[arhpreston]

If you're interested in the details of what goes in to developing rotors for a helicopter for an atmosphere we've never built in before you should check out this talk: https://doi.org/10.52843/47ly7q

[MichaelZuo]

Thanks! In scaling up the fragility of the material seems very likely to be a big factor, cube-square law and so on. I wonder if there’ll be physical testing of proposed designs, are there even near-vacuum wind tunnels?

[arhpreston]

A lot of that talk compares theoretical results with experiments in a low-pressure wind tunnel (see e.g., the slide at this point https://cassyni.com/events/6GYLBKG5pBd4su8dm9A9FB?t=255.0s for a reference).

It's quite a simplistic (2d) setup however. I'm not aware of any more complex experiments.