That doesn’t account for any eventual complexity required to certify the system. Keep in mind there are zero fly by wire civil certified helicopters in existence. Adding an FBW system like this would have flight critical software, redundancy requirements all along the routing of the tail boom and a requirement for no “common mode” failures. That generally means 4 identical fans and motors would not be easily qualified with in flight critical applications because they were not designed for such a purpose.
I bet it is heavier than the system it replaces by a large margin... increases susceptibility to common mode critical failures like software, lightning or EMI.... and substantially less efficient from a pure energy transfer perspective... lots of physics to combat to prove me wrong here.
im glad Bell is investing some money in commercial space though. This seems like a real project as opposed to the FCX1 thing they showed a few years ago... so that’s nice.
Well said bellblade2014 and captures my thoughts closely. Still cool they built and flew it. Taking IR&D to flight test is a sign of a healthy engineering department and good leadership.