Designs

Flying Pig

I think I read some place to the effect that it would be a good idea  to keep it down under 250 lbs.

That may not be possible for the prototype that I have in mind. We'll see.

After watching a number of youtube videos, I think an almost jetski style saddle might make sense. The seating has to be comfortable.

Here is a Blender rendering of my windscreen. It might be a useful accessory. We'll see.



Here we have an unpolished rendition of the saddle.



Just finished the conceptual design and rendering of the landing skids. It looks fine, but it will undoubtedly need a few engineering tweaks. LOL. I haven't read any aircraft engineering books, yet.



I've been trying to express the frame for some days, now. You can think of the frame as sitting atop the landing skids. The saddle is set upon the frame, not unlike a saddle is applied to a horse, or whatever. The fans get attached to the ends of the frame. The back left arm of the frame is a mirror of the front left arm, and the right side of the frame is a mirror of the left side of the frame. That's pretty simple, but getting that one quarter of the frame onto the drawing board, so to speak, is a challenge, so far. Basically, it's a simplified horn shape. For some reason, it has not been as easy to "draw" in Blender as it seems to be to describe in English words. Oh well, I'll accomplish it, eventually.

Okey dohkey! Here is the preliminary expression of the frame. The background is that: I learned another trick of mirroring. I realized I needed to "edge loop" and "edge slide" only up to the "fan arm". The "fan arm" is then extruded and it's end is resized smaller.



The frame will not be a continuous surface (as illustrated here), rather I envision it more like a motorcycle frame that may or may not be skinned for aerodynamics or aesthetics.

Next up the fan housing! The fans will be housed to hopefully channel the air for better thrust as well as for safety. Safety alone is a good enough reason to house the fans, propellers...

Here is the basic propeller housing. This assembly may evolve alot. It has to deal with yaw and hold a motor or engine. Some control and signal electronics/electrics will be integrated, too.



I think this is enough design to produce a working scale RC model.

The rest of the design/development and testing is all about safety, human factors and performance.