In the FJ-4 15 thread it was brought up that swept wing designs might be a hindrance to line sliders. Rules state you can't go any further back than the root chord. Have done a little research and determined the profile standard MO-1 allows the slider to move back about 5 inches behind the CG. If I scale the FJ-4 wing to about the same sq/in as the MO-1 and use the same carbon fiber tube leadout I did on the big one I can get the leadouts to move back to about 3.4 inches behind the CG.

I'm not real sure how much difference in low speed performance that 1.6 inches makes. Maybe a bunch, maybe not enough to kick the FJ4 design out of the running in Profile.... So just how much would it be giving up to the MO-1?

Bob,
An example of a slanted Slider
John

Agree, the root chord rule isn't a bad rule.

I also wished sliders had never been allowed but it was and now it would be really hard to change.

Thanks for input guys, will take all this into consideration when I start designing the profile version.

I would agree, I don't put line sliders on my models and actually land them on the deck like the full size do wiith some forward speed. Witih a line slider you can place the model on the deck and happen to grab a line, I have yet to see a full size aircraft pull off thiis stunt.

I know the idea of banning line sliders would be a total change from the way rules are written and some folks would not like it, I would actually consider attending other carrier contests if the line slider was banned. The MO-1 that I currently fly at our local contest once a year has no line slider and that is the only contest I go to.

Here are the photos of how the throttle transfer works

I would agree, I don't put line sliders on my models and actually land them on the deck like the full size do wiith some forward speed. Witih a line slider you can place the model on the deck and happen to grab a line, I have yet to see a full size aircraft pull off this stunt.

I know the idea of banning line sliders would be a total change from the way rules are written and some folks would not like it, I would actually consider attending other carrier contests if the line slider was banned. The MO-1 that I currently fly at our local contest once a year has no line slider and that is the only contest I go to.

The effects of stationary leadouts would be:

C: Allow prototypes with high aspect ratios and swept wings to complete against the MO-1.

B: Reduce (boring to watch) low speed times from the 3-to-5 minute range (10-5 MPH) to about 90 seconds (20 MPH).

A: Eliminate the MASSIVE judgement factor in which winning hinges on the judge's opinion of stopping and exceeding 60 degrees of attitude.

     Silly things? Really?   Eric

We seem to get into the line slider discussion here every so often and maybe that's needed. Let me add a few comments.

Banning line sliders will cause some people to build new stuff or modify their old stuff. It will also cause some people to quit, as any change does. I have seen no evidence that the number of new people we might pick up, if any, will actually exceed the number who quit. It's really hard to know about this,  but we might get an idea of how many really want to compete without sliders by looking at participation in Nostalgia events which do not have hanging and do not have sliders. That participation is very weak.

Banning sliders will not change the low speeds back to the "old days" numbers. Skyray, which is an event for an airplane neither well designed for carrier nor posessing a low aspect ratio wing, has flights over four minutes regularly. And the same judgement about exceeding sixty degrees and backing up as occurs in the other events is required. If a Skyray can exceed four minutes without a slider, then an awful lot of other designs can do at least as well.

MO-1's are not as common as people seem to think. There were two in Profile at the Nats this year (Dick Perry and Mike Potter) and there was only one last year. In Class one and class two they are more common, but that may not be because they are so much better performers. They are, however, so much easier to build. The fuselage has a rectangular cross section whereas most other candidate designs have rounded fuselages that are much harder to build. That's the reason I have spent the last 35 years developing MO-1's for class one and two: They are the only things I have time to build. And Bill Bischoff developed a foam wing kit for their MO-1 which made it even easier to build. Availability of such a design made MO-1's common. This was very good for Carrier, allowing people to fly with reduced building effort. The currently available profile kit, the Calkins/Brodak Guardian, provides the same ability to fly with less building effort, since it is a good kit to build and it flies well. It is becoming a lot more common. Will we hear calls to get rid of this next?

And I think we should not beat up on the Carrier Contest Board, saying they are winners with MO-1's and would never do anything to upset that. The evidence does not support that. Dick Perry has an MO-1 for Class 1-2, Perhaps Marc Warwashana has one, but he has a great variety of other designs as well. I am not aware of any of the other nine Board members who is flying MO-1's in Class 1-2. (I don't include profile MO-1's in this, since it is pretty clear that they have no great performance advantage over other designs and are not easier to build in Profile than many other designs. Even so, there are only three who have been campaigning Profile MO-1's: Dick Perry, Melvin Schutte, and Mike Potter.) The Carrier Contest Board members are voting to keep the events strong and keep participation up. They may not all agree on the details, but I believe that is the motivation of every one of them.

Pete

Bob, your situation just cries out for more local contests to include Sportsman Profile in their contests. You are clearly the person for which the Sportsman event was invented, and your airplane would be perfect in that competition. In fact, it would be fine with no line slider at all, as Sportsman entries are almost always flown without "hanging." There are a lot of other people out there who also would perfectly fit in Sportsman. Our local contest (Treetown Regional Championships in Sugar Grove, IL, September 5) always includes Sportsman and the Nationals always includes Sportsman. The FCM Championships in Muncie has all three classes of open carrier plus Sportsman on August 28. Let's keep trying to encourage more clubs to have Sportsman. This can best be done, of course, by getting more people to enter the event!

Pete

     Another thing that I think helps with more entry's in contests is that besides the official events you can also fly for top 20 points for any of the NCS events. In other words the contest may only offer 2 or 3 events for trophy's but will time any other NCS events and foreward the times to the HI-LOW LANDINGS news letter for top 20 tabulations.  Eric

     I fly carrier only occasionally as my complex schedule permits.  I just don't see how eliminating sliders from carrier competition, even sportsman, is going to impact the number of participants.  Sliders present no insurmountable challenge while building.  If you have the skills to set up a throttle on a three line bellcrank, a slider mechanism is well within your grasp.  Sliders, in my opinion, make the plane easier to fly, hence the drawn out low speed flights.  How can an easier flying plane at low speed hinder participation when it gives the new carrier pilot added chance for success?  I agree that eliminating sliders may cause a return to a more realistic flight profile, but more likely to happen is that the best fliers wiil adapt and still continue to win at contests because they put in the time to practice and develop their gear.  Using equipment limits has not done much for other C/L events.  Rules put in place to make an event beginner friendly seldom have the intended effect anyway.  How many racing events have been started, with good intentions, to give beginners a level playing field?  How many of those same events have not evolved into serious competition among dedicated racers, still making it hard for a beginner to compete until he has honed his skills and equipment?  The other factor involved in this is that I don't see where all of these other participants would come from.  C/L is a small group of people to begin with and sliders or not, carrier is a niche within that small community.

Howard olson

If you all think back to the days when you either flew scale carrier or you flew profile.  It was when it was allowed to be able to fly all three classes that profile went down hill as far as attendeance in my opinion.  That is my opinion and I stand by it.  Sliders are here to stay and work with practice.  I have won a couple of meets when the person did not have full control of his slider set up.  But,  this cycle is almst done as far as proposals.  Maybe next cycle someone will come up with something.  I was disappointed in the last year I competed in a carrier contest I got no credit for it in the listings of top 20 and there were only about 10 people listed.

...Is it only because a proposal to establish it (or change the sliders allowed rule in Sportsman) has never been submitted to the carrier board? If so, I guess I had better get busy and start writing.

Sportsman is not a rule-book event - so a proposal to change it is un-needed.  Sportsman is a local event and you can use whatever rules you think will get the most people to come out and fly it.  Sportsman AT THE NATS is run by the Navy Carrier Society, to the rules adopted by the Society, so a proposal to the NCS to change the current defininition would need to be made.

A proposal to establish an AMA Sportsman Profile class can of course be made with whatever rules the proposer desires.  I can't speak to how it would be received.  It seems to me that whenever local events become "rule-book" events, they often become something that the original proposer did not intend.

      Looking at the 2009 NCS Top 20 "Sportsman" scores I don't think there are any scores that involved the "hang". I cant remember seeing anyone "hang" in any of the sportsman events that I watched last year or this year. Note that I said "watched" as I found it fun and interesting to watch the sportsman's events (.15 Sportsman, and Sportsman) and have to hand it to these guys as they flew quite well for where they were at in the scheme of things "carrier".
     If I remember right the thought was that this event would be a entry to the AMA Profile Carrier event. It would allow the new fliers to start to play with the hang and when there scores got high enough they would move to AMA Profile Carrier. Still sounds like a good idea to me but I also like to see the non slider guys fly and at times wonder if I would like to do it (non slider) also. There is the Nostalgia Profile class that I think is pretty much a no hang event but that would trap me into building Nostalgia Planes which I don't care that much for. To make a long story short a no hang Sportsman class would be a good event to have.
     Now having said the above I'm a little concerned about how you could police this event. Remember that .15 Profile and Skyray are non slider events where the hang is the norm if you want to be in the top 20. Engine off set and line rake allow these planes to hang quite well. So now if you want to eliminate the hang you have opened up another can of worms. The hang can begin very early in the low speed portion of the event and not be all that detectable.  Eric