Design Challenge: Loyal Wingman / Advanced Trainer / Light Combat Aircraft

[Scott Kenny]

@red admiral , @Arjen - Thank you. I will now go and look up this trickery known as "Reynold" number.

The basic idea is that as you get a smaller flying object, the air acts more viscous. So at people-to-plane size you're in air, at bird size you're in something closer to water, and at insect size you're in oil or even honey.

It actually kinda kicked the Wright Brothers in the jimmies. You see, they had copied their wing shape off of large sea birds, so they had a deeply cambered shape that was relatively thin overall, shaped kinda like a parenthesis (( but laid on its side. That was too thin a wing for an object the size of their Flyer. WW1 planes had a much thicker wing, shaped more like this: (|

Then as planes got faster the wings got thinner again, but with much less camber.

And of course, we see the highly cambered idea come back with the flaps and slats on modern commercial planes.

 

[red admiral]

The Saab study was for their GFF stealth fighter (pic below), so this is relevant for this thread as I could use a 66%-75% scale factor for my notional loyal wingman.

The cuboid law is a reasonable start if there's nohting better, but I'd reccommend using mass estimation methods from textbooks like Raymer or Nicolai. At this scale of aircraft it should be well within the dataset range.