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Okay hear me out: just use the turbine blades themselves, which are wings, as wings.

Slap them on a smallish fuselage, fly to the destination, truck the fuselage back.



They're twisted so that they rotate when they catch the air, which is not what you want plane wings to do to the fuselage they're attached to.


Take twelve blades, run the generators as motors and, uuuh, attach an 40GW CNG power plant? Suddenly clearing out thay landing strip for Windrunner does not seem all that hard ;)

The least-unrealistic approach to go full Munchhausen on getting rotor blades airborne might be assembling them in pairs or triplets and then lifting the contraption with some form of flying tugs that attach near the tips and pulling them into rotation once sufficiently clear from the ground. Like a tip jet rotor tailless helicopter, but with external propulsion units, and powerful enough for static lift during start and touchdown. Would still need per-blade pitch control through the rotation cycle to compensate for the lift difference between forward-going blade and backward-going blade while non-stationary (or compensating wind). Still wildly unrealistic, but other "use the blades to fly themselves!" are even further out I think.


Right, in a windmill they're mounted at an angle for generating rotation. When you mount them on the fuselage you just set them at an appropriate angle for the aircraft.


The airspeed will vary along the length of the blade, necessitating a twist to control the angle of attack for efficiency. A blade/wing that would fly would be stalled at the root and/or supersonic at tip, efficient in only a small ring. That's the twist.


The outer half is just a giant wing-tip, increasing efficiency but not producing lift.

It would need half the turbines to turn the other way around to have left/right wings, doubling tooling cost for production.

And it would need a runway of appropriate width, but maybe they could be mounted at significant v-shape.

Return trip not on the ground. The fuselage, engines, ... would still be massive, but with a set of small "normal" wings.


That "just" is carrying an awful lot of weight.


Train the AI to make it fly anyway. :)


Design the entire turbine as a 200 meter long helicopter, fly it to site, land it tail-first. It's easy.




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