Recent content by starbird

There are EDF systems for aircraft much larger than this. They can put out similar or better performance than the older .80 and .90 glow DF. The trick is sizing the inlets and exhaust, which needs to be a certain percentage of the fan area. If the inlets are too small, the fan can't put out...

Should practice spot landings. Its one of the things that makes a better pilot. Just bring the throttle to idle at a random time during a flight and try to touch down right in front of you (passing left to right or vice versa of course). After some practice you'll be able to bring the plane down...

It depends on the switches you use. The little box I made uses SPDT switches, which essentially act as 2 individual buttons. In most sims you can assign one button to an on position, and another to the off. This way the switches never go out of sync or anything. The downside is that you only...

I started with fixed wing about 20 years ago and helis about 7. Haven't been able to fly much in the last few years since going back to school. I found helis to be much easier to handle than everyone was saying. You just need to be careful about the setup and balance everything. Practicing on...

According to ICAO, troposphere goes up to 11km, not 10km. (I haven't actually looked in the orbiter docs to see how martin does it) Your temperature gradient should just be -6.5 Kelvin per km. So at 10km the temperature is -6.5*10 = 233.15 . If you wanted a formula it would be T(h)=288.15 -...

Pretty sure I posted this before, but this is the video of a Gemini reentry. You can see how much the onboard systems fine tuned the trajectory. YouTube - Gemini 9a re-entry Capsules are designed with an offset CG so that you can roll the craft around to point the lift vector for steering...

There was a design iteration where they were thinking of using small fins. I think the worry was that the TVC system wouldn't be fast enough to keep the correct end pointing forward. At some point it was found that the TVC should work, and the fins were dropped. There should be discussion...

Cassini used an even more elaborate flight path. http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=776

Incidence and angle of attack are 2 different things. Angle of Attack is the angle that the wind is hitting the wing, compared to the mean chord line. Incidence is the difference between chord lines, these are compared to say, wing and tail, or wing and thurst line, or wing and fuselage...