Elon Musk JUST REVEALED Tesla VTOL Electric Aircraft!

Musk has tendency to tout things that he and his design team have only partly thought through... the Hyperloop and the Tesla semi truck spring to mind, both of which remain basically vaporware years after they were introduced. Tesla designs tend to look a bit whiz-bang... look at the Cyber Truck. But if Tesla actually produces an *actual* design for an electric VTOL, something that has gone through a few basic engineering, manufacturing and economic passes, rest assured that those designs won't look as godawful goofy as the kind shown in the video. You want an electric helicopter? Sure, great. Give me a good reason why it won't look like a sixty-year-old Hughes OH-6. It remains a perfectly cromulent design; good aerodynamics with minimal unnecessary nonsense. No matter what your level of technology, it is important for aircraft to be both lightweight and aerodynamic, and a lot of nonsensical bits and pieces tacked onto a fuselage of unnecessary size and angularity fights against both mass and drag.

Hughes_YOH-6A_Cayuse_US_Army_in_flight.jpg


Aircraft as designed to be as *clean* as possible. yes, there are certainly dirty birds out there; witness a fully loaded A-10 Warthog. It has a *lot* of stuff hanging off it, building up drag. But:
1) A Warthog is not designed to be economical. When it comes to blowing up enemy armor, cost is not an object.
2) All that stuff hanging off it is intended to FALL OFF.

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In short: an electric aircraft will look like... a normal aircraft, with a relatively few and relatively modest changes associated with the motors and energy storage system.
 
You can't believe everything you see on the internet?

:)
*Some* people can, and some people do. Thus we end up with the now-deleted thread about the pyramid of conspiracy theories. But videos that are blatantly false in their procalamations ("Elon Musk reveals..." when it' some college kid trying to become an intern at Tesla, or some other random artist with a tenuous grasp of aerodynamics and engineering) irritate the bejeebers out of me just like people yapping on abut "flat Earth" and "wage gap" and "hands up don't shoot" and "Holocaust/Apollo/Roman Empire/Big Bang/evolution didn't happen." At some point the joke gets stale and the falsehoods begin to grate.

At some point Musk might very well unveil the actual Tesla electric airplane/VTOL/SSBJ. If he does, I feel reasonably confident of two things:
1) The airplane/VTOL/SSBJ will look pretty much like any other airplane/VTOL/SSBJ design, just perhaps a bit snazzier like a Rutan design made out of brushed stainless steel ("do it with some style").
2) If this reveal is too many more years down the line, there will have been so many intervening clickbait/fraudulent "Musk reveals..." headlines between now and then that it'll take a few days before the people who would honestly care about it actually begin to suspect that this time its for real.
 

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