The lift curve that made flight look impossible

Lift coefficient against incidence, by Newton's impact theory and by thin-aerofoil theory. One is quadratic in the angle and the other linear, so at small incidence — which is where aircraft fly — they differ by more than an order of magnitude. Newton's version says a wing large enough to carry a man would need an engine nobody could build, and for a century that arithmetic was taken as settling the question.

4 essays call newtonian-lift. The drawing above is what it returns with no arguments at all; every call below passes it something, because a placement that passes nothing draws whichever member of the family the generator happens to default to rather than the one its essay argues about.

It is also the blast radius. Changing newtonian-lift changes every figure listed here at once, and on this site it may change what they assert as well as what they show — which is what has to be rebuilt and looked at before the change is believed.