Comment by dghlsakjg

Oh, you’re talking about a hybrid system. I thought you meant all electric like the aircraft from the article. My mistake.

That’s a ton of weight penalty (the most consequential tradeoff in aircraft design) so the design gains of being able put motors in weird places has to be significant.

Once we have higher density batteries it becomes compelling since you can store power for bursty operations like VTOL while using an ICE engine that otherwise wouldn’t have the power, but currently it doesn’t pen out. You need an order of magnitude more energy density from batteries before you can come anywhere close to what combustion engines can do.