Aluminium rigid wings? + Blade Materials & Erosion

I dont know much about production but «rapid» prototyping is a relative thing. So much work goes into building a flying AWE kite at some reasonable scale. Wing shape, profile, hull etc, but also just fixing the parts together, wiring, electronics, waterproofing, calibration testing etc etc. Im not sure if going for Alu extrusion rather than composited makes a huge impact in the overall picture.

My feeling is the best is going for something similar to what you want to scale at an early stage to gather experience. Because alu kites are bound to be heavier than carbon fiber ones by a good margin (I would think at least), personally I would not bother with Alu knowing that I would have to transition to CF at a slightly larger scale.

But - if you have some competency in the team already (eg Alu extruding) it might make sense to exploit this capability to bypass need for learning and speed up prototyping.

Most important - try to get the design right with fewer prototypes. Any prototype you did not build to advance your understanding is saved time. Better to put some effort into the though process that happens before commiting to a physical build

My thoughts - perhaps an indepth cost analysis may prove me wrong here. As I started out with, I am not really in a position to have a really informed opinion on this subject.