two

actually the number two IRL

Thanks for playing, everyone. I'll see you around.


SomeEgrets
@SomeEgrets

i made a silly one-off comment about carrying around yinglets but i think it's actually kind of a fun birdsona thing so im gonna write it up

so what exactly is my maximum takeoff mass anyway? if i wanna carry a lil buddy around, can i actually do that?

and like, from the outset, humanoid scale avians don't reeeeeeeally make sense. the square-cube law works against you pretty hard (cube in this case, being body volume and therefore mass, and the square being your lift-generating wing surface area)

but numbers are just guidelines and when they get in the way of having fun, we can just throw them out

but im a catbird which is still a medium-ish sized songbird and not a big, powerful, efficient flyer like ospreys1 and eagles. actual catbirds carry around like, twigs and grasses and maybe some bugs and bits of fruit. and i think it's sort of fun to like, sort of approximately resemble the original creature im based on!

so completely out of the air with no math whatsoever im just going to say, lift capacity of around 12kg comfortably, to 16kg max with a lot of effort and good takeoff conditions (headwind, long "runway," high perch). maybe very slightly higher under duress, but that would be very taxing and my range before i just fell out of the sky from exhaustion would be very short

i figure yeah, for a roughly humanoid sized creature, that would be a very easy load to carry on foot - the pack i carry to work every day with all my stuff in it is about half that and i go about 8km/day without slowing down or really feeling any extra burden from it, so it feels right as a ballpark number

anyway, the takeaway is i could probably carry a small yinglet or a mediumish one with some extra effort


  1. ospreys are actually exceptional at this - i think their lift capacity is something like half of their entire body mass? and they're divers who aren't particularly waterproof so they need the wing strength to drag a big, reluctant fish out of the water while also lifting all that excess absorbed water weight


SomeEgrets
@SomeEgrets

aside: imagining trying to explain to my passenger, "okay you're at about my takeoff limit so what we're gonna do here is jump off this 100m ledge to gain enough airspeed to fly"

"you might want to hold on?"


contextual
@contextual

If we're being honest here, an excited yinglet would probably help you run at full speed and start flying so you could get lift and take them along.
Like if you had them in a harness. Especially if you gave them fake wings to strap onto their arms and help.


SomeEgrets
@SomeEgrets

and here, we have an example of zha extremely unstable tandem biplane...


two
@two

According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee yinglet-avian biplane should be able to fly. Their wings are just too small to get the combined weight of the two of them off the ground. They, of course, fly anyway, because it is extremely fun.


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in reply to @SomeEgrets's post:

oh, the thing that isn't common knowledge is that it's not a weight saving thing, bird bone material is much denser than mammal bones to make up the difference in strength, and work out to roughly the same bulk density overall as mammals

the hollow spaces are pneumatized though, and make up part of the respiratory system, i believe, to aid in oxygen storage and intake during flight?