Smithereens said:
How the heck do you resolve forces? Say we've got a vertical and horizontal component, and we had the forces T (thrust on a side bank going outwards), N and mg acting upon it. How would you know when to add or minus both forces when you're looking at each individual component? Do vectors come into play?
Thanks
Break up the vectors into their components by making the final vector the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle.
You can only add vectors if they are in the same direction. So if you have two vectors pointing in the same direction, you can add them up.
The negative of a vector is the same vector except in the opposite direction.
So for example, if mg is downwards and the vertical component of N is upwards, then you can't directly add them because they're not in the same direction. However, if you take the negative of the vector mg, this flips the direction upwards giving - mg. So then, you can now add the two upwards vectors together (e.g. Ncos a - mg = 0, if there is no net vertical force).