Hi all,
Many thanks for the great inputs re the struts and floats (thanks also Frank for correcting my poor German – I have now capitalised the “S” in “see”). Hi Alexis - indeed this is 1/48 scale
I actually am an aeronautical engineer by training so I am slightly embarrassed that I perhaps didn’t think it through as much as I should have; I went more for looks than actual practicality! To be honest, I was thinking more so the way in which the Albatros set up the struts on the W4, which are long and fairly straight up and down:
That being said, that was a larger and heavier aircraft. In thinking this one through, the comments make sense regards the relationship between the engine thrust line, the centre of gravity of the aircraft, and distance to the floats (both the float centre line and centre of gravity). A bigger gap between the thrust line and the floats horizontally, and a smaller gap between the aircraft centre of gravity relative to the float centre of gravity, will indeed create a bigger rotational moment forward. The way to deal with this is to lower that gap and push the centre of gravity of the floats forward, the combination of which counters the forward rotation of the aircraft as more thrust is applied. This, in turn, necessitates the floats being angled upwards more to avoid ‘digging in’ to the water.
The Hanriot HD2 is an example of how this engineering has occurred:
The HD2 has a squat, low set and low distance between the fuselage and floats, some forward angling of the struts, and upwards angle on the floats. The squatness of this design means that these angles and relative positions of floats to fuselage don’t have to be too extreme, but they are there.
This kind of squat look would, I think, not suit the triplane aesthetically – she’s a tall aircraft so I think there’s a balance, looks wise. So somewhere in here I want to apply the adage of “if it looks right, it’ll fly right”. Accordingly, I have shortened the struts up a little, angled them further forward, and raised the incidence (angle) of the floats. I do agree this is a better look that accords a little more with some of the aforementioned engineering principles whilst still maintaining an aesthetic ‘balance’. Here it is compared with the first attempt:
Unfortunately the modified angles means that the aircraft doesn’t sit nicely all by itself on the struts, so I need to prop it up a little for the pictures, but you get the idea.
Thoughts? I may have overdone it a little, but I can still make tweaks.
Cheers,
BC
