Rhinoceros & HP Zbook Studio: Continuing to Place Another Exceptional Milestone

Just like any other people who work at their best, sometimes, we all need a break from what we daily do. Aside from gathering with my family, I do keep my mind away to a "neverland" that keeps on refreshing my technical skill and imagination. The HP Zbook Studio and Rhinoceros 6.0 give me the chance to keep on doing it.

Started with my hobby in "imagining" of being a jetfighter pilot in my childhood, up to having my own fleet of RC planes which wasn't possible as the cost was just simply too much, even up to the moment I started to work in 1991 alongside my college years, the dreams kept on lurking inside my head.

​So, just couple of years back, I started to learn and build my own RC planes from this brilliant website WWW.RCPOWERS.COM, which owned by Dave Powers, a true legend in RC plane scratchbuilding. Keeping the story short, now I've been able to design and build my own RC jetfighters for the last 3 years. Some of my latest own designed planes from dozens of it, below.

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THE HISTORY
​Designing and building my own rc plane is one thing. But coming up with each new design with better technical design and looking, was another different thing. One thing surfaced for sure, the complexities on both designing and building were raised to a new level on each new design.  The most complex design was achieved on the Sukhoi SU-30SM G1R. So, thinking of the next level of complexities was quite challenging.

At some point, I recalled some moments in my childhood, when my beloved Dad showed me the legendary jetfighter which had swinging/retractable wings, THE F-14 TOMCAT. It was part of the moments I could never forget. Then, the decision of making this legendary F-14 began, after some discussions with my colleagues in US and Canada.

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THE DESIGN
HP Zbook Studio was the primary rig for designing and performed some analysis, using Rhinoceros 6.0 for the modeling software and BlueCFD-core for the computational dynamics simulation. The combination hit its peak performance as the modeling and analysis process only took us less than 3 days.

There were some substantial challenges in designing the F-14 Tomcat with swinging wings as I had never designed any planes with such features. However, after some variations in technical designs, I managed to finalize and pick one from some of the variations we had.

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THE FLIGHTS
The very first maiden flight was successfully done by my colleague Jeff Reimer in Canadian airspace. He built the first prototype, followed by my fellow colleague James Soyak in United States. My own built was successfully flown on its maiden flight event, in Cibubur Aeromodelling Club, Jakarta.

Jeff Reimer's F-14

Bimo's F-14

FINAL WORDS
I received tons of emails and messages, stating that the F-14D looks so scale and flies so well. I couldn't agree more with that and extending my personal appreciation to all people that had been placing their attention and support to this project.

Some keypoints I addressed along with this project are:

1. I found Rhinoceros 6.0 delivers the best performance, productivity and efficiency compares to its prior releases, made it possible for this project to be completed within days, instead of weeks.
2. HP Zbook Studio has been my primary mobile rig for daily work and hobby, placing it my best investment to date, carrying high end performance as well as exceptional stability. Both Rhinoceros and BlueCFD-core work at its best on this mobile workstation platform.

The F-14D has successfully joined as a new member on my fleet and instantly placed itself as one of my favorite top rc jets. Flying it had been full of joy, while looking at it in the air, .... fulfilling mine and my Dad's dreams, many decades ago. This one's for you Dad. Again. Miss you and love you heaps.