Last time we left of, we were in the thick of intake design trade-offs. Let's dive right back in..

> FIG 01: Early isometric pass on the twin-side-intake direction.

> FIG 02: Planform check for the fuselage and wing relationship. > FIG 03: Side profile for evaluating intake placement and stack height.

Twin Intakes Win by Elimination

We've decided that the top-mounted dorsal intake is a dead end. This is due to the desire to have a top-mounted gimbal - this would create a wake of turbulent air right in front of the intake, and height constraints don't allow for proper stacking. The belly intake is also dead on arrival, as our lack of landing gear would mean our EDF will suck up debris on landing and likely damage the EDF blades, housing and/or motor. This leaves us with twin side intakes. Given the extensive electronic suite we've selected for the build, we're going to be generating considerable amounts of heat - and thus proper heat management becomes a non-negotioable requirement. My first thought is to mount the intakes flush with the nose of the plane, just to the side of the leading point in an attempt to accomplish three goals simultaneously:

1. avoid intake "choking" that is caused by the boundary layer that forms around the skin of the aircraft.
2. run the ducting completely internally with thin walls around the flight systems, providing passive cooling due to the fast moving ducted air.
3. remove draggy external intakes

Surfacing Lessons Learned the Hard Way

If you're just beginning to use surfacing tools in SolidWorks, here are a few things I wish I knew -

1. The defaulted guide points are wrong almost every time. Often, your surface preview won't even render becuase of the poor default placement of these. Play with the placement of these before backing out of the surface tool for the 6th time to check your reference drawings.
2. Ensure your reference drawings intersect. You must check from many different vantage points.

(For aircraft design specifically)

3. When drawing fuselage ribs, use construction lines for the vertical origin axis to avoid creating unintentional internal walls when mirroring.
4. When editing your airfoil sketch, if your chosen airfoil has a sharp trailing edge, you must cut the trailing edge of the airfoil off with at least 1.6mm between the upper and lower trailing edges(If you're using .8mm layer lines). When you thicken the surface later, this will give you the required space for two layer lines of thickness at .8mm without the feature intersecting itself and failing.

> FIG 04: The fuselage starts to feel real once the canopy volume gets sketched in.

> FIG 05: Top-down packaging pass for canopy footprint and internal layout. > FIG 06: Side profile check for the canopy and camera stack.

Canopy Trade-Offs

After a week-long CAD and learning marathon, we've got a fuselage finally taking shape. We're now at a crossroads for our gimbal placement and design. As part of the extreme-durability goal, there's a heavy incentive to encase the expensive camera and gimbal in a clear canopy. Unfortunately, I don't yet have an SLA printer capable of printing a clear enough canopy. So, we're going to have to get creative.

Our options (as I see them now) with pros and cons are

1. 1. buy a premade canopy from someone else

   pros: saves time and effort

   cons: likely expensive, may be difficult to find correct dimensions, constrains airframe design to someone else's part, adds potential future supply chain failure point

2. 2. print a high-temp mold out of engineering filament, and then get sheets of PETG or similar and use a heat gun or oven to form them

   pros: never made a printed mold, good learning opprotunity, allows endless cheap iteration,

   cons: potentially unreliable results, extensive time and tooling investment

3. 3. design it myself and have it printed by a fellow maker/service with SLA

   pro: future proofs, allows me to eventually take the task in-house once SLA printer is acquired, potential for collaboration

   cons: delays in design with every iteration change, potentially high cost if I can't offer anything in return

4. 4. find a way to recycle old plastic bottles into canopies.

   pros: cool as hell, pro-nature

   cons: potentially janky, reflections?

For now, we'll design it and hope that leads to more clarity on the design decision. Things are starting to look pretty good.

> FIG 07: Refined clear canopy concept.

> FIG 08: Top view. > FIG 09: Transparent body panels to show internal components.