My friend Shaun Atkins and myself are Bloody Baron fans. We both have one and we both love flying them. I maidened mine first. We stood on the flying field and felt the weight of my Baron, looked at those tiny wings and concluded that the thing was going to have to fly at mach 3 to stay in the air. We had seen videos which showed that was not the case but it was just hard to believe it wouldn't be a brick with very small wings. Shaun launched for me. Because of our concerns he did an extremely good impersonation of an olympic javelin thrower by racing along and hurling my Baron forward. The Baron laughed at our fears and happily sailed off into the sky. We were both stunned and delighted. Since then our hand launches are much more casual. What has this to do with an Ugly Stik? Well there we were one Sunday morning sitting in our chairs relaxing between flights. Shaun mentioned he wanted to fly an Ugly Stick. I had built and flown two. One was built from free plans in Depron and the other from a balsa laser cut kit from Hobbyking. They both flew great so I thought Shaun's idea was a very good one. "How about I design one?" I said. Shaun's reply was to suggest that I use the same wing section as the Bloody Baron. "What a bloody brilliant idea!" I thought.
We both feel that a good part of the Bloody Baron's flight characteristics are down to its wing and wing section. I have never heard of an Ugly Stik that didn't fly great so a marriage of the two seemed like an excellent idea.
The Design
I used my balsa Ugly Stik as a guide for the dimensions. I measured the chord of the Bloody Baron wing and calulated that a Stik with a 1.4 metre wing span wing would have the same chord as the Bloody Baron wing as well as the same aspect ratio of my Balsa Stik. After that it was a matter of scaling up the dimensions of my Stik (it has one metre wingspan), while using the same wing section as the Bloody Baron (i.e. basically making the wing panels longer). I discarded the idea of using a power pod because I wanted to add some bulkheads and a run a horizontal piece along the front part of the fuselage halfway between the top and bottom for strength.
Also scaling up my stick meant the fuselage would be too large anyway. The vertical stabiliser on my Stik was not in the Das Ugly Stik style so I came up with a better shape.
