why was the SE-100 built then ? I think it can work, maybe this is not the best, but there is probably a balance to decide. :)
To be honest, it's sometime hard to understand why the French aircraft designers of the 20s and 30s did anything as they made an awful lot of really bad mistakes (frequently resulting in appallingly ugly aircraft). In this case it appears that the intent was to reduce landing gear weight. However, if you look at the SE 100, you'll see that the nose gear is enormous. In order to accommodate the wheels in the tail and to reduce the amount the nose drops after landing, the fuselage is also swept downward to place the tailplane and wheels closer to the ground without needing landing gear legs at all. What you don't see is that the tail structure has had to be beefed up to take the loads considerably more than otherwise.
There's a reason other aircraft didn't copy this arrangement. It's overly heavy, if somewhat simpler, mechanically.
What purpose does the asymmetric or double pod design serve? Two pods like that, so close together, cause greatly increased drag so doing it needs some sort of reason.
Does it need a reason beyond artistic aesthetics?
To me it does because Tophe is drawing airplanes and airplanes come with a body of knowledge and physics that define certain aspects of their shape and function. There are a couple of sayings in the aircraft design world, one is "form follows function" and the other is "if it looks right it is right". Regarding the first, drawing something where the form violates that body out knowledge without some functional justification pushes the design aesthetically into the "unattractive" regime. Pushed too far and it no longer "looks right" and so isn't right. It jars against the senses of what looks right and, again, becomes unattractive.
I realise we're discussing (arguing) matters of taste here. I'm by no means unimaginative or unwilling to take aesthetic leaps, but for me (again, I stress for me) if one is going to use aircraft elements as purely aesthetic elements, why bother retaining any of the forms of physical reality? Why have the wings horizontal? Why have the wheels on the bottom? If it's pure art, why be limited to any of the strictures of reality? However if you are limiting yourself to even most of the structures of real life, then you also start to become affected by the aesthetics and physics of real life, in which case things need some sort of internally coherent rationale for their existence. And, if they speak reasonably to that rationale become able to be appreciated for their aesthetics.
In other words, if one insists on drawing something that looks like an airplane one leaves oneself open to the design being critiqued as an airplane and not as cubist or surrealist art. Make it obviously art and the airplane critiques would fall away and the pure aesthetics become the reason for viewing, not the airplane-ness.
Paul
