Something I'd always recommend before cutting metal: the shop-floor layout exercise. Always been intrigued by the fact that prior to the sort of drafting tools we're used to today, they could still build behemoths like the Titanic by chalking up sections life-size on the factory floor by way of a working template.
It's why automakers still build visualisations in timber and clay (or 3-D printed plastics nowadays), or why airline manufacturers mock-up interiors, or indeed why jurists are invited to inspect crime scenes firsthand in an effort to formulate an opinion.
And in this case while the outline in the last post (cue bugle) has much to commend it ~ not least the fact it allows quads to be stacked so as to provide redundancy ~ it does nonetheless highlight the unbearable lightness of the previous being.
Although the lens amplifies the effect, that square in the corner is under 36" whilst the one in the foreground is around 51". That's not far off half as big again, and I know from (bitter) experience that as personal air vehicles (PAVs) scale up, so do all of the associated problems... not least the fact it wouldn't fit the flatbed trailer 'as is'.
And all to carry the self-same payload!
This calls for the sort of executive decision I was occasionally called upon to make as an airline captain... I've no choice but to run with the iteration at the back there.
My aim in all of this is to create a mass-produced flat-pack airframe that will support you or I upon a 'flying carpet' that out-does boats and hovercraft in the first instance, and which can be furnished with additional means thereafter to facilitate free-flight.
The evolution of eVTOLs has shown that getting up there is relatively easy, but staying up in the event of one or other failure is decidedly not.
I've spent a lifetime teaching people how to manage engine failures in airliners, and from the earliest times in the development of jet aircraft in particular, the problem has not been a want of power so much as to how to direct what's left of it in times of crisis.
At the outset therefore it pays to build the most reliable quad conceivable ~ which is after all what over 90% of the world's drones already are ~ than a flaky octocopter.
It remains a fact that more pilots die in twin-engined light aircraft following a single-engine failure, than do pilots of single-engine aircraft in the same circumstances.
The art of staying alive in the air is knowing precisely what you've got beneath you.
