Hi Craig, I have been a fan of the KR2S for a long time. I joined this net to seriously consider building one. First of all, I am not an aeronautical engineer, I am a Pilot, but I have been an aviation fanatic since I was 7 and I am 70 now and I am always working on increasing my aviation knowledge. I am submitting this comment to you with the best of intentions for you to consider and maybe a discussion can develop where we all can learn more. You say you will only have about 75% of the horizontal tail area compared to a stock KR. You want to "tame the beast" but in my humble opinion you are going to make it worse. You are after a special Seafury look and that is really neat. It looks like you will probably increase the vertical stabilizer area and that will should be fine, but with the decreased horizontal area and the short moment arm of the KR, (at least compared to the Seafury) again IMHO, there is going to be stability issues, at least at lower speeds. I suspect you would need to fly your approach at a higher speed just to be able to have the elevator authority to flare for landing and I would also suspect that if you slowed too much and couldn't flare, the aircraft would likely drop right on its nose, so here you would have exactly the situation you are trying to avoid. Look at the length of the Seafury fuselage compared to the length of the KR. Stabs are sized as a proportion of it's wings area, but the length of the fuselage (the term used is Moment Arm which can be thought of as a lever) is an important factor. A longer fuselage can cut down on the stabs area, as a percentage of the wing, but a shorter fuselage is going to need more area compared to it's wing's area. I also fly RC and I once built a 6 foot model where I made this mistake, there was not enough stab authority to flare for the landing, but no one had a chance to get hurt. What you want to do will create a neat looking aircraft, but decreasing the stab area by as much as you say is a serious deviation from just making appearance revisions, so I hope you will seek professional advice for what you are doing. I don't intend any of this to be negative criticism and I hope you take it as intended. I didn't intend to comment on this net about anything because I am not yet building any model of the KR, but I think this needed to brought out in the open.
Respectively submitted, John in PA
