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ORIGINAL: dvs1

First why are you comparing warbirds to gliders. Unpowered flight vs powered flight and wing loading are two completely different fields. Of coarse you would want light wing loading with a glider for longer flight/ soaring times. With a large warbird it is in a way irrelevant to me, as a higher loaded wing actually flys better, it is more stable in the air, is less affected by turbulent air pockets, and also handles crosswinds better. Back to landing speeds, irrelevant as well. I have had 2 Top Flite ARF 84'' Mustangs for comparison, one just to get the feel for warbirds years ago, very light, no heavy retracts or extra gear, the more recent, fully fiberglassed, heavy retracts, extra gear, scale acceseries, ect, ect, difference in weight 6 lbs. As far as landing I really did not notice much of a difference, however flight characteristics and ease of flight was far better with the heavier plane.

If you want to lean the bird down to each their own. to me, fact of the matter is that this is a warbird discussion forum and when it comes to warbirds lighter does not necessarily mean better.

Im not about to start throwing lead bars in my planes but I don't really worry about cutting corners or altering plans to cut the weight down either. I have never had any plane to date that I really thought to myself I wish I could land slower in fact the opposite. I like realistic flight, and it actually bothers me when flying my sport planes that some of them the plane has to be almost crawling before it will stall out and get on the ground. I don't like it when I am idling a plane 10 ft from the ground, make my final turn, and fly some 500 ft. to the runway and still need to slow more before the plane will be flying slow enough to flare to land.



I can't say this any better, so I won't try. You and I are perfectly parallel in our thinking on this.

I will add this additional point, and it about building. It is so nice to be able to build, and not agonies over ounces, then pounds, so you can hold a vertical line at will. Weight is just not my primary concern when building a scale war bird. Let me qualify that. I do think about it in the tail, for 1 once back there will cost you 4 in the nose, but overall, scale detail, strength, and life of service are way more important things to build into my war birds, and this makes building much more fun for me. That is just me. Not everyone's cup of tea, but those who haven't tried a scaled out war bird, might just find that this type of building does have a lot to offer.

We don't really 'set out to add weight', it just works out that way, and you don't worry about it. Till you build in strength, add scale detail (including the gear and supporting structures), install all the metal gear servos to work all the options (I even use JR 8611 servos on the tail wheels), and redundancy in batteries to power everything, it is what it is.





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