Originally Posted by Ioan
What I am saying though is that I hope it DOES work. New ideas are never popular. This company has made big claims and who knows whether it'll ever live up to them; I hope it does. In 1903 did anyone believe that a hundred years later over a million people would be airborne at any given moment?
Ioan, that is the problem - the sums just don't add up. I also share the dream of easy (but carefully controlled) access to airspace, but the idea has to work. The point is that the Moller concept is going through the same evolution that many similar concepts did in the '60s (eg project Silverbug). The only way to derive lift by throwing air at the ground is to throw lots of it there. This means that to keep the system efficient you need to ingest a large cross sectional area, to keep velocity down. This is as true for fixed as for rotary wings. This efficiency also translates to safe descent when the energy source runs out.
The lastest Moller concept has grudgingly accepted the same guiding principle, that all other aero engineers hold dear, by sprouting a pair of wings. This still leaves transition or flight at low heights and speed to consider. Eventually it will look like a helicopter...