soholingo

What would it take to get more people interestesd in hotliners?

Greg Covey

How about showing us some pictures of your hotliners with a description of the setups?

We would love to see them!

Perhaps to can start a new thread on a particular model and see if others are interested or have questions about it.

Good luck!

tazzdevl1

My Feedback: (1)

Forgive my ignorance. But IS a hotlner?

Greg Covey

Oh boy, can't we start with an easier question?

The definition of a hotliner is somewhat in the mind of the individual. You'll likely see many perspectives here on that definition. Even the German that first coined the term, hotliner, had his definition change over time.

Some folks think of it as a style of flying rather than a requirement of the plane. Others think that hotliners are made to climb and dive at high speeds. This personal perception is where the definition greys from hotliner to warmliner to glider. Your first high performance sailplane may feel like a hotliner initially, but after a while, you progress to something faster and more powerful.

Unless your competing in a special class, the term "hotliner" has a very personal set of traits associated with it.

soholingo

VERY GOOD ANSWER Greg. It IS a matter of personal taste. My first bandit on a brushed system felt VERY hotlinerish initially now it feels like a dog. Yet it is the standard from which most people judge hotliners...

I will start posting some threads here instead of the other place but its easier to post there...

oumed

Soho - It's easier to post at "the other place" only when the server is not "down for maintenance" or "too busy". [sm=wink.gif] That's why I'm here right now instead of at the other place. I just bought a Bandit and I'm trying to do research so I can avoid those unplanned landings that tend to ruin one's flying day. From what I've read, yourself, Andy W, and a few others would have plenty of ideas regarding the Bandit.

I purchased a Bandit 2 that has a Hacker B40-7L brushless motor, Master 70-3P controller, CAM 13 x 9 folding prop (do they still make this prop?), three JR DS368 digital servos, and is powered by 8 cell 1300mah nicads. This apparently was a backup plane built by a pilot that read all the horror stories about needing to build two or three Bandits so that a fresh supply of replacements would be ready at hand. He never needed a replacement and the plane has never been flown. It's twin has been flown and apparently flies quite impressively, although I have not witnessed it in person. Anyhow, the motor, ESC, servos, and batteries are all new and unused with original receipts, boxes, and instructions included. Of course, I will not actually have the Bandit in my possession until later this week but it is never too early to plan ahead for the first flight.

If anyone has any thoughts, ideas, or comments on this particular Bandit setup please feel free to reply. This might actually need to be placed in a separate thread. I'll start one at the other place if it ever comes back online.


oumed

geoffbeneze

I agree, there's a pretty major trade off (G). That "other place" where I navigate easier, has been down more or less constantly since Thurs night when I came home from the hospital. Now, talk about diappointing, four days in there with no "contact" then they're down for another three days? Geeze.

OTOH, I've spent the better part of five hours tonight trying to get a photo of a "new" used glider to upload HERE. My levels of Murphy inspirted frustration are getting EXTREMELY high. ("Help ID'ing New Toy" thread).

geoff

jojonz

Well the other place is still down so here I am too with my first post on this the other site!.
Been following the hotliner threads on both sites and have especially enjoyed soholingo's enlightening review of the
Warmliner from great planes that I was at that stage quite interested in.
Noticed here in New Zealand the easy availability of Pelikan Models but was wondering which I should look at :
Am After an introduction hotliner that will thermal well, if that is possible.
Previous experience 2m gliders(but not for a while) and lots of parkfliers inc brushless aerobats up to 400 speed, which I do fly very frequently.
Want portability so the family does not notice when I sneak one into the car boot going away on holiday!!

I have noticed the filip in discussions but to clarify is that the t tail 400 sport? It is just that I see about 4 filips listed with the local supplier and each looks similar including one model with spoilers and one with full strip ailerons and a v tail.
Would that be a good start or can you enlightened people suggest another brand?

WrenWright

Howdy Geoff. I guess I'll join the party. I mostly hang out over at rcgroups. I find it much easier to navigate and the pages are easier to view.

I wonder what sorts of problems rcgroups is having.

mvigod

Hi guys. Let me officially welcome you to RCU. I noticed a few comments from you that it was "easier" to post at rcg. Question I have is what can we do to make it easier to post here on RCU for you? We would love to get more of you smart guys here talking about this stuff here on RCU. If there is anything I can do to make things easier to post let me know and we'll do it. I see you were all able to post ok here.

I do understand that any "new" site that you are not on alot can be a little confusing until you find your way around. We try really hard to make the site well organized and with our 9 servers total and 3 front end load balanced servers we run close to 99.999% uptime availability with the best bandwidth and speed. We add servers once our systems go over 50% utilized to stay ahead of the curve.

Again if you have comments on how to improve or what is confusing or not easy please email, pm or post it to me in the suggestions forum. We work full time here at RCU to make the site better each day. So if there are things we can do to ease navigation or anything else we REALLY want to know so we can improve any way we can!

thanks and enjoy.

Marc
RCadmin

phat23

Hey Guys,

I'm over here, too. The "other site" is really testing my patience. I know I'm off topic, but I thought I'd just say hi.

mvigod

BTW...you don't even have to say "other" site anymore. RCU changed some of its posting policies about 10 days ago to a "friendlier, kinder and gentler" rcu which gives members and vendors more freedom to openly share information. You can see the [link=http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/RCU_Community_Policies/m_377662/tm.htm]new rules here [/link] which reflect some significant loosening of some old posting restrictions that we used to have but no longer do.

GWR

My Feedback: (31)

Even less at the "Electric RC Pylon Races" forum. You should dump both of them.[>:]

geoffbeneze

Thanks for the response, Marc. The simple reality is that there is PLENTY of room for many groups and lists. Each has it's own personality and that will attact some.

My problem at the moment is the inablity to upload a photo of a "new" used glider I'm trying to ID. This is VERY frustrating, as simple as it should be, but have had no luck over the past 12'ish hours ("There was an error saving the file to disk"). I've obviously tried many combinations and have had several suggestions from other members, but still haven't broken the code.

These are the kinds of small things that cause the hair pulling (G).

mvigod

Ok. A bug is something I can work with easily. My guess is that you are using Mac and Safari probably. If so we are actively working on this bug. All image uploads seem to be working fine on both platforms using IE 5.0+, Netscape 7.2+ and all firefox browsers. If you are on mac try to use IE, firefox or netscape and see if it works. For everyone so far this has in fact worked. For some reason safari's latest updates have caused upload errors and we still are not sure why but will find out.

If you are using another browser or on windows please advise and I can troubleshoot that as we rarely see image upload errors with any of the later browser versions on win platform. If you have older netscape though that has caused this bug so if you are netscape older version on windows update that and it will work fine. Let me me know if this helped.

geoffbeneze

Thank you Marc. Indeed, there appears to be a bug in Safari. A quick scramble, dl and load of Firefox and the upload went swimmingly!

Still, since Mac/Apple have kept me from having to work for a living since '84, I guess I owe them SOME allegience (G)

mvigod

You and me both. I love apple, have one here, but also have a PC. I've been mostly mac since 1986 but a couple years ago had to get a PC to see what the other half sees. I've come to like them both for different reasons. I am a happy apple stockholder too as of late! Steve Jobs has proven his genius once again. Great story there.

Anyway on my G3 here I duplicated this easily with the same error so that makes it easier to start some code changes to find out why safari does not want to play nice on the image upload. I expect to get this finally resolved this week. It was reported awhile ago and we made a few changes which did not fix it but I'll put my best guy on it so we can nail it down.

In the meantime firefox is a pretty good and secure browser. Fastest growing out there. That should get anyone over the hump until the new safari code fix is in place. Also IE and netscape latest should work fine too.

charlie hepler

Well since I have been Lurking...... here for the last several days since RCG is down I wanted to say that there is nothing hard about navigating your site but it is different looking and takes a few moments to learn your way around.

I however wanted to say Thanks for making us feel at home though. I visit the other site daily and looks like I may have to find a new home as they have been having issues for several months now????


charlie

mvigod

Welcome aboard Charlie,

Awhile back we used to be based on the same platform as many other sites including rcg. I have done hosting and programming for almost 8 years with specialty in high traffic sites, scripting and hosting. I made the decision to abandon the VB platform we used over a year ago as there were scalability issues cropping up then with our size which exceeded RCG's after first year online (we are into our 3+ now).

These are issues you can possibly throw big money at to make up for hardware but it is a never ending chase. We ended up using a more scalable platform and offloading tasks to other systems and applications that were more suited for those tasks. I see they have disabled all the cool bells and whistles over time that VB offers to pick up performance. This was a huge fear of mine that led me to move to this scalable platform we now use here at RCU. We were busting at the seams with our VB install well over a year ago and the hardware to keep up was getting out of hand. The search on VB can kill a server and is unfortunatley limited in what it can do which was another pet peeve of mine on our old system.

To ensure service and speed which we feel is critical with forums, classifieds and especially time based events like auctions we setup a system of 3 front end high performance servers which are dynamically load balanced and site behind protected firewalls. We have multiple dual processor backend database systems. We backup all data on all servers daily to ensure no loss. We are hosted on one of the top Tier One providers at Rackspace.com which is roughly about 200x more expensive than most other hosts but the service, network and support is unmatched and we decided a year ago RCU must always be available and fast. I'm not knocking rcg because we all know that "stuff happens", but we have really tried here to plan for all those events and ensure scalability especially with 150,000 members and 6500+ new ones each month coming in.

If one or two servers go down with us or a drive fails nobody would ever know. The load balanced redundant systems take over and nobody would be the wiser. There are other redundant systems in place and rackspace holds cold spare parts for everything for us to ensure members always have reliable and fast access.

I am just telling everyone about our environment so they know just how serious we take this. I am a lifetime modeler of 30 years and so is my partner michael. We both ran separate sites well over a year ago. I ran RCU and he ran RCAirport. We put them together and both work 6 day weeks and 12-16 hour full time at this to make it as good as it can be for the members.

We will both admit..if the weather is nice and the wind not blowing we are known to drop everything and go fly some stuff I'm into both electric and glow. Airplanes mostly and a couple helis. I love the 3D foamy stuff! I have gliders and just about everything else. I dabble in cars a bit too. I'm an rc addict. Michael is more recently into rc helis (electric & glow) but historically has been an airplane guy. Somewhere he decided that spinning rotors was interesting!

Anyway we are both programmers and users of the site like anyone else here. We are always open to suggestions and feedback so if you ever have any just PM, email me or hit our support forums and we always respond quickly I promise.

soholingo

I am a network engineer and I have to admit that if ANY of my servers were down for days, I would be out of a job. Obviouisly the RCG face some challenges, but a better notice page would help to assuage our concerns. I LOVE RCG, and its killing me that they are down, but I am glad you guys are here. Anyway, back to hotliners...

jojonz

Here I go again!
After reading my previous post
could one of you hotliner enlightened persons please tell me if I am on the right track with the Pelikan model Filip?
Just noticed a spell check on this site....kool!

.

soholingo

yes Pelikan makes a lot of different versions of their planes. The one you want is the filip sport (this is the plane witht he foam laminated wing) It should come with a t tail and a rudder. It packs up nice and easy so you can get away without people noticing... And its pretty fast. If go to NESail planes there is a video of Russ Green's filip, he is a good pilot so he makes it look easy...

jojonz

Great video.
Listed at NESail as having a RG-14 airfoil.
The one lat my local supplier has a MH-32 wing section.
So is it a different beast?

sierra gold

I have been a member here for quite a while, but my "daily driver" has been RCG. Beginning to see some familiar "handles" here though.

Don't find it any harder to use at this point... just need to adjust.

Thanks for being here RCU!

SG

sierra gold

More disposable $$$$$$ and a faster connection between my brain and my thumbs.

SG