Yup, being generous, a real engine's highly unlikely.
The announcement for the engine came out of nowhere and the lead time was just a matter of months. Real engineers, doing a real product development program on something like this would need those number of months just to do calculations on component strengths, stress analysis, vibration analysis, heat exchanger sizing and so on. Of course, they live in the real universe where 'scalable' doesn't apply.
(as an aside, anyone seeing that word 'scalable' should have been instantly tipped off that either the writer is woefully ignorant or running a con job. Suppose we make an engine exactly 3 times the scale of our current engine. The volume goes up 3 times the width, height and depth: 3 X 3 X 3 = 27. Take a tube or a cylinder. Tripling the size makes surface area go up by the change in circumference multiplied by length; tripling the scale makes the circumference 3 times larger and also makes the length go up 3 times. This would be 3 X 3 = 9. Therefore, our larger engine has three times the volume in proportion to the area. This is really great for things like heat loss and friction. On the other hand, the boiler and condenser tubing is going to have triple the volume for every square foot being heated or cooled. In other words, they ain't gonna work)
After having done all these calculations, you need to actually create engineering drawings before you can start cutting metal. Given that all the drafting work seems to have been done by engineers no longer on the payroll, that's going to be time consuming. The metal cutting is going to take a long time as it is. And, it's highly doubtful costs could be competitive cutting the engine from billet; forging dies and casting patterns are going to raise time and money requirements accordingly.
And here's the kicker, generator sets run for tens of thousands of hours between overhauls. If you do the math, you realize that even with 10 test engines running simultaneously, they couldn't have accumulated sufficient testing hours.
And, here's my final observation. Look at the Cyclone engine and notice how the components are all relatively petite. Then consider what an industrial diesel engine looks like. Now factor in the crazy starting torque Cyclone claims its engines achieve, showing that you need even greater beef to get the same levels of stress.
It's amazing how they claim they are too poorly financed to compete with the big boys yet then claim development schedules none of them would feel that they could afford. Either there is an utter disconnect from reality on their part or an assumption that their investors suffer from such a disconnect … or maybe a bit of both.
