Grid points against Reynolds number, and where a wing sits

The number of grid points needed to resolve every scale of a turbulent flow, which is Re^(9/4) — the cube of the ratio between the largest scale and the Kolmogorov scale. The line is the arithmetic and the marks are flows a reader can picture. An airliner's wing needs about 10¹⁷ points, and the largest calculations ever run are around 10¹².

2 essays call resolution-cost. 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 resolution-cost 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.