pain, suffering, and redesigns

So, cloud diver flight test 1 has been postponed. One of the rudderons broke and i couldn’t fix it so i need to redesign the part.

In other news, V3 work has begun and its quite a bit different. The older designs had a problem with being very large and heavy for what they needed to do, which meant that at full load (about 1.3kg total) cloud diver would need to get going about 30 miles and hour to even begin to fly. Needless to say this was a bit impractical, so I’ve scrapped most of the fuselage design to make something a bit better (hopefully). What was the fuselage is now the payload, which will be almost entirely self contained, only having a wire or two for signaling with the flight controller, which leads me to the second bit, which is that it will have a proper onboard flight controller (once i can get one). The biggest change is a new central wing section (based on a 6412 aerofoil for added lift) increasing total wing area by about 25%, and a new twin boom design which will have one boom for electronics (flight computer, ESC, etc) and the other for the battery, with some holes in the middle wing for wiring and whatnot and some 1/4 inch aluminium piping for the tail struts. New mount for the wing retraction servo isnt modeled yet. Between additional wing area, some fiddling with the EDF mount and the hopefully massive drop in dead weight (the tail struts will only weigh 28 grams, the old tail assembly was nearly 125), and some proper landing gear it will be less of a hazard to fly.