Agreed on the little T thing - can't you just imagine the other guys wondering if they needed one. Vortex generation can do nice things at times, but if it was supposed to work on the vertical tail in high sideslip maneuvers I think the vortex would miss the tail. Maybe it works to keep the tail from wobbling in yaw in straight and level flight...

Speaking of presentation - a friend in the local club is really heavy into pattern. He practices it many times a day and doesn't fly anything else unless it's to test fly someone's airplane. He is very good. But the position/distance out from the flight line of the pattern is so far that an observer gets really uninterested in a hurry. That is the reason I like the XFC type of contest. They are big fire breathing airplanes flown close enough to appreciate them. They aren't unsafe or flown in such a manner that someone would get hurt and I don't have to get out the telephoto lens to see them!

The pattern today is a series of lines far away with some knots in them now and then when the airplane snaps. Boring.

I wish I lived next door to Dick. He has too much fun for a mere mortal person and the amount I could learn would be a lot. I couldn't afford the models I wanted in the numbers I wanted so I have only built a couple bigger than a .60 sized model. But I do enjoy the big airplanes flying in the hands of a good pilot. They are a joy and easy to photograph too.

As far as designing a model, most designers lay out something based on their experience and what others have done. They fly the airplanes and they fly OK. But to quantify what the changes actually did, whether it hurt a little or helped a little is difficult to prove. It would be nice if someone had the cash to rent a low speed wind tunnel and run some experiments. I nave no doubt the tests would back up a lot of what we take as common truths but it might be very interesting in a lot of cases like airfoils chosen, moments, tail locations and so on.

There hasn't been any real new model design in pattern in several years. It's like looking a new cars, you can't tell what it is until you see the nameplate. Not like in the 50's and 60's. Then I could tell cars and pattern airplanes from several hundred feet away. As far as large scale aerobatic models go, if we lay the planforms over each other there isn't much difference. The biggest difference is the location of the horizontal tail of the CAP and that has been proven to not be a tremendous handicap in large scale aerobatics. I would think the big Yak's, etc. would be better though.

Aerodynamics and model design is an interesting topic....

Ben