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As far as what you have mocked in as the center plate right now, I don’t want to comment too much because it’s a placeholder. What I will say is that we may need to consider CF tubing for these cross braces because we are likely going to have a good bit of compressive force on these cross-members when landing. CF isn’t very good in compression, but it’s light and we can get tubing which will give a much higher moment of inertia which should help. My concern if we did out of thin aluminum like this is that it would bow, and thicker aluminum would be too heavy. I think we would want to allow the 3D printed foot to include mounting spots for CF cross-braces. Then you’d probably need to make a square for the cone to fit in with an open bottom, kind of like this, where red is CF tube and blue is the water collection mechanism.
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The thing here is that it would make it way easier to have the cone at the bottom be the fixed thing, and the center column be the moving part. The only way to make the cone easy to have as the moving part would be to move the whole crossing section about 7” higher so it’s above the cone. The issue with the center column being the moving part is that it basically means you need to be pushing it down instead of pulling up the cone which would be more awkward to do with a servo, given the servo likely needs to be above the whole assembly for packaging and water protection issues.
As far as the exact path forward on that particular issue, I think I need a bit of time to think about it because it’s not immediately clear to me. Hoping to talk to some combination of Alison Thompson Smile Khatri and Evan Janakievski at the work session this weekend to figure out a path forward.
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