Vectored thrust vehicles of CP2020

[FrackingBiscuit]

Originally Posted by hal

The only way to counter going “turtle” while in mid-air, is if it has vectored thrust ducts on all four of its sides.

Does this make sense?

I don't know what exactly you mean by "all four of its sides" - do you mean having duct on its top, bottom, and left and right sides?

That would be one way to survive flipping over, but it doesn't necessarily give it a way to right itself - depending on just how much its thrust can be vectored (as in pointed in a given direction), it might only manage to stay airborne while flipped over.

If I'm looking at the right vehicle on Ye Olde Google, the AV-4 looks like it's basically a van with the wheels replaced by downward-pointing lift engines. I don't know if actual forward thrust is provided by more fans in the back or if these lift engines have some way to vector their thrust a bit to provide forward propulsion - they don't actually look like they can move much. Some images look like they have vents that might be able to vector thrust upwards to a degree, so if it rolled over they might provide enough thrust to stay airborne or at least slow its descent to make a crash-landing possible, depending on the altitude.

That said, as a van with fans instead of wheels, it isn't really shaped like an air vehicle and looks like it's not supposed to get more than a few feet off the ground. In that case rolling over and losing lift is probably enough to cause an immediate crash no matter what kind of vectoring it has - it'd only take a split second to drop two feet and hit the ground. Not enough time to regain control. If it were an actual air vehicle, I would expect something like outboard pods housing the ducted fans that can actually rotate to provide thrust (like a V-22-style tilt-rotor, just with ducted fans instead of helicopter blades). If they could rotate enough such a VTOL aircraft could roll itself over pretty easily without needing to have a bunch of individual ducts pointing in every direction.