[stillsearching]

Has anyone experimented with the use of aerodynamic treatments which are less than completely hard like a body panel? I mean could a metal pole frame with a tarp held tightly over it for a whale tail work as well as a physically hard one, giving you the option to have a collapseable one that you only deploy for highway driving?

Is there any possibility a soft sided vehicle (not whale tail, the whole vehicle, roof, trunk, hood...) would actually work BETTER than a hard one? I ask this having seen some documentary about I think it was sharks or dolphins, about how the turbulence from the water flows along their skin, which is less than perfectly hard along their sides... the softness allows eddies or something to 'stick' to the sides, the skin moves up and down a bit with the particular forces preventing turbulence or cavitation of any sort. They were trying to adapt the nature of that to submarines or somesuch in the docu I saw.

I'm aware air is way less dense, and maybe it's highly dependant on the right amount of give vs firmness (sort of like a shock absorber - too loose and there's no control, too tight and it's jarring) and perhaps there's no easy way to really make it work but if anyone had further ideas I figured this crew might.