On Monday, December 19, 2016 at 5:31:42 AM UTC-8, Christopher Schrader wrote:
When you say you designed the HP24 as a non-serious racing machine and mention it can't run with the ASG29 by what degree do you mean? Is the drag coming from the airfoil rather than the fuselage or both? If so, could you design and sell a more competitive airfoil for 18m config? As a larger pilot I like the 304S because of the roomier cockpit (I haven't seen it in person but I'm told it has a roomier cockpit much like the older 304C).
/Chris

I don't know how the HP-24 will compare with the ASG-29 in practice; all I know is that isn't really what I designed it for. Our primary objective was to make it a sweet flying glider with good stability and handling right out of the box, and we got that. We also wanted enough cockpit volume that it could be adapted to pilots in the mid to high 6' range, and we got that too. But both of those have penalties in trim drag and parasitic drag.

I could certainly put together a team to develop a competitive 18m contender. But I am a bit leery that I could do so as a profitable (or at least non-unprofitable) venture. I'd be worried that kit sales wouldn't amortize the development costs. But I have been collecting wing profiles to analyze for a potential 2nd gen HP-24 wing, and we'll just have to see what happens.

One thing I have proven is that it is possible to get a pretty wide range of fuselage sizes from our standard molded parts. Right now we have a fuselage I call "Slim" under construction in our shop; with only minor modifications of our standard parts we have narrowed the cockpit and substantially reduced both frontal and wetted area; it is now down around the range of the LS6 fuselage.

Thanks, Bob K.