Great work
Looking good! Nice work chaps. The only downside is poor old Vulture 1 is starting to look like a spray painted egg box by comparison. Where is the old girl resting up, anyway? The Smithsonian?
The nylon dust has almost settled on the epic design and build saga of our Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) Vulture 2 spaceplane as 3D printer 3T RPD Ltd fires up the machine to craft the last pieces of our revolutionary aircraft. Yes indeed, ladies and gentlemen, the crack design team of Southampton Uni postgrads …
Perhaps learn from the Mercury program where engineers saw astronauts simply as passengers but reacted to complaints and included a hatch with explosive bolts, a decent-sized window and manual controls? All lovingly rendered in trompe-l'œil, of course - http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/lores/S61-03698.jpg
Does it really only have rudders?
I know it already has two control surfaces more than Vulture 1 had and that's laudable, but just rudders seems like a bit of an issue if that's the case. Or does it have elevons as well (in which case rudders are a bit excessive...)
Has anyone built a foam mockup of this to check how it flies, where the CG should be etc.? It shouldn't be too difficult to do as an RC model and could easily be tested at high speeds with a ducted fan motor or even hobby rockets.
"Has anyone built a foam mockup of this to check how it flies"
That's a good idea. Build a sort of, what do we call it, prototype, yeah, that's it, a prototype. Maybe we could use some of that newfangled nylon on one of those clever 3D printers often that are supposed to be good for "rapid, one off, prototyping". Great idea!
I design and fly model slope-soarers, and I wonder about the use of wingtip rudders on a high aspect-ratio wing like that.
The rudders will have a secondary effect of drag, and that will be acting at quite a distance from the CG. It might not be an issue at low deflections, but you might find that at high deflections the model drops the inside wing and goes into a spin. Although the rudders should keep biting the air during such a spin, it's never a good idea to put a lot of weight in the wingtips of a plane prone to spinning - it makes it hard to recover.
Still, if somone's tested the design, maybe it's fine....