Rene,
The decision for the market to drop one design over another never occurs in one swoop, it takes bunch of individual decisions by a bunch of different buyers to end up dropping one design over another. Also the factors that make or break one idea over another are seldom easy to convey in a Discovery Channel show, even if the producers want to go there (which they don't, because lost causes sell deodorant). I tried once in a show to discuss the effects of disk loading and efficiency, it was all cut.
The idea that politics and some dirty work help to bury a carboretor that runs on water, or a Tucker car that gets 100 mpg or a synchropter that is better than a helicopter is pure bunk, the paranoid fumings of those with too much time and too little understanding. Believe it or not, syncropters have too many parts, too much drag and too little to offer the modern helicopter market. Dave doesn't believe it, but even Charlie Kaman does. He designed the very nice H-2 long after as a single rotor because it was the best for his customer, and he sold hundreds of them.
Flight stability and ease of handling is easy to get, these days, and it does not require us to perform the dubious trick of horsing around with the physical layout of the aircraft, like removing tail rotors or making two rotorheads.
Simple, capable flight stabilization systems using microprocessors and simple sensors are so mature that many RC helicopters use them, and the whole system costs a few hundred dollars. With a push from you folks, these systems will be adapted to the machines, and a cheap hands-off helicopter will be available, for a lot less than messing around with how the rotors are bolted on and where the anti-torque comes from.
Dave's arguments for symmetry are so seductive, you can start to believe that some wonderful balance of nature will make a hands-off flying machine.
Not true! The coaxials have the same need for autopilots and stability systems as the regular helos, mostly because rotors themselves are so darn unstable to begin with. Remember all those discussions about NOTAR being so stable that it was hands off? Notars need autopilots (in some of the models) because they are less stable than regular helos.
The world is not against development and change (quite the opposite), all configurations get a fair shake in the marketplace. I am certainly against the overblown promises of yet another scheme to make the all-singing-all dancing helicopter. I do believe that some of Dave's ideas are questionable, and are based not on engineering data, but on metaphysical arguments about purity and symmetry.
Last edited by NickLappos; 29th April 2003 at 01:17.