Originally Posted by
DaveReidUK
Yes, you'd have thought that over the years the Russians would have thought of some new places to stick the wings, tail and engines, rather than the same old boring, conventional locations.
If you've ever tried to design an airplane from scratch, you'll quickly realize there is a reason they all tend to look the same.
Back when I was in college, we had a class on aircraft design - a really interesting class literally taught by the guy who wrote the text book
. For our grade, we had to design an aircraft - either individually or as teams of two. One guy took some promotional materials for a "new kind of airplane" - STOL using ducted fans and such - from a startup company trying to raise funding. Short story, he simply couldn't make it work - things like CG and CP were all wrong, it would have been extremely heavy and very fuel inefficient. At least the guy had a sense of humor - when he did his presentation at the end of the class he put up a slide of 'the vision' from the promotional materials, followed by a slide of 'reality' - literally a streamlined brick
Not surprisingly the company quickly disappeared without a trace - it wouldn't surprise me if it was scam.
