I agree with steve on that...
Consider the seemingly simple section of a plane where the trailing edge of the wing intersects the fuselage. A HUGE amount of money and time was spend designing that geometry. Intersecting flow regions are a no no, but in a case like this - it's unavoidable.
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Besides, I really enjoy learning this stuff! When someone like trebuchet03 reports an Re of 184 and that seems to me to be an odd number, I figure I'm about to learn something--after all he's got access to this cool software and testing apparatus, so he probably knows a thing or two that I don't.
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That makes me happy
Seriously though, I'm still scratching my head a little... Intuitively, something seems off - but, we're given no reason to believe otherwise. We know for flow testing that it stays laminar, we know it's foil like... And we arrived at the shape via an evolutionary approach (start with one model - fix/test "bad" areas for each subsequent model until you're tired). I don't think the software is calculating Re# like an equation so much as it determines Re# based on how laminar or how turbulent it is (as Re# is just a psuedo relative comparison).
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P.P.S. I don't want to sound too discouraging or anything--what we're trying to achieve is *hard*. Aero mods (generally) aren't silver bullets where one mod will buy us gobs of efficiency. Rather, it's a series of small mods which, when added up, buy us a significant improvement. Speaking as someone who's done a bit of calculation, we're talking about changes which individually are on the order of a few percent. Those are tough to measure outside of a lab setting.
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And that is absolutely correct. I wouldn't even say a few percent - some are fractions. Another thing to remember is that it's not anything individually - it's the whole package. One feature/modification you add might not play well with another - and negate one (or both) of their potential benefit. But by the same token, one modification could make another work even better... Two steps away from a catch 22
