The Thundertaker is one of the most consistent performing dynamic soaring airframes ever made, hosting a wing that given a single update would take it easily beyond 500 mph in sustainted DS flight.  Clues as to the why are seen in the renderings.  The second Thundertaker was centric to the customer asking for dedicated focus on an airframe always in orbital flight.  Not opting for new wings and using the same wings as the first version, the new fuselage was drawn on the perimeter of a circle 500 feet in diameter, giving it a very slight banana shape.  The center of the circle aligned with the wings max point of aero thickness, and again the center of the circle intersected the max point of thickness on the stabilizer.  The arc delta between the two set the stabs incidence angle.  The wing was mounted on its angle of least drag.

The customer was very much into a very strong slave motor for the horizontal stabilizer, and this posed a design challenge to accommodate the servo while still minimizing whetted area.  The result is now routine in my own design practice; the vertical fin itself -is- the aft fuselage.  The result is highly streamlined with absolute minimum wake.

A step forward in manufacturing the male plugs, fuselage was machine carved on a removable parting plane.  A first for me, and now a technique I use routinely.  The customer gets the actual part.

Given a staggering finish and one of the first models to experiment with emerging telemetry, performance was excellent from the start, but died quickly as the customer fell out of the hobby.  As with Thundertaker v1, the ‘DS Junkie‘ offered no compensation of any kind, going on to include the customer claiming all credit for himself, again after designing the model and working out the aero mechanics, drawing the model, decomposing the model to part files, coding the part files, CNC machining the parts, shipping and promotional renderings all at my own personal expense.  In point of fact, the customer insisted and made clear to his friends no recognition and/or compensation would be granted.

Free plans/part files for download.  IGES format, with others available on request.  When my site is fully updated I will address this design again to feature more vertical fin area and longer nose moment from making the wings more higher aspect ratio.  I will also post the updated ultra wing for +500 mph sustained ds flight.