Originally Posted by IFMU
As far as the 15% benefit with respect to disk area, how much of that is undone by the fact that the lift vectors of the synchrocopter waste some of their effort against each other, since they are inclined outwards? You could probably do a ROM estimate of the lost lift of each rotor by multiplying it by the cosine of the shaft angle.
IFMU, in theory the intermesher will not lose efficiency since the downwashes force each other back to vertical. The rotors may actually improve the way the wake contraction is handled, although a ring rotor would offer greater benefits for coaxial only.
The main arguement for interleaving to my mind is maximising rotor area for a given weight. If you see aircraft width as a constraint, this points towards tandem layout. However, rear rotor will suffer from losses due to inflow.
I'm jus gonna sit right here on my fence...
Mart