More specifically, I was watching a video of an RC helicopter doing amazing stunts and thought to myself imagine being in a full sized helicopter doing that. I’d be dead! But then began pondering, would I experience the same stress on my body if I were smaller?
Perhaps an even easier way to distill this question down is, whatever amount of gforce we perish at, would that number be different if we were a tenth of our size? And what would be the main contributing factor? Our weight crushing ourselves? Blood not being able to flow? Fluids being pressed through our cells?
In: 0
Generally size effects follow the square cube principle.
Mass and therefore things like weight, inertia etc are the cube of the linear dimension and areas (therefore things like strength, muscle strength, bone strength) is roughly the square of the linear dimension.
So if something were made 1/2 size, the weight/mass/inertia goes down by a factor of 8, while strength goes down by a factor of 4. This is why smaller animals can carry more weight relative to their body weight etc. And also why small RC craft can do things a full size craft couldn’t do – they are much “stronger” per unit of mass.
[removed]
G forces multiply your weight. So an object experiencing 2Gs will be feeling double it’s normal weight. For my best attempt at an explanation for a 5yo… Let’s compare a lego figure in an RC helicopter to an adult human in a real helicopter each feeling about 5Gs
A lego figure weighs about 3 grams, so at 5Gs its going to be feeling 15 grams of weight, and it can easily handle that 12 gram excess.
For easy math, assume the adult weighs 200lbs. At 5Gs, they will feel 1000lbs and just absorbing 800lbs of extra weight sounds ridiculous.
Some good points already, but perhaps most importantly for the initial question, when you are “scaling” the helicopter, you are also scaling speed and acceleration: The actual g-forces present in the spinning helicopter are not that large. It moves at a high velocity relative to its size, but absolutely speaking, it’s still quite slow.
So, even aside from possible size benefits for withstanding acceleration, helicopter small -> speed small -> gforce small. The fair comparison would be to have the tiny version of you in the large helicopter doing similar spins.
Latest Answers