Skylab RC rocket glider

I always thought the Centuri Skylab was neat but never had one. Being left alone for the weekend my mindsim got the better of me and decided to do an RC rocket glider themed version.

I sat down and did some mass balancing Sims to convince myself weight and dimensions would work and the location if the wing and lateral stability, then looked in my parts drawer. I had some 2" tubing and 2.6". I picked up a bt20 nose cone pack and two white motor tubes for the tail thruster.

I thought styrofam coffee cups might work for the transition and nose and lo and behold the base of the cups were 2".

I also found some small paper cups and they nested in the base of the foam cups to extend the nose. I doubled the foam cups for support and used a Depron disk in between them for stiffness and glued a coupler through the base for a shoulder.

I used a doubled cup for the transition.

I'm using an 11" chord 27" span Depron wing with two carbon spars.

Glide tests are done and it is looking good. I picked up some gold monokote trim for the wing/solar panels because I think it will look better than silver.

It's 43" long and 27" span and 7.25 oz dry, rtf should be right around 11 oz which is my sweet spot, looks like CG will not require nose weight.

I'll cover the foam nose with white vinyl to protect it. I picked up some aluminum tube for rail button standoffs because the nose diameter is larger than the rear by 1/2".

Wow! Let us know how it flies. I too am trying to scratch build stuff. I run into a quandary with nose cones. I have used red plastic cups, dixie cups, and old caps of laundry bottles. Your nose cone looks clean and smooth.

Here she is with the solar panel detail..

Added some more details, now just work with stickershock for some UNITED STATES and SL6 lettering

Finished covering the nose and adding locating stripes and ports....

Very cool.

Super impressive!

burkefj said:

I always thought the Centuri Skylab was neat but never had one. Being left alone for the weekend my mindsim got the better of me and decided to do an RC rocket glider themed version.

I sat down and did some mass balancing Sims to convince myself weight and dimensions would work and the location if the wing and lateral stability, then looked in my parts drawer. I had some 2" tubing and 2.6". I picked up a bt20 nose cone pack and two white motor tubes for the tail thruster.

I thought styrofam coffee cups might work for the transition and nose and lo and behold the base of the cups were 2".

I also found some small paper cups and they nested in the base of the foam cups to extend the nose. I doubled the foam cups for support and used a Depron disk in between them for stiffness and glued a coupler through the base for a shoulder.

I used a doubled cup for the transition.

I'm using an 11" chord 27" span Depron wing with two carbon spars.

Glide tests are done and it is looking good. I picked up some gold monokote trim for the wing/solar panels because I think it will look better than silver.

It's 43" long and 27" span and 7.25 oz dry, rtf should be right around 11 oz which is my sweet spot, looks like CG will not require nose weight.

I'll cover the foam nose with white vinyl to protect it. I picked up some aluminum tube for rail button standoffs because the nose diameter is larger than the rear by 1/2".

Click to expand...

Very impressive

Super cool!

Got the stickershock decals to finish off the skylab RC RG and got in some test flights today, was a bit more windy than I wanted and I had to keep the nose down into the headwind to keep it from balooning but overall not bad.

Always surprises me with how quickly you go from concept to successful finished model. Don't know how you do it, man does anything you create ever not work?

Thank you. I think things through for a while before I start so have a generally good idea of whether they will work or not and once I have confidence the build goes pretty quick. I have several things that I never built because I was pretty sure they wouldn't work and I hate failure. I've had two designs that I just couldn't get to work that I thought would, one was an upscale x24 bug, the cone shaped lifting body not the actual lifting body x24, it kept flopping upside down, and an x37b that had such a small CG range boost was ok but glide was uncontrollable. I saved the fuselage and turned it into a buran that flies great. And I had one upscale mach 10 that got too heavy and required so much power to fly that the wing fluttered and failed, it had an 8" diameter.

burkefj said:

Thank you. I think things through for a while before I start so have a generally good idea of whether they will work or not and once I have confidence the build goes pretty quick. I have several things that I never built because I was pretty sure they wouldn't work and I hate failure. I've had two designs that I just couldn't get to work that I thought would, one was an upscale x24 bug, the cone shaped lifting body not the actual lifting body x24, it kept flopping upside down, and an x37b that had such a small CG range boost was ok but glide was uncontrollable. I saved the fuselage and turned it into a buran that flies great. And I had one upscale mach 10 that got too heavy and required so much power to fly that the wing fluttered and failed, it had an 8" diameter.

Click to expand...

What do you use to sim/prototype? Rocksim and OpenRocket both seem geared more toward rocket design and stability vs glider design and feasibility (I could be wrong and just not familiar enough to know a workaround for gliders).

I use either geometry or a CG calculator call Bruder Wing calc to get a starting CG for the wing along with some experience and judgement for how much the forward fuselage isis goi to impact the CG location. then I'll be able to model in open Rocket that doesn't have the wings but just has the vertical stabilizer and the same vertical stabilizer at 90° to that so I can see what my yaw cp location is going to be. I then remove the extra vertical stabilizer at 90 degrees then locate my wing on the model so that I know that the cg for flights is going to be with some margin ahead of the yaw cp. in some cases I'll use rocks em if my yaw stability looks marginal just to verify and use their stability equations instead of borrowman.
then I'll add in all the masses of the receiver servos battery components, the weights of the wing material in the tubes and then look at how much balast it looks like it's going to require. then I'll play around with wing location and length and battery and Servo placements that I can minimize the extra nose weight that I might need. once I've got something that I think will work and that meets the weight limit, I'll do some indoor Glide tests as I assemble it before I put all the equipment in to verify that the CG location looks good. I usually start with a slightly tail heavy center of gravity for Boost. usually once I've done that the first flight is usually pretty good or maybe just marginally tail heavy but not so bad that I can't control it and add nose wait to get it dialed in.

Sounds complicated.
Thanks for the methodology info though, it helps point me in the right direction.

Forgot to ask: what's "rocks em"? An app?

Rocksim that's what I get for trying to use voice to type messages.