- Joined
- Mar 5, 2017
- Messages
- 1,917
- Reaction score
- 806
Any chance that the position of the components is different after an apogee deployment than it is when you are doing test flights on the ground? In other words, the action of the aerial deployment may be positioning the wings or other components slightly different than when you are ground testing. One thing you could try and is that if it is flying well on ground test and you launch it and it doesn't fly well would be to take the immediately recovered rocket and try to do ground test tosses with it. Does it still glide well or does it porpoise like the flight? My suspicion is that there is something "slightly "different between the position of the components when deployed on an actual flight than when you are ground testing. Another possibility is that aerial deployment initial forward velocity is near zero (essentially like just releasing it in dead air at altitude rather than the forward momentum imparted with a ground level "toss") that's always a challenge for configuration transition type gliders (as opposed to @iter 's gliders that use remote control to transition their vertical velocity to horizontal velocity). Swing wing, pop pod, elevator release mechanisms have to assume the glider starts with zero velocity in dead air.
As far as I can tell everything is in proper alignment when the wings deploy. I did try some hand tosses immediately after it's initial flight and it glided nice and level, which is why I'm at a loss to figure out what's up with it when it's launched. After it lawn-darted on its second flight I'm going to have to rebuild the motor pod/piston and retry it with a few grams of nose weight to see what it does.
Serendipitously I was gifted with another Swinger kit by a fellow club member so I'm going to build that one completely stock and see how it flies. I'll be able to compare the two to see if I can spot any differences at all in the lifting surfaces or alignment of components. Hopefully I can discover the culprit, which would make for a very valuable learning experience.