Fierce Little Wings
After flying combat sessions for about three months, Dave North and I are gradually figuring out Small-Wing Combat.
Mike Nadler liked to say about streamer combat: “The only rule is there are no rules!”
We’ve adopted Mike’s no-rules-rule as a starting point, but you gotta have some definition.
So far, these are the rules:
- In order to qualify for combat, your wing must be 24-30 inches in span.
- If you hit another wing, good! If your hit smacks the other wing to the ground, you score a kill unless you also immediately crash, in which case it’s a no-credit event.
- If your plane lands prematurely it’s a kill, but no one gets credit.
- Flying sessions are 9 minutes in duration. If you’re still able to fly after a premature landing, launch your plane!
Obviously, the rules are in flux as we gain experience. I suspect that as we refine the guidelines we’ll probably add limits on motor size and over-all weight.
About 6 Ounces. A typical Small-Wing Combat airship is 24-30 inches in span, powered by a little brushless inrunner (Feigao or Medusa 12mm 4000KV) or outrunner. Prop sizes range from 3×2 to 3×3 to slightly larger. Batteries are 2S or 3S LiPos ranging between 400MAh and 650MAh. Usual all-up weight is 6 ounces, plus or minus an ounce or two.
The Mini Speed Wing is a good candidate for Small-Wing Combat. At $29.95, it’s inexpensive and it’s made of resilient EPP, which laughs off crashes and most collisions.
When I build a Mini Speed Wing, I leave off the wooden keel, which I think adds weight without offering significant strength. I also embed a bowed carbon-fiber ribbon across the wing to stiffen it.
No Extra Weight. I don’t add any unnecessary weight. If the wing is nose heavy, as many are, move the motor forward.
We welcome other small wings. Mike Bigby has whacked me good with his Hyper Flea and Dave North started out with a 30-inch flat-airfoil wing from SloFly.
When we began, Dave maintained that it was impossible for two wings to hit each other, and for a week or two he was correct.
But then he and I flew enough to begin to understand the physics of combat and soon we were hitting each other, occasionally at first and then more regularly. Now we sometimes collide as many as four times in a single session.
Add more wings, and mayhem increases. So far, our maximum combat bout included four planes.
Maximize Contact. The keys to maximum contact are these:
- Tighten your pattern. Don’t fly from one end of the field to another.
- Slow down. Accelerate only when you’re chasing a target or trying to get away.
- Vary your movement. Loop, roll, speed up, slow down. Sometimes Dave evades me by flying slowly in a straight line. That’s frustrating!
- Fly low to increase the probability that you or your foe will hit the ground after a collision.
Other than that, I’m not sure what we do. This sort of flying is instinctual, reflexive, not analytic. Your targets are moving in unpredictable patterns. You don’t have time to think.
I’m still surprised at how relaxed I am at flying inverted in the heat of combat. I don’t consider my orientation. I just do what I have to do.
Wind is great—gusts blow you in surprising directions. No wind is fun—you’re your own worst enemy.
Near misses are frequent. Sometimes it seems as if the wings align themselves at a molecular level so they can pass through each other. And seeing your shadow slash across another wing is almost as good as hitting it.
Every now and then, time stops. You find yourself in a perfect position, advancing on your opponent and you thrill as you whack into him.
It’s a Surprise! More often you’re surprised by a strike, not sure if you’re the target or the bullet.
Often the impact spins both wings around. Then it’s up to you to straighten out and stay in the air, hoping that your adversary succumbs to gravity.
Either way, you win. This is lots of fun.
Read more about Wing to Wing Combat. (Top photo by Don Cohn. Bottom photo by Don Dvorak.)
December 17th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Reading this I realized there’s at least an internal naming convention growing up around the various kinds of hits. And I’m a lousy square dance caller.
Having nearly forgotten my high school education, I’ve been referring to the “tiplet hook” hit (where both planes hook their wing ends and go spinning off — more common that you’d guess) as a do-si-do. But it’s not: that would be closer to the near-miss lateral fly-bys. The tiplet hook is more properly an Allemande, which sounds cooler anyway.
Today’s invention was the “nose boink,” a fairly rare event where one plane centerpunches the other and bounces off.
Probably the most common is the acute-angle smack, which makes a satisfying slap. There are brush-bys, wing whacks and prop strikes.
Technical note: I use a 5043 prop (five-inch diameter) and batteries from 460 MAH all the way up to 800 MAH, the latter being pigs that are really too big, but I use ‘em if everything else is run down.
December 18th, 2007 at 11:43 am
I don’t know about this square-dance terminology, Dave. Here are the impact categories I can reconstruct, using alternate category names:
The last four need a bit of explanation. A Smackdown is when one wing descends on another, pushing the target down. Smackup comes from below, going up. Right-Angle is like an egret spearing a gopher, the opponent coming nose-first and fast from above, below or either side of the target. A tick is a barely-noticeable momentary bump.
I’ve seen all of these in our combat, except for sideways right angles. But I’ll bet I see those soon, too.