Hey gents just another quick question about the 'ballasted' tucker special; the idea of a ballasted ship still seems counter-intuitive to me, but thinking about has raised a few questions.
Rather than add weight to the ship, for arguments sake wouldn't it be a better idea to remove some of the wing area rather than add weight? This would mean you don't decrease your power loading but you wing loading incresases, right? Orrr is it the fact that you now you have to apply more centripetal force to the aircraft to turn keep it tethered therefore raising the Netzeband wall?
I get the feeling I'm missing a key element here. 
Howard of course has it, reducing the wing area per se doesn't help much of at all, the hinge moment would be the same if you had the same flap and elevator. Reducing the size overall (and leaving the bellcrank and control system the same) and keeping the same mass *would* be equivalent to what we did on the Tucker, because the hinge moments would be reduced and the line tension would be the same.
At some point, of course, you start losing and the ability to deflect the controls is outweighed by running out of lift at the higher wing loading, or poor vertical performance. With the engines the Tucker was designed around (Fox/Forster/Johnson 35), this limit is *much* lower than it is with a Rustler-Merco 40/Tornado 10-4 3-blade. It may indeed be impossible to build it to lightly with a Fox, because the hinge moment issue is less relevant than the lack of vertical performance or ability to keep the speed up in the corners.
Throw more effective "power" into the equation, the weight makes far less difference in the cornering or the vertical performance, but you can add weight and deflect the controls further and have more restoring forces in roll and yaw.
This is a crucial observation that many people have missed completely - at one time, with the feeble power available before about 1985, building lighter was a critical factor and almost always improved the performance. Since the ST60 and then much more so, tuned pipe engines, it's an entirely different game and different (and reduced) set of engineering compromises. 4-strokes (at least in the common run style using 4.5" pitch props at relatively high revs) and electric are not exactly the same as tuned pipes but the differences are minor compared to Fox 35/ST46 days.
Brett