Wings are almost always good, though in this case they'd only be useful for flying in gravities of about 0.1 to 0.3 G (depending on how heavy the creature is - for the wing area required for a human-mass creature to fly in 1g see pictures of a hang glider). Cute though.
Incidentally Steelwing and I speculated that about a possible replacement for jetpacks for flying Kiravai. Jetpacks have all sorts of problems; they're /very/ noisy, they tend to burn up or blow away anything directly underneath them, and they either run out of fuel very quickly or require a portable fusion reactor (which had better be aneutronic fusion if you don't want extreme radiation posioning) strapped to your back. Even with computer control and good instincts, balancing on one isn't easy (very few humans can do it), and current designs are very heavy.
What you could do instead is use a pair of planar electrostatic thrusters. These are under development at present for aircraft propulsion. Essentially they work by using a grid of high voltage wires on the surface, which have a carefully controlled AC signal applied to them to drag ionised boundary layer air along (rather like a supercharged version of those 'ionic breeze' air cleaner devices). Right now we don't know how to make one that would have the kind of thrust density needed to lift a human with a couple of relatively small thrusters, but it is fairly plausible science, is more or less silent and can be powered by anything that puts out enough electricity (e.g. advanced nanotech batteries/fuel cells). You'd still get a fair backblast (to lift 50-100 kilos you have to move a lot of air), but it would be cold and relatively benign. Presumably you'd shape the thrusters into small wings to benefit from limited aerodynamic lift (and hence get longer range) when travelling at high speed. This would be particularly practical for androids as they already have internal high-power electrical sources - the thrusters themselves are potentially quite lightweight and foldable (it should be fairly easy to make them in segments that fold the way feathers do, albeit feathers consisting of a high voltage electrode grid instead of keratin vanes).
no subject
Incidentally Steelwing and I speculated that about a possible replacement for jetpacks for flying Kiravai. Jetpacks have all sorts of problems; they're /very/ noisy, they tend to burn up or blow away anything directly underneath them, and they either run out of fuel very quickly or require a portable fusion reactor (which had better be aneutronic fusion if you don't want extreme radiation posioning) strapped to your back. Even with computer control and good instincts, balancing on one isn't easy (very few humans can do it), and current designs are very heavy.
What you could do instead is use a pair of planar electrostatic thrusters. These are under development at present for aircraft propulsion. Essentially they work by using a grid of high voltage wires on the surface, which have a carefully controlled AC signal applied to them to drag ionised boundary layer air along (rather like a supercharged version of those 'ionic breeze' air cleaner devices). Right now we don't know how to make one that would have the kind of thrust density needed to lift a human with a couple of relatively small thrusters, but it is fairly plausible science, is more or less silent and can be powered by anything that puts out enough electricity (e.g. advanced nanotech batteries/fuel cells). You'd still get a fair backblast (to lift 50-100 kilos you have to move a lot of air), but it would be cold and relatively benign. Presumably you'd shape the thrusters into small wings to benefit from limited aerodynamic lift (and hence get longer range) when travelling at high speed. This would be particularly practical for androids as they already have internal high-power electrical sources - the thrusters themselves are potentially quite lightweight and foldable (it should be fairly easy to make them in segments that fold the way feathers do, albeit feathers consisting of a high voltage electrode grid instead of keratin vanes).