What you save on weight with the turbine, you add on weight in fuel so that you get at least half the endurance of a comparable piston engine. Small turboprops don’t make much sense…
And as observed by the first commenter (something I’ve also seen Vans Aircraft also write about with respect to putting more powerful or turbocharged/turbonormalized engines on a Vans RV):
One thing you guys are leaving out here is Vne. The Vne of an Rv-10 is 200KTAS. Notice that this is TRUE airspeed and not indicated airspeed as most pilots believe. The problem here is if you take it to the flight levels with a turbine making more power than a piston, you are very likely to exceed Vne. As we know, this can impinge on safety margins in terms of flutter.
In short, the RV-10 airframe was just not designed to go as fast as most turboprops and this needs to be respected. I am all for experimental aviation, but physics and engineering need to be respected as well.
The problem isn’t so much with going faster. With 240HP it isn’t going to be going much faster, given how fast drag increases with speed (third power?).
The traditional problem is with going higher but still going fairly fast. At say FL250 you get an awesome TAS, and since flutter is related to TAS (not IAS) it becomes a problem.
It would be quite funny to see an RV with this
People and military users install turbines for performance, meaning primarily climb rate due to lower weight. Endurance suffers – a guy flies an SF260 turbine into my base to visit his buddies, I think it has something like a two hour fuel range.
Lots of standard RVs already flying high, and on oxygen. These are aircraft with a great deal of capability, more than most production aircraft.