Found this site,plenty of designs of aircraft that might have been..
Take a look at:
http://home.att.net/~dannysoar/FantasySectionIntro.htm

What do you think?Lots more links to see once you are there.
I think it's inspirational.

Matt

I have played Crimson Skies in the past and would love to make a few of the planes but don't think I have the skills to scratch build yet...

any ideas?

My favorite site for fantasy planes is Luft 46

www.luft46.com

Love those Nazi wunder weapons

If anyone remembers an old B & W SciFi movie called "Things to Come" - it featured an aerial attack by huge flying wing bomber/transports. Some three or four years back, I got some photos of a multi electric version that was seen to fly pretty good at E-vents in England.

Some of these fantasy planes can work - if you can live with a little license to stay within the laws of aerodynamics, of course.

Most of International Rescue's Thunderbirds have flown in England, under various powers and means of control though (if all else fails, small control-line will usually work!)

Regards

Dereck

I have played Crimson Skies in the past and would love to make a few of the planes but don't think I have the skills to scratch build yet...

any ideas?

I was working on an idea of the main characters plane ffrom crimson skies by modifying an XP-55 Ascender to a bi-plane configuration and such but got put off on to something else, never finished it.

Being new to the R/C crowd I've got alot of bad ideas probably but it's fun to find out for myself.

I also did some checking with the resident R/C ac experts I know (they got me in this mess to begin with) and there are several of the Crimson Skies ac that have very short nose or tail monments and would be very difficult to balance, but then again there are several that I think would be very possible to build and fly

WOW!

Vintage1 was right! This is the right thread! I too am an avid CrimsonSkies nut (both boardgame and computer game) and have been pondering building RCs of them!

For those of you who have played the boardgame (the old FASA game and not the new WizKids product), you'll be familiar with how easy and fun it is to design your own aircraft! So, having designed my own:



I suppose one could call it the freakish lovechild of a Devastator and a Fury, minus the upper wing of the Devastator and nigh-useless tail assembly of the Fury!

I've actually started a number of threads around here discussing power options, controls and so on. I'm a very big fan of pusher-puller designs like the Dornier335 which is why I opted for that particular arrangement.

At the moment, I'm going for two 400 motors, either direct drive or slightly geared depending on my initial flight tests. I'm going to have an aileron servo in each outer wing section, a servo for the canards, and due to the trouble of rigging the twin rudders outboard of the anhedral inner wing sections, I have instead decided to use a steerable nosewheel/inverted rudder arrangement and put the main gear inside the fixed vertical stabilizers at the rear.

I'm going to assemble and carve/sand the whole thing out of 2" slices of blue foam for the fuselage and wirecut wings. If I were building this as a larger gas kit, I would probably fiberglass the fuselage and balsa sheet the wings. I'll post the crude doodle I did of the inverted nosewheel rudder thingy, unless I have a chance to modify my CAD plans first! ^_~

I think you'll find if you want to tackle the basic CrimsonSkies planes, I think the Devastator is probably the most flyable of the bunch! Depending on the scale however, I'd probably stick to the LG layout I've described here, and I would have ailerons on the upper wings connected to the lower ailerons as I've seen on several Pitts Special kits!

Anyhoo, I'll keep y'all posted on how the project goes!

Cheers!

LK

Another point, is that I'm not sure the Bell Ascender is the right choice as the base for a Devastator. It's a little thin and lanky, whereas the Devastator is rather "fat" with huge chord on it's wings.

Scratchbuilding is the best way to go in my opinion, but if you don't have the tools, the time and the patience, it might be possible to cannibalize wing sections and fuselages from other kits!

Another really good bird to model would be the Bloodhawk. In fact, this plane is based off a German design which can be found on the Luft46 site. The Warhawk is also there, but I don't know how far that particular design got off the drawing boards!

Another good source of "alternate" aircraft design would be the LuftKrieg boardgame put out by DreamPod9. It's attached to their GearKrieg game which is based on an alternate history WW2 scenario where all the crazy far out ideas of the pulp genre (jetpacks, walking tanks, tesla guns, etc) actually came to pass!

They really did their homework for that game, as it features more than a few designs featured on the Luft46 site, and for the Allies, many of the birds featured here:

http://sfstation.members.easyspace.com/allyx.htm

Anyhow, I'm really happy to have found this forum and people as disturbingly obsessed about aircraft as me! ^_^

LK

I suppose one could call it the freakish lovechild of a Devastator and a Fury, minus the upper wing of the Devastator and nigh-useless tail assembly of the Fury!


That's quite a sharp looking machine! It been quite q while since I actually played the computer game but is the Devastator the red and black machine of the main character? If so the plan I'm tossing about has alot of the look of the devastaor but the wings would be an inverted gull for the lowers and regular gull for the uppers w/ a bubble canopy, flying canards with the vertical stabs between the outer wing panels w/ rudders attached, I was pondering the landing gear question when the project got shelved.

I'd like to hear more of your ideas and see more of your plans as you go along

Tracy

I've used the general layout of the Ascender but fattened her up a bit to help fit everything in so to speak.

I'd noticed one of the planes looking a bit like some of the Luft 46 birds just didn't know which one.

I love building and scratch is my favorite way to do it so I'm all set to get some radical stuff on the work bench privided the time ever surfaces

Tracy

Hi Tracy!

Thanks!

Yup, the Devastator is the red and black machine you start of with! It's funny, last time I played through the game, I was quite a big fan of the Fury *pauses to look up at the Fury and Brigand miniatures stuck to the top of the monitor* having gone so far as to build a rather huge Fury out of Lego! *lol* But as far as building an RC version of such, I'm thinking getting the balance right and any decent amount of pitch control would be a little awkward!

Now that I'm playing the game again (always fun with new hardware to make everything look prettier!), I've become quite fond of the Devastator. I think it's the most original and beautiful aircraft in the game! Heh.. My usual bird is called "Miss Sixty", named that because of the twin .60 caliber machine guns and the sixty points of armor all around!

Yeah, I'll get my LG design up when I get home. You know, I really wasn't all that crazy about fixed LG, but now that I've hidden it in streamlined and functional fairings, it's seems like a masterstroke! But I've got to credit the nosewheel/rudder combo to my buddy Eric He promptly suggested it when I mentioned I was thinking of going with only elevator and ailerons! *lol* He's the electrical engineer amongst us two. I'm the one who he says is capable of sticking loose parts in a bag, shaking it and an aircraft pops out! *lol* What can I say? Epoxy and packing tape are my friends!

What's even cooler is that if I decide to stick floats on my beasty (I'm as much of a seaplane fanatic as I am of Warbirds!), I can pop out the nosewheel and stick a dagger like extension on the inverted rudder, and voila! I've got a water rudder! *grin* Having tried to taxi floatplanes without, that's going to be a definite advantage!

Yeah, floatplanes are fun. That's what happens when you find yourself with a GWS e-starter, some styrofoam packing material, some copper wire, a good battery, a coat hanger and four spare hours followed by a weekend at a lakeside cottage! ^_^

Anyhoo, I'll catch ya later!

LK

Pitch will definitely be a problem, all things considered it'll be a bear but bigger I think will be better in the long run.

c'ya later

Tracy

Hmm... I don't know, depending on the placement of the CG and the size of the canards it shouldn't be tooooo hard...

[edit] sorry guys, had to clean up some webspace, so I had to take the pics of the Devastator with LG down!


LK

I think this is a great thread. Everyone with a bit of imagination should post up the plane not that WAS but OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN.

If some of them get built, so much the better.

Now how about those weird flying squirrels?

I mean Ripmax Alienator. Total rubbish.

Ive got an idea. Pointy nose, then two delta wings - like a dartboard dart, but much bigger 'flights' with a huge pusher prop on the back and 4 servos one for each wing, and mixing so it can fly any which way up..sometimes its v tail, sometimes elevons and rudder.
...
To launch, it stands on its tail and goes straight up
Mmm. AND the prop needs to be in front of the 'allinoneavons' for control authority in hover

I do like the CS planes and the idea of fantasy scale.

An old Air Progress mag had a neat article on fantasy homebuilt aircraft. They had some wild ideas like a triple size J-3 cub. This came out about the size of a DC-3. It had a spiral staircase up to the flight deck and a roomy lower lounge for your freinds. Power was a 1000 hp radial hidden in the cowl, turning a huge prop via a reduction unit.

They also had a small B-17 homebuilt, with a prone pilot and 4 small motors. It was about the span of a normal J-3.

Back to the root idea of fantasy scale. Some plastic model sites and meets dabble in this. Things like Gee Bees in war paint, interesting kit bashes of two or three aircraft combined into one.

I once built a retirement display model for a great engineer freind. He had worked on a number of Convair/General Dynamics/Lockheed programs and I built a model that had the fuse of an F-16, the vertical tail from a B-36, the nose of a B-58 and the horizontail tails of an F-111, all blended together. Great fun.

I've been ruminating a bit and i believe there are quite a few "stealable" parts from the late WWII x-planes generated byt the U.S. and other countries. What tipped me was the landing gear pics of the devastator, the nose section looks alot like the twin boom pusher that went up against the xp-55.

LedKitty,

Your damselfly looks alot like the Hwaker seafury around the engines and cockpit so there's a good place to start I'm thinking. I'll be tracking down the drawings I have of the wannbe devastator and the XP-54 I think twin boom pusher and see what can be devised.

Anybody got anymore ideas, don't want this thread to slip into oblivion