Chris, As you probably know already, weight is more of a state-of-mind than anything else. If weight is the priority, then one must ask, why do I need a 17g spar, when a 7g is perfectly adequate for a normal flight, why do I have a wood spar, when Marske style portruded carbon one is much lighter, why do I carry fuel in the fuselage or stub wing, when weight wise the most efficient place to put it is in the wing tip, .... and it goes on and on.
One can certainly overbuild everything to make sure it will NOT break, but usually there is a weight penalty. Or one can under-build everything purposely, test it, figure out how does it fail, than reinforce the critical area to make it pass the load test. The second approach IMHO will result a much lighter airplane, but one has to build it likely several times unless one is skilled to calculate strength accurately (that I am not). Also on speed. If one wants to fly fast, there are typically two options: typical one is to put on a bigger engine, the atypical one is to reduce the weight, the wing area and the airplane's drag. It is unlikely that you will fly even a heavily modified KR-1 on a 36hp engine on 200mph just because the current wings are way to big for that speed (think more like 100mph+), but again the question is, what is the primary mission that we want to optimize for? (My personal goal is to have a single seater with 100mph economy cruise with a 1000 mile range with the smallest practical engine, so that is why weight is important for me). Again I apologize for all this rumbling, if I would have a plan, I would certainly build instead of dream, but for now, dreaming is my only option. James
