On May 11, 9:49*am, Eric Greenwell wrote:

It's a 20+ year-old design...

Yes, but it does incorporate a huge amount of engineering, data,
practice, and empirical results pertaining to soaring performance and
(perhaps more importantly) crashworthiness. They turned a lot of test
articles into little white flakes in order to expand the envelope of
impact energies within which you could walk away from a crash. I don't
think you can reasonably expect to get that kind of protection from
one-off ships optimized for uber-performance. It is no accident that
all current ASx designs build upon the design principles established
by and developed for the ASW-24 and -27.

Thanks, Bob K.