Two steps forward, one step back

I’ve been busy these last few days… First things first

INITAL FLIGHT HARDWARE ASSEMBLY
I’ve scrounged together a bunch of (kinda subpar) parts to use for flight testing while I wait for my grant, meaning I have just enough bits and bobs to bring this thing to life, especially now that (most) of the printed stuff is done (with the exception of the payload bay and outer wings) with “minimal” fit errors (the wings are a bit of a pain but c’est la vie)

GROUND TESTING
I installed flight critical hardware (no data logging yet, coming soon while i print off the next batch of parts… more on that later) and it works! the EDF is more powerful than i expected, and its got a hell of a moment around the COM, which…. yeah, more on that in a minute. The rudder/elevon/aileron things work great as well.

DISASTER
I got over confident and went “Oh yeah I can totally get this thing flying no problem even with half the wings missing and subpar electronics and random test parts in place of a payload bay” (spoiler alert: no) and tried to fly it. the combination of the moment i mentioned earlier, plus limited wing area, plus needing three hands to launch the bloody thing meant that it immediately nose-dived into the dirt… and broke the tail in half, bent the wing spars, bent the frame, and managed to disconnect the trasmitter from the esc… not great

WHAT NEXT
Well, I want to go to outpost, so I’m waiting on final approval there, but in the mean time i’ve done lots of little cad improvements, so now there will be actual connectors between segments, meaning less gaps and hopefully less bending. i’ve also changed the output duct for the EDF, so now it deflects upwards slightly, hopefully offsetting the moment and easing its nose down tendencies. I’ve got a cheeky idea for a wing locking mechanism for the outer edges to allow for a less sketchy take off, but thats not quite ready yet.