How many wings ya got there?

[Willy]

I'm working on a more authentic flight model for Tom Eads' Gee Bee R-6. He's got the top speed dead on, but from digging around in it with AirWrench and my little bit of knowlege with FMs there's some items that don't make a lick of sense.

The Gee Bee is a monoplane but AirWrench show the FM to be for a biplane. I've tried to change it to a monoplane, but it won't change. Anyone know what section in the .air file controls how many wings the FM has? I'll change it there if need be. Or better yet, how to get AirWrench to change it?

TIA
Willy
"Apprentice in the Black Art of Flight Models"

[sparks]

AirWrench determines what the aircraft's wing configuration is based on the wing span, root chord, and wing surface area. For a monoplane with a normal tapered wing, the wing area will always be less than than the 'footprint' defined by the wing span multiplied by the root chord. If the wing area is larger than this footprint, then there must be more than one wing.

Many old flight models (including a lot of mine) use the mean chord as the root chord, and round-off errors can cause the calculated footprint area to be slightly less than the wing surface area. The solution is to use a larger value for the root chord.

[TICTOC]

lol...
Willy's root cord multiplied by his wingspan comes to 210.98; ergo Airwrench is picking it as a bi-plane by .02 of a square foot!!!!

Sorry, I'm a nerd, I know. I just found that funny.

Tic.

P.S., Thanks for the heads up though. I learnt something here. A single wing aircraft I did a flight model for using the workbook came up with the same thing when I looked at it in the evaluation version of Airwrench. Now I know why.

[Willy]

Thanks Sparks!

That's one of the problems with those stubby winged Gee Bees ;). I was thinking some time back that it felt much like a biplane when it lifted off the ground. Now to see about changing it without getting top speed out of whack.

Just bumped the root chord by .02 and when I went to save, it told me my climb rate was too high. I lowered the climb rate from 2408 to 2000 and it let me save then. Now it's showing as a monoplane.

I'll be off to test it in a bit.

Thanks again.