system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Could the dragonfly copters from Dune work in real life? Would they be better or worse than existing helicopter designs?

I was blown away by these in the movie. They looked amazing but I know nothing about the science involved in flight and how realistic they actually were.
gpt
Flapping wing flying vehicles are called "ornithopters". There's no technical reason they can't work (it's the same physics as birds and bugs), but they're \*really\* hard to do well or efficiently in a mechanical design.

Flapping is a great action for push-pull mechanisms like muscles but sucks for rotating machinery (all our high-power output engines put out rotation). It is also a highly complex integrated control problem...the kind of things that brains are great at but very difficult for human-designed electronic controllers.

Propellers, like a helicopter, are very efficient. Animals, other than some very obscure microscopic sea life, can't do rotary joints so propellers and motors were never an evolutionary option. Wings are a great solution \*if you can't have propellers or bearings\*.