4 ms·

Trust me on this. Blade efficiency is not only a swept area game, but also the middle of the blade is extra useless due to horrible vortex effects. One big blad

• trhway 12y ago
  > One big blade massively outperforms eight little ones. taking just blades into account - yes, though not that "massively". But the moment we consider the whole system - attach the blades onto a shaft, connect that shaft to reductor, to gas turbine, etc... ie. if that system is helicopter than bigger blade is still better, but if we change the whole system, ie. octocopter built using electric motors - the equation starts to change and we have good efficiency with octocopter and, which is more important, - much better control (eight electric motors with some of them allowed to be tilted gives precise control compare to very sluggish system of one big rotor driven by one big gas turbine), which addresses your point about " hovering around a minimum of a ton" - impossible task to do safely for helicopter in urban environment and pretty easy to do with ducted octocopter (you can't really have ducted helicopter precisely because of the size of the blades) As far as i see, the lack of good control (not efficiency, range, payload, etc..) and direct danger from unshrouded blades is that doesn't allow to fly helicopters in any (even close to)urban environment, and especially for regular people.