It's been two years 4 months since the space plane plan was unveiled.
When will it fly?
I'm starting to feel old.
The Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) team is preparing the Vulture 2 aircraft for its eye-catching paintjob, and while we rattle tins of primer and fiddle with wet-and-dry, we thought you might enjoy some intimate bare-bones views of our magnificent spaceplane. Here's the beast in its naked form (more photos here …
I hope this craft has a decent autopilot; with no dihedral on the wings, it's not going to have any inherent attitude stability, meaning that it won't glide stably by itself. What do you have planned in terms of flight testing?
Nearly all free-flight model aircraft are designed to have lots of inherent stability to overcome the absence of an active control system. An active autopilot significantly mitigates this requirement, but tuning the autopilot up is a project all by itself. I hope you folks have a few extra copies for the initial test flights.
When mounting the ArduPilot, remember the vibration damping. Anything +/-5 on the Z axis will throw off the Baro and gyro accuracy. And mount the compass as far away from any electronics as possible.
http://www.diydrones.com is a good source of anti vibe techniques - four corners of MoonGel or Zeal is the most effective "singlle solution, direct mount" approach. To improve your gryo accuracy (which I suspect will be important given the proposed speeds), I'd recommend the zeal route.