MCSEVZ

I'm a moderately experienced "intermediate" flyer and I'm looking to transition into electric gliders versus my last run-off with sport aerobatics. I'm seriously considering some of the planes in the Pulsar series, available from Espritmodels. Right now I'm looking at the Pulsar 2E and the Pulsar 3.2E. Both seem like well constructed planes, but how tough are they? Can they handle any mild aerobatics that some gliders are capable of? If not, what is a similarly designed plane that can handle a little abuse?

http://www.espritmodel.com/index.asp...OD&ProdID=6739

http://www.espritmodel.com/index.asp...OD&ProdID=5517

BMatthews

The wings will handle a fair degree of load but I'd suggest that they might be at their limit if you were to do a long terminal velocity dive then yank full up. For looping maneuvers there's no problem. The elevator and wings are light and the fuselage short so inside loops will be small and snappy to do as long as you have some speed. Outside loops will be more open and you'd see stability issues around the bottoms where they are heavily G loaded and due to the dihedral that both still have in them to aid thermal turn stability. Rolling maneuvers are going to be slow and graceful due to the long spans and high aspect ratios. Yes, they'll do such things. But other models do that style of flying so much better that you'll find flying them that way to be pretty pointless after you see how they handle it. That's not to say you can't have some fun with them by doing things like a slow and graceful reverse immelman and come ripping down out of the half loop for a fast low pass along the field. Just that an actual aerobatic routine is really not going to be such a model's best side.

What it sounds like you want is more along the lines of a warm or hotliner. Somehting with smaller and flatter wings with a low camber airfoil and coupled flaps for coupling in some camber changing to the elevator inputs.

Something more along the lines of the models found on this page;

http://www.espritmodel.com/index.asp...S&Category=550

If selected for a reasonably light empty weight and powered with a motor and battery pack which keeps them lighter and more in the "warmliner" weight category they will thermal decently but still crank out some good glider maneuvers. But regardless they are still going to look "slow and majestic" compared to even a sport power model for the speed and tightness of the aerobatics. They are designed first for good gliding and are at their best doing big fast open loops, rolls, jet like passes and the like. They look impressive as heck when flown that way. But try to do tight snappy 3D stuff and they are out of their element and will tend to look like a hippo walking on a big circus ball.

If you look at You Tube with "hotliner glider" as the search words you'll find a lot of videos of the seriously powered hotliners performing. My beef with such models is that although they CAN thermal once you shut off the motor that they are carrying a lot of motor and battery weight on a small wing. So the wing loading is high enough that they aren't going to do well with small or weak thermals that would hold up one of the Pulsar series gliders all day. So until you learn to see the effects and deal with the higher wing loading and resulting flying speed learning to soar with a hotliner could be very frustrating unless your area enjoys big thermals on a regular basis.