Gary,

Regarding your #3 ... I absolutely agree ... however, when someone starts making malicious comments in public about me being a thief, I am going to defend myself, otherwise the person who made the assertions may appear to have validity.

MikeyD asked about the all molded composite for under $200 that will be a reality by the end of the year. That and my response were relevant to the discussion, because the issue of composite planes was brought up. Cheap all molded composite planes will become more and more common. The thing that makes the all molded composite planes in racing expensive is domestic cottage industry production.

Bill Vargas chose to call me a thief.

All airplane designs borrow from other designs. The Racer II is not some brilliant piece of innovation that is entirely original. I stated in my message what I borrowed from. Most of it is from full scale aircraft. The Cherokee series as well as most modern designs have the widest part of the fuselage at the rear of the wing. This is due to a lack of fillets on those planes. It is very hard to design fillets that do not induce drag. It has been known for more than twenty to thirty years that the so-called "Coke Bottle" shape is an efficient way of handling airflow behind the wing, especially when there is no wing fillet. I'm not even sure if the Racer II uses this techique. The side profile of a fuselage has little to do with the airflow behind the wing when compared to the top profile. Check out the wing to stab area on the Shark. Notice how there are no straight surfaces in the critical areas. This is something that I used on my design. The Racer II and many other Q-500 designs have a lot of drag inducing straight areas in critical areas like from the firewall to the wing. My plane is actually fatter in certain areas than many Q-500 designs. As I said, I did a lot of work running simulations to try to optimize my plane.

I will attempt to split out the discussion about The Smasher versus the Racer II.