JonB wrote:Anyone have advice for flying at Nationals in this huge room? If you have not seen the room:
http://www.scienceolympiad2015.com/Docu ... Photos.pdf
We fly in a 24ft gym. We do not even completely know how to approach a ~60ft ceiling. Should we increase the torque with a thicker motor to get it up to the maximum height the room allows but then lose out on the winds a thinner motor would give us? This room is going to lead to some crazy times at nationals!
The best way to simulate a higher ceiling is to fly partial motors. There is a nice description of this on Ray Harlan's website:
http://www.indoorspecialties.com/index1.html
You could use a half motor, as described in the article, to simulate 48 feet, or use a 40% motor to simulate 60. This would be 0.8 g of rubber with a dummy stick of 1.2 g that is 60% as long as your prop to rear hook distance. Tie up some partial loops of different rubber sizes, and optimize each for a no touch flight just up below the 24 ft. ceiling. Whichever gives you the longest flight is the size to use. As Ray says in his article, this will get you close, but the best launch torque may be a bit less or more than the partial loop suggests. And of course, there are the other factors such as temperature and loop to loop variations, etc.
In general, I think that you will want to fly slightly
smaller rubber than you would use in a lower ceiling. Then, you increase the launch torque to get you to the top, and you still have lots of turns on which to cruise and descend. Another benefit of flying partial motors is that you get to see how your plane behaves when you launch it at a higher torque. Does the motorstick bend or twist, causing a problem? This would be difficult to check otherwise, unless you were willing to really bang around in the rafters. If you need to launch at a higher torque than your plane will tolerate, you might consider lowering the propeller pitch, as a lower pitch will often climb better. If you do this, of course, you will also want to downsize the rubber.
We have used this technique previously for simulating our State site, which is about 1 1/2 times the height of our gym. So we use 2/3 loops. It seems to work pretty well.