Thin Airfoil and Climb Performance

On May 5, 8:58*am, sisu1a wrote:
Considering that prepregs have appx double the
strength of the traditional wet layup construction...

To the extent that that is true, it's also largely irrlevant to glider
design. The reason we use carbon has much more to do with its
stiffness than its strength. And prepregs offer only a rather modest
stiffness/weight or stiffness/volume advantage over conventional
vacuum-bagged carbon. However, they usually require the use of a high-
temperature, high-pressure autoclave, and also specially-made high-
temperature molds to go with it. Tooling like that can be quite
expensive to buy and operate, and is quite difficult to amortize in
the very marginal economics of sailplane development and manufacture.

Thanks, Bob K.
http://www.hpaircraft.com/hp-24