A few from our flying club attended a 'combat wombat' event last Saturday - what a hoot. Lots of FT enthusiasts and 75' streamers, lots of carnage. Boy oh boy what fun though.
I finally got my first build flying well, surprised at the aerobatics chasing the group, seems I'm flying way above my level with this plane.
My second build augured in right away - trims too far out, perhaps CG too far back, too unstable, should have cut the throttle and got it down, but it went in and destroyed the front end. Surprisingly the power pod survived well enough to be repaired, put it back in my flawed first build and was able to complete several flights over the event. We are using 3D printed firewalls with a box-channel type design that fits into the pod about an inch. Broke that up pretty bad but able to CA it back together and get it back on the front of the pod. New prop, blow out the dirt, and it was flying again.
I saw another vertical takeoff gone bad, not sure about this - everyone else in the event hand-launched, we flew 8-10 planes at a time.
All of the other flyers from our club destroyed their planes in mid-airs. The sponsoring club did a terrific job putting on the event. They were giving 100 points for a ribbon cut, and a hundred points to each party of a mid-air. I think the winner had over 600 points, with several cuts and at least one mid-air.
I have ordered more parts from fT - couple motors, some build parts, have built another BW MkIII and gave it to my buddy that crashed his, the one that got me into this. He brought two of them to the event, lent his spare out to another flyer which survived the event, and then a mid-air took his out in the last heat. We were all scrambling between heats fixing planes - I'm glad I brought a solar-genarator for charging, and to plug a hot-melt gun in, as well as CA and kicker, tools, etc. I had the whole crew at the tailgate fixing airplanes. Two of our guys won second and third in the event. I got zero points, but my air plane survived at least four heats.
Seems having an extra power-pod is key, they seem to get destroyed first in a crash. Wings can be taped, foam can be glued, but a broken power pod can take you out.
I made the mistake of getting a slightly larger ESC - a competing one from eflite - so it won't fit in the pod with a 2200mAh pack, so I mounted the ESC on the bottom of the pod, plenty of room to move the pack around inside for CG balance. Worked out swimmingly! LOL And no venting or cooling problem!
Going to build a couple more BW's, maybe some more FT designs. I really like the Jenny XL. And I have lots of spare parts from crashed planes, - motors, servos, RX's, etc. We will be making combat a regular part of our future club events - surely more will get involved.
We also fly indoors in winter, a club member is the wrestling coach at our local high school, so we have access to a 6-court gym on Sundays. Flying Twisted Hobbys super-lites taught me more about aerobatics and 3D than the whole year at the flying field. I took a concept they use for winglets and thought they would make a nice addition to my first BW. They worked out well enough, and finished off the open wing tip, I'm going to use them on future builds as well. Here's a couple pics...
Thanks for all the help here - a new era in RC for me. Sponz is dabomb!
Here you can see my first attempt at the fuse - doublers on the outside - now I understand the folding sequences and they're turning out much better. I also used two aileron servos under the wing on this one, then decided the single one on top per plans works just as well - even has built-in differential. They sure are sturdy, and they fly just fantastic! Unlimited vertical, super maneuverable.
