No. of Recommendations: 3
What I know about aerodynamics could fit on a napkin. A small crumpled up one with a wine stain.
That being said, isn't the lozenge shape directly at odds with the "transonic area rule", or Whitcomb area rule, whereby one attempts to narrow the fuselage where it meets the wings so the overall cross section of the aircraft is closer to constant from fore to aft, reducing wave drag? Which I thought was a big deal just below or just above Mach 1. This is, I am led to believe, one of the reasons that the 747 hump ended where it did, but more often the reason that the fuselages of fighter jets are often wasp-waisted seen from above.
I do like the design philosophy in one high level respect, something I have used as a rule of thumb myself: when you have a huge list of too many tradeoff goals to meet, forcing you to compromise on all of them, sometimes completely throwing out one requirement entirely (no windows, in this case) can make all the other constraints work out very nicely.
Jim
