Definitely. Because of the nature of the flying, there are a lot of midairs. Bring a balsa plane, even "armored" with fiberglass, and you'll leave with a broken heart, a bag of bits, and a bad taste in your mouth for combat. What's fiberglass, but glass fibers that break like glass when you hit them. Strong, but not impact-resistant.

You don't want it to feel like building, because if you get serious about combat, you'll be building a lot of planes. You want a plane that's inexpensive, builds quickly, and is tough.

The most common design for combat planes is a reinforced foam wing, coroplast tail feathers, and some sort of creative bit of something for a fuselage. I've seen fuselages made from wiffle ball bats, PVC downspout, plastic fence posts, and coroplast. Some fuselages are even CNC machined from solid pieces of HDPE plastic, and some combat planes don't have fuselages at all.

If you're getting started out, definitely check out the SPAD stuff. While they don't hold up to today's armored foam wings, the coroplast wings are easy to mass-produce and hold up fine against other coroplast wings. You could start a club "one design" combat series.

It's also important to know that not all foam is created equal.

When you wonder if foam is as weak as balsa, you're no doubt thinking of the very light weight white beaded stuff.

We are using pink or blue foam (dow hi-load or owens corning foamular) rated from 25 to 60psi depending on the plane and the designer. Most common in is 40psi foam. 40psi foam is hard stuff.

When someone does show up and try to fly combat with a balsa airplane, it's not uncommon for the eventual midair to blow the plane in to little bits, while the armored foam plane flys out with no damage. A couple of times I've flown though a balsa plane, and after landing, I couldn't even figure out where on my wing the impact was (excpet, maybe, for the paint smear).

well then, ill have to try some foam then. what you use to glue to it? wood glue or contact cement or what?

BM,
For answers to your questions, follow along here:
http://www.jkaerotech.com/cmbtp51.htm

Those instructions are very thorough and complete. But, those particular instructions don't show that now ALL of their kits come with spars and pre-cut grooves in the wings. The spars supplied are best installed with ProBond polyurethane glue.

For a great review of the JKA P-51, check this out:
http://www.rccombat.com/sections/wor...ish/index.html

Mr. Clean's review is both highly informative AND very entertaining.

HTH,
D