Dick,

There is no doubt, you want to keep weight to a minimum. Once you've done that, you want to look at how to minimize the drag increase you suffer in a turn. While induced drag does increase during a turn, it stays small compared to the other components of drag. One component of drag that gets bigger is profile drag, due to the plane flying at a higher angle of attack. The rationale behind coupling the elevator to flaperons, or flaps, is to get the lift needed for the turn with a smaller increase in the airplane's angle of attack ( or maybe no increase ). You mention coupling the elevator to the wing incidence. That is exactly what coupling the elevator to flaperonse does, among other things. When flaps/flaperons are deployed, the camber increases, and the angle of attack of the wing section increases. Both of these effects increase the lift without requiring the airframe's AoA to increase.

I prefer to think in terms of a variable camber ( & variable incidence, as you point out ) wing than flaperons. If you had access to the necessary data, you could design the wing to generate enough lift for level flight at target straightaway speed without flaps deployed, and enough lift for the target turn radius with the flaps deployed. A wing with flaps deployed is simply a wing with a funny looking camber line, and can be analyzed with Xfoil or other tool. Lacking this data, one could build a variable camber wing, with small throws as Ollie points out, and find the best turning deflection by trial and error, as a kind of trimming problem.

The small wings behave differently due to their small reynolds numbers, but not that differently. I think most of the design rules are similar, in general terms.

Cajun,

I am anxious to hear how your tests go!

banktotturn