Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecky
Intuitively, this is tough for me. If you're displacing air in order to provide an upward force on the vehicle, my intuition says that energy is lost. But, it's been proven many times that what is intuitive often isn't reality.
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* Technically, energy is always conserved.
* It may take on a form which is essentially useless to us, which is at the heart of the 2nd-Law of thermodynamics. Entropy.
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* Using and internal combustion engine, with an overall thermal efficiency of 15% to power a wing ( which has it's own losses ), to generate lift, to reduce rolling-resistance, has some overall thermal or mechanical efficiency footprint.
* The gain from the pain quotient must be examined to decide if the concept is a non-starter.
* There's enough existing information available that, actually building and testing could all be done virtually, with a high degree of certainty in the results.
* The days of physical prototyping R&D are fast disappearing.