I've been meaning to post up some of the fun we had this past weekend out at our field, something we do once every couple of months:
PAINTBALL!!
No, not like you'd think. We actually pull out our old planes and let the club shoot down some aircraft.
What happens is that we have people set up in 4 chairs in the pilot's box, and we get pilots to come down the flight line from right to left in front of everyone, letting them take potshots at our old planes, hopefully marking them up with some good splats.
Turns out paintballs have a little more velocity than you'd think and tend to punch through foamboard:
If you look closely, you can see several holes through the wing, and the pink paintballs that exploded at the trailing edge. What finally brought it down was a lucky shot that took out the prop, and down she went. I managed to pancake it into a safe landing, even with the hunk missing from the right elevon (the wing is upside down).
And before anyone says, "You built a perfectly good Versa Wing to let people shoot up?!?", no - I actually built it for our combat events, to crash INTO other perfectly good Versa Wings, and this one just happened to hang on from the week before. It's now dead, and I'm going to rebuild it for next month's combat event.
PAINTBALL!!
No, not like you'd think. We actually pull out our old planes and let the club shoot down some aircraft.
What happens is that we have people set up in 4 chairs in the pilot's box, and we get pilots to come down the flight line from right to left in front of everyone, letting them take potshots at our old planes, hopefully marking them up with some good splats.
Turns out paintballs have a little more velocity than you'd think and tend to punch through foamboard:
If you look closely, you can see several holes through the wing, and the pink paintballs that exploded at the trailing edge. What finally brought it down was a lucky shot that took out the prop, and down she went. I managed to pancake it into a safe landing, even with the hunk missing from the right elevon (the wing is upside down).
And before anyone says, "You built a perfectly good Versa Wing to let people shoot up?!?", no - I actually built it for our combat events, to crash INTO other perfectly good Versa Wings, and this one just happened to hang on from the week before. It's now dead, and I'm going to rebuild it for next month's combat event.
