ZOHD Talon Rebel GT aka the Galleon DT(FB)

[cmckamey]

Got a chance to take mine out and really push it. Hit a bit over 4 miles from launch and 11 miles total in just over 19 minutes. Overall I think this design is a winner for sure and can only imagine it's better with the v2 mods.

Looking forward to seeing some footage from your latest model and dropping a link to my latest flight here.

2019/08/03 - CRCS to East Wolf Valley

-Clay

 

[CapnBry]

I've only flown 4 times now with the camera on board, still trying to get more of a locked in feel to the tune. I spent a bunch of hours this weekend trying to debug an inav problem which turned out to only be a blackbox logging issue.

I may not have video to share, I'm just flying circles around my field mostly, but I have some images. People like pictures right?!

"Sure, I can get in a flight before the rain starts" followup: nope!

My face in this one shows that clearly flying planes made from a few bucks worth of paper is srs business

Can I get some more butter on this landing?

That said, even after adding some neoprene foam and a larger magnet, the FPV pod can still eject itself on a fast landing so I'm just going to stick something through the top to make sure it doesn't come out on landing. I've flown upside down and loops and vertical rudder stalls no problem, but decelerating from 30-40kph to 0 in a second is enough for the cameras to get thrown out the front.

 

[mayan]

I've only flown 4 times now with the camera on board, still trying to get more of a locked in feel to the tune. I spent a bunch of hours this weekend trying to debug an inav problem which turned out to only be a blackbox logging issue.

I may not have video to share, I'm just flying circles around my field mostly, but I have some images. People like pictures right?!

"Sure, I can get in a flight before the rain starts" followup: nope!
View attachment 138034

My face in this one shows that clearly flying planes made from a few bucks worth of paper is srs business
View attachment 138033

Can I get some more butter on this landing?
View attachment 138032

That said, even after adding some neoprene foam and a larger magnet, the FPV pod can still eject itself on a fast landing so I'm just going to stick something through the top to make sure it doesn't come out on landing. I've flown upside down and loops and vertical rudder stalls no problem, but decelerating from 30-40kph to 0 in a second is enough for the cameras to get thrown out the front.

Those are some beatiful picture buddy!

 

[James Powell]

Just got mine built. Thanks for the plans! Just need to install the electronics and she's ready to maiden.

 

[CapnBry]

Just got mine built. Thanks for the plans! Just need to install the electronics and she's ready to maiden.

Looks pretty sweet, and the first with the DTFB wing too! It might just be the camera angle, but the V-Tail looks more vertical than horizontal. If it is more vertical then you'll have more rudder authority (which you really don't need) and less elevator authority (which you might?). It should be 40-45 degrees from horizontal, but I'm not sure it if matters.

I'm sitting here at 10pm rebuilding my work PC since it decided to no longer work any more once the spinny mass storage drive died. While I was waiting for the backups to copy through the network I went out to fly. My PID settings were finally looking pretty good so I flipped over to manual mode real quick just to grab some gyro data on hard banks and loops. Pulled hard and immediately lost control in a high speed roll. Crashed hard into a lake, losing one soul, the $110 camera.

There wasn't enough wind to blow it to the edge before dark set in so I fished it in as close as I could then waded out through the reeds to chest-deep water to recover it. I used a pair of pokin' sticks to poke around as I went, as I saw an alligator as I approached the lake and a nearby citizen came over to let me know he frequently sees venomous water moccasins along the shore. Luckily, all the stuff that wants to kill you in Florida let me pass to recover the wreckage.

I'm not entirely sure what happened, but the blackbox logs show I entered the roll at ~80m, ~65kph and jumped up to rolling left at over 350 degrees/s. Since I know that my normal max roll rate is only 200 degrees/s, I think the wing snapped off and it just became a spinny death dart. All the bits still work, although I'll trash the battery to be on the safe side since this isn't its first major incident. Or its second.

 

[mayan]

Looks pretty sweet, and the first with the DTFB wing too! It might just be the camera angle, but the V-Tail looks more vertical than horizontal. If it is more vertical then you'll have more rudder authority (which you really don't need) and less elevator authority (which you might?). It should be 40-45 degrees from horizontal, but I'm not sure it if matters.

I'm sitting here at 10pm rebuilding my work PC since it decided to no longer work any more once the spinny mass storage drive died. While I was waiting for the backups to copy through the network I went out to fly. My PID settings were finally looking pretty good so I flipped over to manual mode real quick just to grab some gyro data on hard banks and loops. Pulled hard and immediately lost control in a high speed roll. Crashed hard into a lake, losing one soul, the $110 camera.
View attachment 138630

There wasn't enough wind to blow it to the edge before dark set in so I fished it in as close as I could then waded out through the reeds to chest-deep water to recover it. I used a pair of pokin' sticks to poke around as I went, as I saw an alligator as I approached the lake and a nearby citizen came over to let me know he frequently sees venomous water moccasins along the shore. Luckily, all the stuff that wants to kill you in Florida let me pass to recover the wreckage.

I'm not entirely sure what happened, but the blackbox logs show I entered the roll at ~80m, ~65kph and jumped up to rolling left at over 350 degrees/s. Since I know that my normal max roll rate is only 200 degrees/s, I think the wing snapped off and it just became a spinny death dart. All the bits still work, although I'll trash the battery to be on the safe side since this isn't its first major incident. Or its second.

Ouch .

 

[CapnBry]

Ouch .

Thanks, man. It's ok, I'll just build another one in a few months when I can afford a new camera except probably with a traditional DTFB wing. I'll miss that camera but I'll miss its footage lost along with it as well. I had one battery full of doing proximity FPV on the Galleon between the tree stands and through bigger gaps in the treeline and zipping around upside down. I didn't copy it off due to the hard drive failure so it went down with the camera.

Is there a DTFB FPV submarine for probing lake bottoms for missing cameras?

 

[mayan]

Is there a DTFB FPV submarine for probing lake bottoms for missing cameras?

 

[CapnBry]

Not content with just throwing one action camera into a lake, I built another Galleon!

I've built it this time with a DTFB wing, plans forthcoming. The bent-down wingtips look cool and match the original, but this airfoil is just the standard flat bottom clark-y-ish deal with the ends folded down so they'll probably just act more like brakes than anything else. I think in the final plans I might just make them regular undercambered bits.

The wing also seems... small. It is 1000mm, but I don't think the tips are going to add any lift, so that makes it ~900mm. I feel like it is going to lose a lot of low speed performance compared to my cut foam wing, which was a rectangular 1092mm wing. It is also a little heavier, at 355g for the foam, servos, motor, and ESC. Add the receiver, vtx, flight controller, battery tray and who knows what else, but it tips the scales at ~410g. 2600mAh 3S battery is around 230g and another 80g for cameras, and I'm over 700g. I didn't want to pull a motor out of another model so I used a dirt cheap A2212 1400KV motor with that generic yellow-wrapped 30A ESC you can get from eBay for under $10. With the included 8x6 prop, I can get 675g of thrust at 18.4A on 3S. Should be enough for the maiden without any cameras-- hey I'm not willing to lose the cameras on the maiden!

The setup inside is just the same standard iNav setup on an Omnibus F4 Pro V2, BN-180 GPS, Flit10+ receiver, and some cheap VTX from Amazon. The plan here is to feel out the range of the Flit10 in every direction, and I have a new Crossfire Nano RX to try after that. I've flown up to 900m before on the Flit and I'm wondering if the Crossfire will make RX LOSS a thing of the past, at least within video range. I bought one of the Micro TX V2 for flying my quads but I am just as interested in the range for my fixed wings.

It has rained non-stop here for over a month now I think, but I have waited three days with this thing already so I think I'm going to just brave the soggy fields and overcast skies tomorrow just to get it in the air. The build is only 2 sheets of foam plus a few scraps and it is pretty amazing what you can put together from $2 of material using the techniques FliteTest has taught me.

EDIT: Ok maybe not today since it rained during the night and plenty this morning too. C'maahhhhn!

 

[CapnBry]

I've flown three days in a row! However, my battery is still at 3.9V so I think that may tell you how things are going.

• Day 1 Flight 1 - (maiden) Actively raining, but calm, so what are you going to do? I'm supes confident though so I'm just going to dive right in and maiden in iNav LAUNCH mode. Result: Motor is spinning the wrong direction so it comes to a dead stop within 10m of me and plorps to the ground. Zero damage.
• Day 1 Flight 2 - Motor direction reversed, launch goes great, untuned iNav seems to be having a hard time with control so I'd better switch to MANUAL. OH WHAT IS THIS MESS! It wants to pitch up like crazy going into the wind, downwind is a better but control is really strange. Manage to "land" by stuffing the nose into the ground from 2m up and it sticks in the mud. Minor nose damage. I add a little trim to keep it from wanting to go to the moon.

• Day 1 Flight 3 - Still barely able to fly, it is just pitchy as all getout so I think the cgCalc (link) is wrong. Unfortunately I can't move the battery any further forward because my battery tray strap is too hard to move in the field.

I removed the battery tray and went back to regular ole velcro stuck to the bottom of the fuselage. Moved the batteries forward 25mm. I also reconfigured all my iNav modes to get 6 different total flight modes: Manual, Rate/Acro, Horizon, 3D Cruise, Waypoint, and Return to Home.

• Day 2 Flight 1 - Other people at the park so I can't really fly very far, and also it is blowing 10-20kt. Perfect! I nearly launch directly into a tree and feel like I have no control (overdamped). It isn't pitchy any more but now in manual mode the nose wants to go right into the ground. I have to make a downwind landing and run out of the 100m long field still doing 70kph, but I only bust one of the lower vertical stabilizers. Its a clean break, it will heal.

Turns out the default iNav mode logical operator is OR, not AND, so I had every mode active at the same time, including flapperons /facepalm. I move the CG back 5mm too.

• Day 3 Flight 1 - Oh only 6-10kt winds today, and the mud filling my shoes as I stand in the field is calming. Finally a decent flight though. It still wants to go to space in manual mode, and dive with flapperons on. The CG is in the exact right spot though now, because I actually disarmed iNav at 65m / 60kph but I flipped it back to HORIZON mode as I reset all the switches and throttle to rearm. It just floated in the air-- steady, slowing, and lightly descending with a little nose up attitude. I just let it hang in the air above me like a kite and when I rearmed I was only going 9kph so it was definitely stalled, but behaving beautifully. I only lost 8m of altitude! It flies pretty good in all the stabilized and navigation modes, but needs 15% down elevator to maintain level flight. If I turn on flapperons, it needs 10% *up* elevator to fly straight.

I'm going to rebuild the wing without the bent down tips. I think they're doing something weird because they're more like cups catching the wind and pushing the nose up or something. It could also be the V-tail is angled down, but it is hard to tell if that is the case. Neither really explain how much the flapperons want it to pitch down so hard. I took a bunch of video, but it is hard to see anything because I was many mistakes high.

Experimentation continues! I just hope I get a full flight out of it before the fuselage takes too much (cough) landing damage.

 

[CapnBry]

I built a wing with no droops, completely tip-droop-free! You may ask why I didn't just try cutting the tips off the other wing and flying it that way, and the answer is because it didn't occur to me until I had already built it.

I extended the inner straight portion by 25mm on each side to make it look a little more aggressive on the taper, and the bottom extends out as far as a 20" wide piece of DTFB will hold. That leaves a little bit of undercamber tip but not enough that I'd say it was any benefit. The real goal here was to just stop it from popping nose up when going into wind. It worked too, just with this change alone I dropped from 12% down elevator to fly level, to about 2-3% down elevator which is a totally acceptable amount of trim to run with. It flew pretty OK even considering it was 10-20kt winds.

Headed out today early to get a long non-test flight in because it was supposed to be windy today as well. Beautiful morning, sent it up, made my turn at the end of the field when suddenly "TELEMETRY LOST" oh that's not good but we can still fly... oh nope nothing. I tried rebooting the radio, reattaching the antenna, unplugging and replugging the multiprotocol module, and no joy. I had no control and iNav was just circling overhead. With 2600mAh of 3S battery I estimated I was in for an anxious 30 minute wait for the battery to die and the ESC protection to kick in. My loiter radius is the same size as my field, 50m in each direction, with giant pine trees all around OR a couple adjacent gatorlakes if things go really wrong.

Sure enough 30 minutes after launch I could tell it was struggling to get into a 3-8kt wind. 31 minutes and it barely makes it back up the field. iNav did it's best and it actually made a pretty good downwind landing despite being stalled and kickn' that high alpha life. No damage whatsoever, although the battery was down to 2.9V/cell at landing, but recovered to 3.5V so I'm cautiously optimistic.

All the wiring was fine in the model, but the receiver, a Flit10, had the status LED blinking fast like it wasn't bound. My TX connects no problem to other FlySky receivers, so it is working great. Hit the bind button and it connected right up. Has anyone ever seen an RX lose its binding mid-flight? I have no idea what could cause that, but I probably won't ever use this receiver again.

 

[CapnBry]

I've had a lot of things go wrong that have never gone wrong before. I took it out for another flight and thanks to having an audience gather at the park, it turned into a 15 minute airshow of rolls, loops, stalls, inverted flights, high speed passes, and split-S. Everything worked great, and it is surprising just how agile this thing is, despite its primary function to be an FPV cruiser. After landing, I was using the iNav OSD menu to mess with some of the PID gains, Save and Reboot... and the two wing servos freak out a little as they always do as iNav starts... but then never go to their center position again. In fact, they don't move at all any more. Take the model home and after investigation both wing servos died at the same time. One of them is obviously burned, with a big black spot and a melting of the case. The other just rotates until it hits the stop and stays there.

Well that is certainly weird, right? So I replaced the two servos. That's when I remembered that one of the V-tail servos also stopped working between me centering it with the tester and being connected to the flight controller. It was a used servo so I assumed that one was just "its time" but now I am thinking it might be systemic to the build. I added a 330uF capacitor to the 5V line to maybe catch some spikes that were frying the servos?

Took it out again, flew perfectly for 15 minutes of LOS, so I added the FPV camera. Took it for a quick flight around to make sure the aerodynamics hadn't changed, checks out, landed... aaaaaand the flight controller stops powering up at all. Turns out I burned out another servo in the V-tail which melted and is a dead short on the 5V line now. This. is. insanity. More importantly, the flight controller had been used for over a year in another build without any issue.

This time, I've added a 3A switching BEC to exclusively drive the 4x 9g servos. I've never needed this before so I'm not sure what has changed to cause these issues. If another servo dies on this build, I'm going to have to suspect that the flight controller is doing something to anger them and have to replace it. My frugal side will be sad to see that the $17 Omnibus F4 Pro wasn't up to the challenge of me pushing it around for a couple years.

So far so good though, and I FINALLY FLEW FPV on this model I started to fly FPV with. I flew about 15 minutes on 1100mAh, mostly between 50-60kph at a rate of 82mAh/km. I think the wing design is good now, so I'll be posting that shortly along with an updated fuselage design with some minor tweaks.

 

[CapnBry]

We've had a good few days, the Galleon and me. Nothing weird breaking for no reason has left me oddly confident. Confident enough to put a real camera into it? Haha, no. No.

But skimming trees with no power 150m away? We got this! (asterisk: it didn't look that close from where I was standing) I've now put over 100km of flying into this sucker and I really do like it. It still has a tendency to gain lift into the wind, but not in the "WHOA HOLD ON" way, more in the "Oh hey, free lift" way. It is sort of draggy going into the wind too, but it is a flying brick so I guess that's to be expected. It still can putter along at 50% throttle doing 45-60kph (depending on wind) averaging 80-85mAh/km, or 110kph at full speed. It is agile in roll (300 degrees/s) and not bad on pitch either (120*/s). It does want to land fast though-- I don't think I've had one landing below 35kph.

I've attached updated v1.1 plans (to the first post of the thread)!

• A wing! The first plans didn't come with a wing design because I did a hot wire wing. This is more in the spirit of FliteTest now, and guess what? I didn't snap a wing in half and drop a gopro in a lake yet! That's a bonus for me maybe more than you folks. It's an approximation of a Clark-Y with 175mm chord and 1010mm wingspan 16.6dm^2. 11.7% thickness at 28% of chord, that's the only dimension that the whole thing is based on.
• The previous version had 1 degree of wing incidence added, I've removed that since the airfoil already has ~3 degrees of incidence resting on its flat bottom.
• Size of the lower vertical stabilizers reduced. Turns out that if they stick out, they like to act as brakes on the ground and just get torn up. Who knew a piece of foam sticking out going 30mph could be damaged so easily?
• A buncha millimeter tweaks here and there. Inkscape isn't really a great program for keeping angles correct as you make changes, so I am pretty sure if I wanted to make any more tweaks I'd have to redraw the whole thing and I've likely made things worse, but it should be fairly close.

How much foam board? About 1 black sheet for the body and 1 white sheet for the wings and canopy. You'll note I did not conveniently put the canopy on the white wing page, one support piece didn't fit so I figured leave it on the other one. The black page is also too large to fit a standard sheet of DTFB but you should be able to get the fuselage and all the tail parts and formers out of one sheet and the FPV pod and angle gauge can come out of scrap.

I should say what's on board now I guess.

• A2212 1400KV motor with a yellow shrinkwrap 30A ESC and the 8060 prop that came with it. I don't recommend this, but I had it on hand and it only cost $12 on eBay. I wouldn't go any larger than an 8" prop so that's like a FliteTest Radial 2212 1050KV (Power Pack B) on 4S or maybe the 2216 1180KV on 3S both with an 8x6 prop. I think the best would be around what the original has, a Sunnysky X2216 1250KV with an 8x6 prop for 3S and maybe an 8x4 for 4S? In thrust tests, this prop put out about 10% less thrust at 10% less power compared to a Gemfan 8x6 but I'd be afraid to push this noname gear any harder and maxes out at 15A on the ground or about 13A in the air.
• Omnibus F4 Pro V2 flight controller. $17 on eBay at the time and, like most of these parts, has been in a lake.
• 4x SG90 / HXT900 servos
• Flit10 receiver, which gets failsafey between 250m and 600m, but I think I paid $9 for it a couple years ago. Also lake-seasoned. I just put a Crossfire Nano in last night and far run out of FPV before LQI even comes close to warning now.
• Runcam Phoenix V2. This FPV camera. Is. Beautiful. A little oversaturated when the FPV signal is strong but the detail, WDR, sharpness, and lack of shimmer is great. Also pretty good color balance inside and outside. This is the most expensive thing on the model and I can't say enough good things about it.
• 800mW AKK X2M VTX. Got Lake? This guy has. The MMCX connector broke off but I just soldered the Foxeer Lollipop V2 antenna on. The length of the feed line is now a little short but it still works pretty good.
• All up weight ~675g with 2x 3S 1300mAh batteries (2600mAh total) or ~445g dry with all electronics (no gopro).

 

[CapnBry]

I've now flown 350-400km with this iteration of the Galleon DT(FB) and I'm pretty pleased with the capabilities. I broke a prop landing too hard though so I just slapped a new one on. The vibrations were pretty bad but, hey, it is just going to be a 10 minute flight so I'll balance it later. A couple minutes in I decided it was too much and turned around and headed for home. Over the field, I switched to RTH mode and took off my goggles and watched it immediately break apart in the air.

The vibrations were so bad the motor was overheating. It melted through the firewall and came loose, attacking and breaking off one of the V-tail control horns and generally making a mess of everything. The body was a total write-off but all the components are fine. I'm super pleased it waited just long enough to be over home and didn't happen 500m away over the swamp and woods I fly over where I'd have a pretty low chance of recovering any of it. I walked away from the field this day feeling like the Luckiest Man in the World!

 

[Bo123]

What foamboard are you using? I might make something like this, maybe simplfied version.

 

[CapnBry]

It is DTFB, the stuff from Dollar Tree, 30"x20" and almost 5mm thick or FliteTest foam will work too. The main plans are too large to fit on one sheet, because there's a couple extras like the FPV Pod, Nose Cover, and Wing Centerer, but those I usually make out of scraps and the fuselage, v-tail, power pod, and formers all come from the main sheet.

In unsurprising news, I built a new fuselage and I'm back in the air again with Galleon DT number four. The best part is I didn't damage the nose on the maiden so I'm sure this one will remain pristine forever! I put a TBS Tracer receiver in it and oof the lack of penetration is real. I'd get failsafes from 100% LQI to 0 in under a second just because of some dumb trees. I was going to sell my crossfire and go all in on tracer, but now I don't know which to keep.

 

[mperroud]

Hi! this is my GT clone. I was crashed my talon GT. looking in the web, i find your plane on the forum, y try to build using original plastic parts, wings, and vtail. This is what i get. I hope that fly like the original. Im using my very poor skils in 3d desing to print an cowl.

Regards!
Matias, from Argentina

 

[casfra]

Hi all!
I'm very interested in this model, but I want to repurpose some electronics from RC quads.

• 6S LiPo 1300mAh (about 260 grams)
• Xing 2207 motor 1800KV (up to 1.5 kg thrust)
• GoPro Hero 9 (I think aboud 180 grams).

The model should weigh almost 1kg. Furthermore, I'll be constructing it with 6mm depron (3mm for the wing) instead of foam (I've never found a foam supplier in my region).

The depron sheet is 1250mm wide, so I'll be creating a single wing with a 1.25m wingspan. To achieve a Wing Cube Loading (WCL) of 8, the chord length should be around 10 cm (right?).

Could I potentially encounter issues if I proceed with this configuration?