Congrats, Tim, another prominent user endorsement from someone with stature. I see that Ashlar are still claiming Burt Rutan on their site, although I remember you saying that he was retiring with Shark and Aeropack. Hmm, Mr. Parks is knowledgeable about ducted fans. I wonder if there's any advantage in using ducts for quadcopters? Aerial photography is a current hobby of mine. There were a couple of experimental US Army Air Corp/Air Force hover aircraft that were ducted fans more-or-less fitted with seats, Moller's SkyCar had quad ducted fans with rotary engines, and there's someone in Christchurch, New Zealand who's developing a ducted-fan jetpack-style personal flyer. Quadcopters generally have guards for the props, a duct could do that, too.
I'm CAD jockey for a guy who's building a plane, but although he persuaded me to do an AutoCAD course that he'd taken two decades and some back, he never progressed in CAD himself. Although he was designing eight-metre diameter commercial satellite dishes, he's been resolutely 2D until now. It's like it's never occurred to him what parametrics and 3D modelling can do over a paper drawing, a guy on Youtube flashes the occasional SW screenshot at him and he has a lightbulb moment! His design is inspired a bit by Rutan's, a bit by Piaggio's Avanti executive turboprop, and a bit by another guy who's productionising a canard he calls Raptor on YouTube. We'll see...We've nothing much to show for our efforts yet, a mold for a canard wing with FFF 3D printed tip molds, planning the carbon fibre layout now. I wanna sticker it over with wool tufts and video the flow, put it on a pylon on his truck's flatbed and take a few runs up and down the road, see how much downforce it adds, not to mention cred with the street machine crew.
Edited by user Sunday, March 3, 2019 7:44:02 PM(UTC)
| Reason: Not specified
