Generator

The wake, and the velocity it gives itself

The wake, and the velocity it gives itself
The wake, and the velocity it gives itself. The cross-section of the wake far behind a wing with turned-up tips, with the velocity the wake induces on itself drawn as arrows normal to the trace. Induced drag is the integral of the circulation against that velocity and nothing else — this picture contains the entire quantity. It also contains no information whatever about where the surfaces were: two wings a chord apart and two wings ten chords apart produce the same picture and therefore the same drag, which is Munk's stagger theorem stated as a fact about what the arithmetic can see.

The cross-section of the wake far behind a wing with turned-up tips, with the velocity the wake induces on itself drawn as arrows normal to the trace. Induced drag is the integral of the circulation against that velocity and nothing else — this picture contains the entire quantity. It also contains no information whatever about where the surfaces were: two wings a chord apart and two wings ten chords apart produce the same picture and therefore the same drag, which is Munk's stagger theorem stated as a fact about what the arithmetic can see.

4 essays call wake-plane. 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 wake-plane 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.

Where it is called

What each of these essays asks for instead of the defaults is on the regime index, which reads the parameters back out of the finished figures rather than out of the placements.

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