Well, yes. I think you are correct about laying the ThunderGazer plans over the Imitation and what I'd see (or not see) difference-wise. But for the benefit of those of us not in the hunt for the Walker Cup and who might build a plane for the enjoyment of seeing it in the air (and for the day-dreamers and arm-chair pilots amongst us) please indulge us with your opinion on how to redesign the MIG so it would be smaller (to fit in a car and maybe powered by, say, an LA-46), take advantage of what we know about modern stunt-ship design, and still appear MIG-like. (An Infinity painted deep red with white-outlined stars on its wings doesn't count...)
Please?
Sorry, I just assumed that the most straightforward way was obvious, but maybe not. I would take the same approach that thousands of people did back in the 50's-70s with Nobler-based "original designs", and later with the CSC foam Gemini parts. Take an Impact wing and tail, make the tips and the fuselage look like the airplane you want, then paint it red and white.
I don't think there is any way to take these airplanes and make minor modifications to make them competitive against conventional airplanes in the 21st century. They were, with no insult intended, extreme even in the day, when they were still trying to figure out what to do with the tremendous power available with the 4-2 break 60s (I think the MIG actually had an OS60 of some sort, rather than the ST60 you might have expected). It turns out that there was a better solution to that issue, once they stopped trying to run gigantic props, but it is to their credit that they had an idea and fully explored it. So you can't just trim a bit here and add a bit there and make consequentially different.
If the "put a MIG fuselage on an Impact wing" approach doesn't appeal to you, I would suggest you just build it as it is, and start lifting weights. The airplanes can be made to fly respectably well, Windy did it, so can you. It's not as easy to dig out the last bit of performance as it is with other airplanes, but it will certainly do stunt patterns. The differences in performance we are talking about, as mentioned in some recent thread, are usually swamped by trim and power issues even at the Top 20 NATS qualifier level anyway. For almost any purpose short of that, you can have fun building and flying it, be competitive with your peers (as long as you can out-trim them), and have what you want. You will have to practice a lot more than some others, but we supposedly enjoy flying model airplanes, right?
I cannot emphasize this point enough -
the design differences between airplanes are almost always swamped by variations in alignment/workmanship/trim/power issues. People gas on for years about various design points, but in practice any attempt to evaluate which design changes are valuable and not is almost impossible to determine by most people. They will build an airplane with certain design ideas, it either flies well or doesn't, and they will decide "that didn't work" or "that worked great". They are almost always wrong, the difference they are feeling is a small misalignment, a trim variation, or a power variation that has NOTHING to do with the design of the airplane, and they never really know whether the design is any good or not. Only with the most careful and repeatable methods (Paul Walker/Impact type approach) or massive statistics (100,000 Green Box Noblers) can you make any sense of the design issues involved.
As an example, just in this thread, there are examples of "thundergazers build heavy" and "thundergazer wing broke off", which are pretty serious issues, I don't want my wing to break off, either. But other Thundergazers won a world championship and 4 NATs. They were all the same design, so we can immediately conclude that design wasn't the difference. That happens in far more wubtle cases, as well, in 1000's of different ways.
Put another way, for the most part, you can build any airplane you want and be able to be competitive if you do everything else better, because "everything else' makes more difference.
Brett