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eofpi.bsky.social

@eofpi.bsky.social

eofpi.bsky.social @eofpi.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

It would be hilarious, yeah. (One reason I was thinking of it now, because of the naval reduction gearing stuff). Might even favor two big fans or something, or some of the ideas I've seen of core exhaust to drive the tips of a ducted fan. It'd need some kind of CL-1201 nonsense to justify.

A diagram from a 1964 report labeled "figure 2 - evolution of a tip driven cruise fan from a tip turbine lift fan" showing exhaust from a turbojet engine being used to drive the tips of a either a vertical lift fan or a forward-facing cruise fan.

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eofpi.bsky.social @eofpi.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

Fixed wing Wildcat (F4F-3 I think) compared to folding wing (F4F-4 or similar). You can kind of "tetris" two fixed wing aircraft together, but you can see how it let you fit two or three times as many planes aboard.

Comparison of fixed wing and folding wing variants of the Grumman F4F wildcat fighter. The folding wing variant allows fitting almost three fighters into the wingspan of the fixed wing variant.

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eofpi.bsky.social @eofpi.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

They've done that since the freaking V2: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co... This was figured out for rockets for 80 years now, and it works fine for everything from Saturn V to N1 to Shuttle to SLS. But SpaceX wanted to be different, and it turns out it was dumb. Who knew!

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