Chalo said:
Yeah, I built a really comical tilting tadpole that does that, because the front axle is about 3 feet long but it steers in the center where a normal bike's front hub would be. After you make a steering correction, due to inertia it's well on its way to some other heading. But that's the fun of that objectively awful trike.
I think that by the time you need or want a steering damper, you are compensating for some more fundamental design mistake. My cargo bike used to headshake when there was a load in the box. It came down to the thing having too much trail, because the fork was made from a BMX fork with only 32mm offset.
While I could have installed a steering damper and taken away the resonant shaking, it would not have addressed the real problem. A real fix came from a fork with more appropriate 44mm offset. Now it doesn't shake under any conditions, and it carves through turns more steadily than any of my regular bikes.
When I look at your LWB recumbent, I see a bike that would probably have much better steering qualities with a more normal head angle (even if it needs near zero trail to tolerate crosswinds).]
A 'mistake' is an suboptimal choice, usually accidental.
Using way less trail than usual on something with large lateral area and compensating for it with... something else is not a 'mistake', but a deliberate design choice of the 'least evil'.
If you could just go ahead and install a small, light fairing on any bike and have it add a ton of speed and not interfere with anything - everyone would be using them by now, and screw the UCI... it obviously is not the case, because their are indeed either marginally effective or even entirely ineffective or bulky and crosswind sensitive... quite often both.
Which brings me to my pet peeve - when 'mountain bikes' were "invented", it was UCI that had to follow the trends and basically invent some MTB disciplines to suit them... and if recumbents were indeed as great as some more ardent bent evangelists suggest, all benefits - we'd ride recumbents anyway, and UCI will be forced to adopt them, just like they did with eMTB - and I mean, what can be more abhorrent to UCI than e-assisted bikes if you think about it?
Unfortunately, recumbent designs that have clear advantages over 'upright bikes' in both speed and comfort (best example - highly reclined lowracers) have no less great demerits when it comes to control, not even a tiny shred of 'offroadability', impared vision and visibility and, in absolute most cases, significant penalty to raw power output that gets greater when you need it most - climbing.
I think this problem can be solved, or at least minimized while retaining the benefits - but so far most bent manufacturers seem oblivious that it even exist (or at least pretend it does not), yet alone make steps to remedy the situation - with Cruzbike being one of rare exceptions, but they have their own share of foibles...
Same with fairings - and combination of recumbent position and fairings IS a way to go - velomobiles, that can ride 40 mph on pedal power alone with a rider that is fit, but far, far from olympic champion (230-250watt, laughable watts from perspectives of this board - Toecutter is a great example what can be achieved with fully faired recumbent).
But combination of singletrack dynamics and full fairings (a streamliner) while have even more raw potential - but even more potential for disaster. One thing is for certain - you need to think way outside the box if you want to make some new advances on this problem...