LifeWiki talk:Did you know/167

After patching up the definition of a Cordership "wing", I went and looked for uses of the term that mean that. It looks like, at least originally, David Bell used "wing" generically to mean one protruding lateral side of any spaceship. It wasn't really specific to Corderships. Here's a sample from 2005. The term "wing" being in quotes is a sign that it's kind of a neologism -- no expectation that just saying "wing" would be understood without the implied definition there.

The problem with the 3-engine Cordership is that the 2-engine "wing" component swings wildly in population from small to large, and in the 3-engine Cordership the two (overlapping) wing components are locked together in a non-optimal relative phase, so that whenever one half has a small population, the other half has a large population.
By adding another switch engine in the middle to create two independent wing components, the relative phases can be adjusted in an optimal manner to reduce the population, even taking the extra switch engine into account.
-- David Bell, July 9, 2005

But then there are lots of other uses of "wing" going back to 1992 that are talking about 2c/5 spaceships or all kinds of other wide short ships. Not sure whether that means that it would be better not to mention Corderships specifically in this DYK. It does seem like the 2-engine Cordership pairing mentioned above has gotten to be a standard meaning of "wing", but David Bell talked at various times in 2005 of "a 3-engine wing component" and "another 3-engine wing component", so that wasn't the original intent of the term. Dvgrn (talk) 12:12, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

At least Hartmut Holzwart and I have used "wing" to mean any thin component that protrudes from a spaceship in a direction not parallel to the direction of travel. It is not specific to Corderships. ~Sokwe 12:55, 28 November 2023 (UTC)