G
I just picked 80kts as a touchdown speed out of the air as I have flown one or two elderly GA aircraft that needed that and they did not pose major strip length issues.
The real a/c landed at 90kts for back end reasons although it was controllable below 40 at height. The actual speed (‘stall’/min demonstrated) of your VLA device is going to be so dependant on the weight you can build down to. No floppy wing structure to worry about though!
As to the other more contentious stuff, I did not mean to imply that everything was known (I did say most not all) just a very high percentage compared to 50 years ago. The other way of looking at it is to list all the past research aircraft you can think of and then ask yourself what questions they were intended to answer. Not questions we have today I suspect.
All the tunnel guys I talk to are concentrating on unsteady flow regimes as the ‘last subsonic frontier’ to be sorted.
The thing that depresses me is that the last 25 years has seen nothing designed to fly higher or faster than had already been achieved by 1978. That stagnation of envelope expansion has gone on for 25% of the time we have been aviating!!!!
J