Re: Purely theoretical question about multi-engine ops
It was a slow day - I got to thinking, twins I can understand from a redundancy/safety aspect but how can it add any speed? Say you were pushing a piano on a 4-wheel dolly, and you kept accelerating until you were running flat out - it wouldn't matter how many helpers you had, you couldn't go any faster (until you got to a downhill slope). <br /><br />Then I realized, if you were pushing your pickup truck, and maybe your girlfriend was still miffed cause you turned your head to check out the babe in the Miata (2 days ago), so she secretly engages the parking brake just a little, to where you can't hardly move it - a helper means the difference between moving and not moving at all. So with each additional motorist who stops to assist, you gain a bit of speed, right? Until you reach the top speed of the slowest helper. But in this analogy instead of letting go, he hangs on and slows the rest of you down. But even with perfectly matched engines all contributing equally - they only go so fast.<br /><br />So the only reason to add an outboard (apart from redundancy) would be if the one you have is woefully inadequate. And it should be obvious that fewer bigger engines will always be way more efficient than more smaller ones.<br /><br />Okay, that and the coolness factor.
<br /><br />Anyways I got curious about whether my analogies would hold water, so to speak.
