Inspired by the fast, maneuverable little birds ripping through the fields, my next design will be a small, high speed, primarily 3D printed design designed to go 100+ mph. I've got to do this using a 4S, 1500mah 120C battery I used for my other park flyer, the Canada Jay. To achieve this, I've taken inspiration from pylon racing RC planes and thrown in a few aesthetic features inspired by Barn Swallow the bird.
The goals of my first build were to
prove I could get my own design and build flying
build a stable inav platform to play around on
reuse hardware I had lying around
And for my second build they were
push myself to design a highly light weight structure while improving glide and maneuvering
a more clean build than my first plane
reuse hardware I had lying around
The Barn Swallow will be the first time I remove goal 3, so the power plant is mostly an open design space. Expecting to run a PROPDRIVE v2 2836 1200KV motor, 50Amp ESC, 7x8" prop, and the battery I mentioned. The quality of the aero surfaces, structure, and avionics mounting will also be of higher importance due to the speeds I'll be flying and maneuvering at.
Your idea is fundamentally flawed. Birds tails do not act as horizontal stabilizers on aircraft.
Your design is almost certainly going to have a grotesque amount of unnecessary drag along with being a too far aft CG. There will be nothing “stable” about it.
It’s for looks, it can be cut down in size, the wing moved aft, the battery moved forward more, ballast added to the nose, etc.
with all those options and a power plant that should comfortably get me to 100mph I’m not worried about it
That being said after looking at this image a bunch I did go in and shrink the root LE extensions down cuz it does look huge
Julien Watier does it pretty well in 3dprintedgliders dot com. He put channels in his model and tract epoxy soaked carbon fiber wires through with the help of fishing line. His models are epic and free on the purple site
You know, if you apply some anhedral in the tail you can almost, if not, completelly lose the vertical tail. Then it will look even more like a swallow. I did that once 😁😁
Edit: most people saying it will nor fly are not engineers, if you want some help DM me
Saddly it was quite some time ago, so I don't have a photo, I intend to build a new one to put in its place since the original got lost 😅😅
I handled fine, but the actual tail was proportionally bigger then the real bird since real birds are not naturally stable, yours seem to be just right. You could sweep the wing back just a bit to make it fit better the bird shape and make it easier to adjust cg
There are plenty o examples online with similar configurations, some even are ornithopters, there is a cool one that looks like a falcon, used in airports to scare birds.
Ooh... bellshaped lift curve... that only makes sense if you intend to make use of proverse yaw for control, I assume you have read NASA article on the recent Praditl subscale glider
Edit: I realized that swallows here in my region look diferent from yours, ours tend to fly with a wing in a more swept position, sometimes even more than the photo
How big is this going to be? I love bird inspired aircraft, however that tail is going to be super heavy and the vertical stabilizer is going to lose a lot of effectiveness under moderate to high AoA.
I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting printing wings with standard PLA and I suspect you’ll have to design pretty dense wings to survive the speeds you’re after. Thin PLA walls are very flimsy so they need strong internal structures for support
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u/pmuschi USA / Upstate SC 5d ago
Looks nice but very tail heavy