Quote: Originally posted by Prussik

Quote: Those backstalls are intriguing. All Nasas, and that includes Nasa Star, suffer from the critical flaw – reduced ability to fly at low angle of attack. From what I’ve seen in every Nasa I’ve tried is that that deficiency is overcompensated by overly steep AOA and too much trailing edge pull. This results in a lot of power - largely illusionary since it is directed where you don’t want to go i.e. downwind, at the expense of the component in the direction of travel. This is accompanied by the tendency to backflying and tail crashing. For those reasons, without modifications, I do not consider them competitive with good foils. With modifications I find them quite good, lightly to moderately powered, preferably in low drag situations like on clear ice. BTW Nasa Stars are 3 or 4 or 5 line kites and I wouldn’t fly them in other than the last configuration.

I would be interested in knowing what modifications you are speaking of. Sounds interesting.

I dug up my posting from 2013:

My impressions from the past, sporadic encounters with these kites were that they are bridled for power rather than the window width and forward pull. The same seems to be true is true of Nasa Star. This indicates to me the likelihood of a too steep AOA and/or too much braking. So the first thing I did was to release the brake pull a little. This immediately widened the window, significantly reduced the tendency to back-fly or tail-crash when underpowered. This alleviated somewhat my original scepticism about these kites and convinced me that it may be worthwhile to give them a more serious consideration. So the next thing I did was to correct things I didn’t like about Nasa Star starting with Z-bridles. They are made of thick nylon cord, which makes for big, snag prone knots and require larger than necessary line gobblers for adjusting the lengths. I replaced them with Spectra line. At the same time I changed the other thing I didn’t like –the brake function. Brakes were connected to A9-A12. They work better, in my opinion, when connected to A11,A12,B5,B6 . And finally –while replacing Z-bridles – I divided power connections into 2 parts: (A1-A6,B1,B2) and (A7-A10,B3,B4). Thus, after installing line gobblers, I can adjust the amount of brake pull as well as the AOA.

I experimented with AOA and brake tension. Gradual reduction of the AOA eventually produces the tendency of the leading edge between B1, B2 and B3 to loose tension and begin to flop. This can be alleviated by increasing the length of B2 bridle. Pushing it a little more may require increasing B1 and B3 bridles a little. I eventually settled on a set up when I can induce some leading edge flop in a dive but I can also avoid it by a little of brake input. In that configuration the window is as good as any foil in lighter loading with no tendency of backflying. It is more difficult to fine tune larger sizes which is not unexpected considering that with the same number of bridles the support of the canopy is not as good. Performance under heavy load still does not match a good foil, producing excessive downwind and reduced forward components of the force sooner than a foil.

Thanks. I've got a NS2, I'll take a look at this. I already have the different brake line selections, I believe. I've not used z-bridles on the NS2.