Hi Buckeye it interesting as your looking at it perhaps from an engineers point of view and I believe both Jester and I are simply looking at it from a practical point of view, Dude make it just like a set of seaplane floats, a simple "warren truss" with members working in tension from high at the exhaust end of the engine down to the torward low corner. That way you will be able to enjoy our engine at any power setting.

OK now to the question of how to control that throttle lead from your on board computer. First it can be done with a servo driver of some sort however this is difficult as you will have trouble setting to reliable trim positions and never be consistent.

The startup scenario with every engine I have worked with after all manual valves are opened the throttle and throttle trim shall be bottomed out. The start is initiated by raising the throttle trim to neutral and the auto start will begin. There is no need to touch the throttle or throttle trim agine through out the following ignition and ramp up to running stages. Shut down is always initiated by throttle full down and throttle trim to full down.

So the point here is you will need an RC system of some short to run the engine (Yes you can intiate start from you Ground support unit but its best you set up some RC link. If you look at the pictures of my test stand above you will see a Hitec Rx on the board and a five cell Nimh batt pack to power it. For runs the pack is simply plugged into any of the ports and the 'throttle lead' from the onboard computer is plugged into the #3 throttle port of the rx. Also on the board you can see a large two cell lipo (in this case an old RC car pack) to power the engine system and pump. This two cell lipo works on many of the older propane start engines but check your manual as many of newer kero starts engines require the higher voltage of a three cell life 9.9v.

John