A Mace, Menace and an ALCM walk into a bar.....

Well, not really.....

So I've had a desire to do an RC RG Mace or Matador, I like that 50's-60's era cruise missile look.... I've seen Mace and Matador missiles up close in Albequerque and at wright patterson, and I read a good book called US air force tactical missiles which talks about the deployment of these...

For the design, I was worried about having a stiff enough control mechanism for the t tail for pitch was worried about the tail weight. The T tail is too small as is for enough pitch authority for the CG shift. I thought maybe I could do just elevons on the wing like on a snark, but the wings are pretty far forward and I wasn't sure of the pitch effectiveness of the elevons on a wing that far forward, whether I'd have to move the cg a lot or not, flying wings don't handle cg shift for motor burnout in an rc rg as well as nicely as model with a tail....Also, the chord on the wing is pretty small so cutting an elevon out takes a lot of the wing and I was worried about wing flex and losing a lot of the lift with the movable surfaces...so I sort of shelved the idea....

Then the other day I saw a posting about morerockets.com and noticed the Menace kit....at the same time I was posting about a PNC-80B nose cone and found one in a box to take a picture, and realized, hey I have a nose cone here.....

I've previously done a triangle fused A model ALCM and the Menace looked like a round tube version of an ALCM, I thought about an upscaled menace but that's almost the same look as the ALCM...

Maybe I could do a mashup with upscaled menace wings, ALCM full flying elevators for roll and pitch, do the vertical tail like a Mace and steal the Menace/ALCM style markings...

and here is the mutant result.....

Nice mutant...waiting for the paint scheme and decals.

Big forward fins are usually a bad thing aren't they?

Not when it is supposed to glide and I'm steering it

hobie1dog said:

Big forward fins are usually a bad thing aren't they?

Click to expand...

Ok, I've done what I can so far, panel lines, did some trim vinyl on the bottom to simulate the Mace engine intake and to fake a little boat tail effect on the bottom when viewed from the side, waiting for shark teeth, stars and bars and usaf plus the red stripes and cg markings from Stickershock to finish it. The rectangles in the middle of the wings are supposed to simulate where the fingered spoilers would come up and down out of the wing.

Frank

My wife and daughter were real troopers, it was still about 25 degrees out but went out to the flying field with me, the runway was still about 9" thick powder and I had three great flights. The boost and glider were almost spot on, it was just a tad pitch sensitive, so I added about 5-6 grams of extra nose weight and it was very nice, just about hands off boost and a really nice glide...We managed not to get stuck in the snow on the way out, added bonus!

[video=youtube;x9NN00HFAFs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9NN00HFAFs&feature=youtu.be[/video]

Got my vinyl from Mark at stickershock and finished it up, doesn't look too bad!

I'm also doing one with a different tail more like an ALCM with the intake on the top, and moved the wing back an inch to give me a sub 11 oz flying weight with no nose weight required, here it is framed up. I showed it to Mark at stickershock and he said it looks just like the other one....I told him he sounded like my wife

Really great all around. Great design, beautiful looking rocket, boost looked perfect to me, and nice long controlled flight (I am amazed at how long your flights are given how little wing surface area you have on a lot of these birds.

here is the ALCM themed version completed, 11.25 ounces, wing moved back an inch to allow me to remove all of the nose weight.

As someone who flies scale RC aircraft, I am very impressed with the look of your models, Frank.

The problem with an all-white model (or all-silver, or all-red,..) is that decal placement is particularly hard to get 'right'. And errors show up all too easily.

Your ALCM 'look' model would be appreciated at the RC scale fun flys I have been to. :wink:

Thank you, I appreciate that.

Here are some flights from yesterday.

[video=youtube;t3BYrMHO28M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3BYrMHO28M[/video]