Espresso-Outfitters
Posts: 196
Joined: 12/24/2005
From: Tacoma, WA, USA
Status: offline
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Please keep in mind, I never threw out the book for traditional design procedures, by all means, those are the foundation of any good aircraft design and understing these by default are mandatory if you are going to be creating your own original designs, I was just trying to convey the fact that this science is still being developed and in all cases, real world flight testing is the bottom line. It gets really strange when you take a perfectly normal design that's mainstream and scale it down into smaller sizes only to find out it doesn't fly at all in those scales, yet other designs which thrive in it, do not in the larger realm. I'm digging the modern materials we have to work with, the micro receivers, powerful electrical motors and power packs, it sure beats what I was using 26 years ago. Where I drew the line is when I had others with vastly more experience then I in this field mainstream tell me something was impossible, only to ignore then, create, fly, test and find out they were wrong, I'll take the flying disc for example. Alone, by itself it is hopeless "without computer aided control", placing rudders at the proper 45 degree angle and creating a non symmetrical aerofoil does indeed allow it to fly. To expand upon this, Roy L. Clarks disc, at least one of them was the predecessor for the modern wing with all of the extra's, why it wasn't looked at more closely is beyond me, but it took many years for science to catch up to him. Davinci created a working aerofoil, the Vikings did the same with their long boat rudder, yet it took centuries to have it reinvented.
I then have to expand upon this where you have a team of highly educated, highly skilled people build a new design having to cross their fingers and/or face failures in spite of the fact that everything was calculated, so it shows me that science alone doesn't solve the equasion, it's a combination of that and thinking out of the box. What the original poster is trying to do is set up something that's universal, which is impossible, you can only say this is the general guide and fine tuning it for your particular application will require individual effort on your end to perfect it. The flying basketball will work as long as the basketball is spinning while the rest of the armature, wings, tail, etc. are stationary, the symmetrical flying disc will work without any tail assembly, again, it has to be spinning, or at least the dome and/or body needs to in order to maintain stability. I don't know all about every subtle nuance of aircraft design, just enough in my little corner and I'm developing a working set of procedures, designs and formula's that are not mainstream by any means, the old school stuff isn't the issue, that's a given throughout it all, it's implimenting it properly and expanding upon it dramatically, especially with the odd shapes is where science left me high and dry, so I opted to use the trial and error approach to fine tune things after the fundamentals were addressed.
The main formula I recently nailed down "pretty much" is the powertrain weight to wing mass ratio, everybody tells me it's about prop size and thrust, but when you are dealing with model electrics, you are limited as to what is on hand so have to work within those confines and in fact, I'm finding it easier to design starting with the hardware, weighing it prior to determining the proper scale of craft I should be building. If it were full sized units, or just wind tunnel tests, I can ignore that since the technology in those areas give you alot more options and I then have to go back to thrust and prop size.
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RE: Collecting material for a FAQ - 
