The beautiful part is that our powertrains are completely separate. You fly up/down using rotor. You fly forward using turboprop. The only transition that occurs is change in pitch of rotor blades to go from “powered” state into “passive autogyro” state. No complex clutches, no rotating mounts (like on Osprey). Completely separate independent systems. It also provides some measure of redundancy.
You are right that most of the noise comes from blades. And yes, there is some awesome blade design progress, especially for auto-gyros. Also there are a lot of specific things like low rotational speed, lack of tilt and other stuff that plays well into less noise in our specific application. But no, we won’t be as quiet as multicopters, especially those with ducted fans. That’s ok, this is a reasonable trade-off - manageable noise levels, a lot less complexity, lots of lift.
Not yet, we are a bit too early for that! But I sure hope that we’ll be able to start actually building soon, and then we’ll be very much doing that in public. It’s companies like Astranis, Boom and Hill Helicopters who inspired us and we’d love to follow their lead!
You are right that most of the noise comes from blades. And yes, there is some awesome blade design progress, especially for auto-gyros. Also there are a lot of specific things like low rotational speed, lack of tilt and other stuff that plays well into less noise in our specific application. But no, we won’t be as quiet as multicopters, especially those with ducted fans. That’s ok, this is a reasonable trade-off - manageable noise levels, a lot less complexity, lots of lift.