Hmmmmmm. I wonder if X-Plane would be capable of simulating that... they basically do an FEA model of flight, although I’m not sure if it would scale down appropriately.
X-Plane really only SORT of models flight. There is no actual FEA or fluid simulation of any kind. The airfoils are canned data lookup. So you can't make something out of polygons and have it wactually "work". It'll fuselage calculate drag based on frontal area and the coefficient you specify, but that's about it.
This approach works well for real planes since 99.999% of them use standard NACA airfoils that are well documented in the public domain.
Flight physics don't scale down (or up) well. It's the predominant reason small airplane and quad models have enormously unscalable performance characteristics and abilities.
Making it bigger doesn't "just work"... same for the inverse.
Isn't that mostly due to the square/cube nature of scaling things? E.g. your wing area changes with the square of your scaling factor, but your mass changes with the cube of your scaling factor?
I wonder if anyone has attempted to use machine learning to try and build a realistic physics environment. I feel like that would be super interesting.
