Here is another drawback to a chain drive.
If you lower the engine so the chain drive thrust line to come out in
the right place you lose a lot of valuable volume in the
cowl for  the cooling system. In the planetary case you
have room under the engine for the water rad.

What is shown here is a four inch lower pulley and a 12 inch upper
pulley for a 3:1 reduction ratio necessary to get the
most amount of power out of an RX8 engine.

Paul Lamar

-HarrisonYoung wrote:

This is the most convincing argument against a chain drive I've heard. 
I hadn't thought about this problem. My particular interest
is a rotary installation in a twin-engine plane. It's possible 
that the drives could be offset to the side instead of top or bottom,
but that would result in some rather bizarre motor mount requirements. 
You've finally convinced me to stick to planetary gears :)

Harrison Young

 
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