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The thread has progressed somewhat but I have a question which is somewhat related to the original question. I got to talk to an aerospace engineer once when I was a kid, and I asked how a rounded shape could be as aerodynamic as a cone shape (I think I said "more pointy" at the time) on the nose of model rockets. His response was that the round shape presented the same amount of area to the oncoming air as the pointy one, and slower than the speed of sound, they both did about as well to push the air to the sides of the rocket body.
Can anybody elaborate on if my memory from when I was about 11 is any good? If that is correct, and knowing a bit more now, it seems to me that the blunt shape does the job of getting the air attached to the sides via less surface area, and therefore less viscous drag than a long pointy cone-like shape which would have the same cross sectional diameter. (I'm a software engineer, not a mechanical engineer, so please excuse any confused terminologies!)
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