ideal. Loading behind your center of thrust requires a lot more counter balancing /compensation as fuel goes down. Asymetric thrust: similar to an osprey if any of your props/engines/hydraulics/ manipulator arms gets damaged you now have to deal with uneven lift which makes it a bitch to land or take off, especially with how much concentrated down was this would have. wing conflict: it's like in a biplane each wing disrupts the other they are inducing drag on one another based off placement and their movement. What I like about it though is when compared to a helicopter it could likely transition from a hovering poistion to forward movement at a higher rate allowing for better peeling out after firing a load (giggity) . It also can utilize altitude based potential energy more similar to a glider then a traditional helicopter. If I was gonna do anything to the design I would add halteres . It's basically a free flapping wing club shaped wing that provides reference data to the computer allowing it to map by providing effectively gyroscopic information based off comparison between the halteres and main wings. this data can include things to compensate for asymmetric thrust based on yaw/pitch/roll , it also would just use the already existing power-plant and provide more real time/comparable data then a gyroscope.

I’m amazed by the builds of decofox that’s a really a great things you get inspired by him and gives him some visibility ! This guy is really crazy !

incredible chunk of work

Maybe you can convince people to build a real life remote controlled version of it. Btw why not use something more bionic than standard conventional rotating motors --- something more like muscles ---- probably all speculation but the first thing which came to mind when hearing about the broken wings was that the wings could be somekind of foil or elastic material that gets its strength by pressure (probably air pressure) and loses its pressure when the stress is to high ----something like the wings can be repressurized and become hard again --- as for now I see there room for improvements ((btw butterflies pump their wings up after hatching --- so that's probably why I came up with it))

I did make 2 or 3 in brick rigs and it does work tho it depends of the way u aproach it, tho there is a pleaging issue which is simulation frequancy which makes it work best with really wide and super long wings and a kinda slow flapping rate, and its really hard to make fully stable by only using the 4 or 8 flapping wings, tho I did end up with even more controls than a typical hellicopter with my design but yeah, ur rotor design for the wings is genious and I might copy it for my own contraptions and yeah, I wish I had flyout, sadly I dont have money nor enough reasons to get it...

This is so cool, and one of the most believable ornithopters i've seen designed anywhere. Could you explain how you decided on placing the 8 wongs in High low low high configuration, rather than duplicating what dragonflies do, but adding a second set? (so making the wings be high low high low.

Love the condensing vapors procedurally generated by Flyout

Damnnn, I never even thought about making an ornithopter in Flyout… that’s sick.

Oh hell yes... This teaches me 2 things. One, we may actually be able to do a real ornithopter, and two.... I need to get fly out. This looks like an AMAZING game that I can use to make my own aircraft designs and test fly them before making them the real way... Which is just about the coolest thing ever! ❤

This channel just sat the bar too high... thank you very much, sir!

0:21 Best part of the video 😂 it made me spit out my food

It's nice to know she's actually purring as she flies :)

Impressive work man! I’m surprised that Flyout can handle something like this. You think we’ll ever see ornithopters in our lifetime?

*picturing jacques ze whipper mad cracking*

Great video, i was expecting a video about ornithopters. I would love to se you make a ducted fan rotorcaft like the samson sa2 from Avatar

Back in the 60's my parents bought for my brother and I some working model ornithopters made by some French company at an Ohio State fair. There was a crank on the tail to wind up the rubber band and the spinning gears inside made the wings flap and they flew wonderfully - while a bit erratic due to the flapping, they were none the less stable in altitude and direction - even more so than the wind up rubber band powered Balsa wood prop planes of the era. You could change the pitch of both rear stabilizers some to account for wind and whether you wanted a long straight flight or the classic circle flight. It also glided without power reasonably well if the 4 wings were fairly level. Stuff like that prompted the desire to learn as a child.

9:20 in the Dune movies, the 3D artists executed the same design under the hood. You can see, when the thopters are coming in for a hot landing, that the amplitude is much higher than the normal "stable" flight.

Haven't you ever seen a dragonfly taking a escape suddenly ? In a fraction of second, this marvel is away... At the scale, the speed of the ornithopter must be higher than the presented model. No ? But your reflexion and your work in collabiration is very interesting to follow, step by step. Sorry if I've missunderstoud something, as a french, I've some limits to follow all your explanations. Well done, and the sound source is a piece of poetry.

Messier never disappoints. Even his Ornithopter has dual boom tail design.

FYI: helicopters also taxi. Wheeled helos like the black hawk roll and skids like a Iroquois (huey) air taxi. Which is hovering a few feet off the ground while following taxi lanes.

Despite having an early sneak peek, the full video experience is priceless

I'm a big fan of Dune, so this was fun to see pop up in my feed. I'm also a huge fan of Half-life and would LOVE to see the Hunter Chopper from Half-life 2 created in Flyout. I've always wondered what its actual flight characteristics would be.

That cinematic was so cool wtf I wish I could do stuff like this

perfect, just... PERFECT!

If you do a follow up vid, or a video on cyclogyros/cycloidal rotors, I’d love to hear your thoughts comparing the two. To my mind they share a lot of similarities: many long blades protruding horizontally, which provide both propulsion and the main lifting area, ability for higher horizontal speed than traditional helicopters while retaining increased maneuverability and some amount of S/VTOL, and (imo the biggest challenge with both designs) the unusual motion of the blades putting them under complex lateral loads, unlike the simpler centripetal tension of a helicopters blades.

OMG I can't believe that u are made this I just wrote it on a comment I didn't think that you are gonna do it Thanks bro❤

Pilot's hearing vanishing instantly after the engine starts.

Main problem would be wear and tear on the mechanisms. Helicopters have a lot of wear and tear. I estimate this wil be 10 times worse withan ornithopter.

The "flap" motion will impart a forward torque at the mount point that will be very high and thus need resisting. This does not take into account the vibration that will wear the mounts. These forces are squared with length of the wing, times how many "wings". Don't use metal if you can avoid it. less weight less force. I can't help but think that flapping frequency will matter as far as harmonic's go. NO steel wing's probably lots of rubber mount's and shock absorbers like bungee cords.Lots of flexible parts.

Ill be honest: i loved the concept when i saw it the first time in "Laputa"... what an unfortunate name, but their little flying things were very cool