The Indoor Night

So much to catch up on - I'm posting about stuff I did on Saturday, yet today I maidened my new Tucano as well (she is still in one piece but a post on that to follow).

On Saturday night I went down to Nitrodude's Indoor Night at the MpowerDome in Fadden. The MpowerDome is an indoor Tennis facility in Fadden, which has about 8 tennis courts and a two story amenties block.

It sounds promising but I got to admit when I got there I wasn't super impressed by some of the "features".

Two tennis courts had been roped off for the flying and a whiteboard masquerading as frequency board was posted out the front. The two tennis court flying space seemed a little tight, but the more concerning thing was the overhead lights. They hung from the ceiling on long cables creating a unique upside down mine field for your aircraft to negotiate if you were silly enough to let it fly above about 2.5 metres (particularly at the edges of the court, where the roof came down from being quite satisfactory in the middle to a bit too low for comfort rather quickly.

Now - all that being said, a lot of fun was still had. DJ had put together a ThunderTiger 3D Expo foam thingame - video below which he took for a few circuits around the field whilst binaryboy (a new guy who is flying out at Curtin with us a fair bit - I just made up his handle - I wonder if he gets it) brought a little electric helicopter.

DJ's night came to a premature end when he snapped the prop shaft on the ThunderTiger - to be fair it had taken a fair bit of punishment up til that point - jettisoning part of the undercarriage along the way.

It seems binaryboy's night came to an end when he flew his heli to the middle of the area without his antennae up and had a slightly hard landing busting some piece of the skids.

The SA lil' squirt - seen taxing here on the right (DJ tried to catch some shots of it in the air but with my crappy digital camera, the light, and the relative speed of the thing it never worked out) hung in for a little longer and was getting amazing duration out of her 450mAh Elegance LiPos. However, once or twice she had lost power for seemingly no reason.

After one hard landing the squirt's servos started going mental trying to go past their throw limits (although it's not clear that the servo action isn't what caused the landing). Checking to make sure the guy on my frequency was off (he was) I couldn't figure out what was going wrong. It has since been figured out - was the ESC (which Paul Daniels from NQRC has kindly agreed to replace).

There were many casualties in terms of models, and one casualty in terms of humans - fortunately not seriously - a 3d plane clipped a light, went out of control and speared into someone. Remember what I said about those lights - too low. The most comical casualty of the evening was a shockflyer that passed a bit too close to the net, clipped and feel to ground, but not before leaving its undercarriage in the netting about 2.5 metres up.

Overall certainly enjoyed the night, but the venue is not the best in my opinion and I'm wondering whether somewhere like Erindale college might offer higher ceilings and move flying space (there are a couple of two basketball court gynasiums there if memory serves). Binaryboy mentioned that there are some indoor nights in Queanbeyan which also have a better format (in his opinion) with separate flight space for helis and planes.

Anyway, here's the vid of DJ's ThunderTiger - not doing 3d or anything, but was starting to get the hang of it - shame it ended prematurely, but I'm sure it will be back.

Quick time version .mov (1MB)
General version .avi (5MB)