Have a safe trip Glen.

Thanks Pete.

I keep looking for something that must be missing. There is still room in the car. Oh well we are not going on a cruise. We can buy any critical item we forgot.

Champagne Il here we come. Well in the morning. Time for bed now.

Measure the attenuation of a transmission line.

Night Glen, have a safe trip. I'm looking forward to seeing the photos.

I majored in Geology ;)


Looking at various plans for RC planes online......holy sheet, people are whipping up little entirely foam bodied electric planes that well exceed 100mph?!?!?!

If I remember correctly the fastest RC plane is a glider.

College housemate majored in Geology and graduated just in time for the oil bust. Managed an appliance store for years. Now he is a writer for Oil & Gas magazine.

When I was into RC one of the RC plane magazines had a contest for the widest flying envelope with a 40 size engine. You got 3 points for every MPH it would fly controllably under 25mph without special skills and 1 for every mph over. You had to video it flying it's fastest and it's slowest over a specific distance, and submit the video with plans for the plane.

It stared with a $1000 prize, then some aerospace companies got involved in sponsoring the contest and the prize grew to $15,000. It went on for about six months. There were a couple of articles about submitted planes. One had an engine nacel that rotated like the wings on the Osprey from hover to forward. Another was a submission by Burt Rattan, the winges would pivot on the CG to prevent low speed stalling and the fuselage and engine rotated 45 degrees from the tail boom/horiontal stabilizers to provide both lift and forward power at low speeds. It was pretty cool because it could lift and carry a 9lb. payload (that's huge for a 40 size plane).

Then 3 months before the submission deadline the contest disappeared. No more mention of it in the magazine, no advertising, no winner announced, nothing. It was like it never happened.

I sometimes wonder what it was that someone came up with that was so cool not only killed but hushed the contest.

tiltrotor. :)

Or this

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/UcaL4zPCKNI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Don't think it was a tilt rotor. The magazine featured one, it had a LOT of trouble transitioning from slow to fast flight and maintaining control in that size. Also featured a plane that had a twin tail boom and it was a ducted fan type setup where the engine/fan was in the center section and rotated to provide thrust like a harrier's exhaust and rotated for hover vs. flight.

The design was to use one 40 size engine. Difficultly lies in control at low speeds and still be able to attain high speed flight.

Not indoor planes either. Yeah they can fly slow, but takes a LOT of skill to be able to control it. Rules state no special skill to mainatin control in slow flight. I know guys that can hang almost any rc plane on the prop, that don't count. And when you get the low speed control of those indoor planes (super light), you lose the high speed capability. That's one of the reasons those are being flown indoors, they can't even handle a little wind.

You are looking out having to beat points wise a 40 size rc helicopter that can hover. Even though some would say an rc helicopter takes some special skill to hover and fly.

After a little Google, the design that Burt Ratan did for the contest is now being marketed as the Scorpion Freewing UAV. It's much bigger than the original 40 size.

F***face Friday

http://thechive.files.wordpress.com/...pg?w=500&h=354

Bwahahahahahahaha!

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/support/smileys/clap.gifhttp://forums.pelicanparts.com/support/smileys/clap.gif

At some point I had to go through 100s of m/p details... I giggled for like a week straight.
My dad majored in geology but, the only funny stories I've heard about in that department were about a frat house full of football players.

I'm outa here. Night all.

morning everyone

Ugh 5 hours of sleep and time to look productive. Not. Zzzzzzzzzz

That thing looks wicked......if I could contemplate a way to make a small scale version in something less than 1000 hrs I'd be all over it.

Still running ideas for a predator drone through my head....

Welp we made it to Joplin. Non stop. 3 hrs. On the road again.