Samson help
 

Help me, ToS, you are my only hope...

*coughs*

Or, more seriously; I'm trying to write a story that's been kicking around in my head for over a year, and I keep running into the same problem and I'm hoping you guys could help me.

Very basic premise is: early on in their Pandora tour, Trudy's Samson (not Maya/Samson 16) is attacked by a toruk, and the aircraft ends up crashing in the jungle, leaving Trudy and Wainfleet alive (although I'm planning on her being injured) while Trudy's co-pilot is dead, and possibly so is everyone else on-board (or some could be alive, depending on how it plays out).

I can see the toruk grabbing the 'tail' of the Samson and swinging, like what happened in the final battle (and I figure after how many decades the RDA's been around, the resident toruks are getting good at attacking Samsons and Scorpions without getting shot up), but I have utterly no idea how the craft would react after being swung - how it would spin through the air, how it'd react, etc. I'm going to hazard a guess that a Samson wouldn't react like a helicopter that's lost its rear-rotor (which is to pitch forward and spin on a horizontal plane - if anyone has seen Black Hawk Down, you know what I mean) due to the difference in the craft's build, but I. Yeah. I'm stuck, and have utterly no brain for maths or engineering or physics, and so I was wondering if anyone of you guys could possibly help in working out how a Samson would react after being swung through the air. If it helps, here is the Samson page at the wikia.

:D?

Well... if the thing were turned so that the fan blades were largely perpendicular to the ground, then it would lose its lift, at least momentarily. One might reasonably assume that a Samson would have some automatic feedback system on board that attempts to correct situations like this by reversing or cutting power to one of the fans, etc. However all that would take some time. Perhaps the answer here is not so much to explain how the Samson spins out of control (unless the toruk rips one of the fans completely off!), but rather to place it near certain other obstacles so that it simply has no time to right itself before colliding with trees, the ground, or something else.

*nodnods* I was planning for the Samson to hit a tree or two on the way down, too.

Just curious - how would the Samson fall through the air if what you suggested happened? Just...straight down, all wonky, with a twist...?

If it pitched too far forwards, I would guess it would be likely to spiral downwards as the rotors pitch in one direction, probably from an instinctual reaction to correct it. When the toruk throws the Scorpion, you can see the pitch on the rotors change in an attempt to correct, but nothing is going to withstand that strength :)

Thanks! And I really should go back and study the last battle (although, augh, Truuuuuudy :( ) and see that pitch-change.

:)