ORIGINAL: wsmalley
Yea, Dan, I'd love to see your idea. As you may have noticed, the plane is made in sections. In the 'fore' section, I'm balancing the wings in the wind to check balance. As many times as I've watched 'Ram-K', including freeze framing the DVD, the flaps- during landing are imperceptable as far as movement as flaperons. The elevons are working like crazy. I can only conclude the flaperons function only at hi speed maneuvers, and then seemingly very slight. I figured I would use piano hinge on the bottom edge and lithoplate skin to slide over the gap. That too is very hard to figure out in the FS.
Here's the image with the schematic that shows the control system I was describing.
It can use a simple 6-channel radio or computer radio. Since my computer radios won't cross-mix the flaps with elevator and flaps, I'd need two elevon mixers and a servo reverser. If your computer radio can't do this, then you'll need these, too.
EM1 mixes elevator and flaps so that the LE flaps droop with up elevator. With my Futaba 7-channel computer radio, I can set it up so that flap travel is limited to one direction only. You'd need to utilize the same sort of functionality here so that the LE flaps don't go up with down elevator.
EM2 mixes aileron and flaps in a standard flaperon configuration.
The servo reverser is necessary only if you want the pushrod to come off opposite sides of the servo. Our Su-27 requires this because of the tight quarters for the elevator pusrod.
I have to use external mixers because my computer radio won't allow me to cross-mix flaps with both elevator and ailerons. I can do one or the other, but not both. This is because it requires that one control (flaperon or elevon) gets plugged into the flap channel and the other control (flaperon or elevon) be plugged in the the other respective channel (aileron or elevator).
So, here's how I envision a system working.
The flap channel is programmed on the computer radio to only go in one direction. This prevents the flaps from reflexing upwards.
EM1 works in conjunction with the elevators. Up elevator causes the LE flap to droop. Because the flap channel is programmed to only go in one direction, the LE flaps remain at 0 degrees with down elevator.
EM2 works primarily off the ailerons. Application of flaps causes the ailerons to droop, but still provide roll control.
Application of flaps would cause both the LE flaps and the TE flaps to droop. The LE flaps would continue to mix off the elevators and the TE flaps would mix off the ailerons. At full flaps, the LE flaps would become more or less fixed at a full-down position as would the TE flaps. When ailerons are used, the respective TE flap would actuate to effect roll control.
My computer radio has two types of flap/elevator mixing. The first mixes flaps with elevator like a control-line stunter and the second mix trims the elevator with the application of flaps. I personally would select the second so that I could trim the airplane so there would be no pitching with the application of flaps.
If you wanted roll control on the elevons, you'd just add a "Y" to the aileron and another "Y" to the elevator channels and add a third elevon mixer to control the tail feathers. Naturally, these would be active all the time regardless of the flap settings.
That's about it.
Dan