Earlier, Steve Leonard wrote:

Hmmm. 18 meter span, 265 pound empty weight, 48.7
aspect ratio wing, about 72 square feet of wing area.
Wonder how they plan to make it less than half the
empty weight of any other 18 meter ship? Maybe they
think that if they have half the wing area, it will
weigh half as much?

What I'd like to know is how they expect to approach that kind of empty
weight with such a shallow wing and still get the deflections shown in
the artists renderings. Or perhaps it was rendered in the 0.5g
condition...

And check out the landing gear geometry - in the retracted condition
the yoke is in line with the lower leg of the aft links. As Dick
Schreder learned with the HP-11, that's a sure recipe for peek-a-boo
gear unless you either drive both the yoke and the aft links or include
an up-lock. And given how low they've anchored the gear pivots in the
fuselage, either of those will add quite a handful of mechanical
complexity.

All that said, I think that it is definitely possible to develop and
build a ship that is substantially similar to the artists renderings,
and have it acheve within a handful of percent the claimed performance.
However, I believe that such an aircraft will be quite expensive - it
would require a lot of some rather exotic materials, and the
construction would be quite labor-intensive. I think it approaches the
sailplane in the context of ultimate racing machine, not as a product
to be series- manufactured cost-effectively so as to be available to
soaring pilots of more typical means. Not that that's bad, mind you,
just that I think it is sort of irrelevant to the majority of pilots.

Bob K.