[aerohead]

Originally Posted by elhigh

That's stunning.

I remember seeing add-on fairings to make the cables on one's ultralight aircraft less of a drag, but they didn't significantly increase the frontal area, they weren't much more than stiff tapes to add to the cable.

This shows that one could replace the cables with, for instance, spars and still have no net gain while picking up lots of strength.

Here's a selection of shapes for fairing circular sections