The flight earlier today was the first official mission of the new Civvie design and with Commander Valentina in the pilot’s seat it flew 304km and completed three contracts for crew observations plus an additional contract for more readings from the radiation instrument installed in one of the science payload bays. Overall the mission was a great success and Val is as pleased as Jeb was in the Civvie’s handling and performance. However now that it has some flight hours logged engineers want to give it a good look-over to ensure everything is holding up as it should be. While it is back in the Horizontal Assembly Building for this check over there are a few changes that will be made at the same time:
- Larger Battery Capacity – the single science transmission sent from the Civvie on this flight drained all but 7% of the battery capacity, which severely limits the aircraft’s ability to perform multiple experiments on a single flight. Now that initial performance data is in, engineers can see how much wiggle room they have for installing larger and heavier batteries without sacrificing the aircraft’s stability. While they are currently looking to increase the standard power capacity, it should be noted that dedicated science flights could carry extra batteries as cargo for additional power.
- Fuel Pumps – the biggest addition will be the installation of fuel pumps that will allow fuel to be moved between the three tanks. Currently the fuel system draws from all three tanks evenly, but it’s been demonstrated in flight so far that it would be to the pilot’s benefit to be able to adjust the aircraft’s center of mass, especially during landing. While the system itself is simple, using it should be considered an advanced technique as messing with an aircraft’s center of mass can have deadly consequences. C7 wants to test it out before deciding whether to include it on planes sold to the general public.
- Aileron Control Damping – both Jeb and Val have agreed that the roll capability of the Civvie is still a bit over-powered. Certainly the control surfaces that make up the ailerons on the wings are very large, but C7 engineers have always insisted this is necessary. Still, the pilots have argued that their control inputs don’t feel proportional to the response of the aircraft, and that they would like to actually feel like they were turning the plane rather than twitching the stick over a millimeter. The service crew will install additional dampers that will require the pilots to move the stick more for the aircraft to respond along the roll axis.
C7 is expecting all these changes to be completed within the next two weeks. In the meantime, the original prototype model is finishing up its repairs to return to flight this week and assuming all goes well will be able to pick up any slack.
