So, my box frame concepts turned out to be a failure - the frames just didn't stand up to my heavy handed flying, and I managed to kill one of the Fortresses and the Exocet within 5 minutes in the woods. That left me with a pile of broken carbon, but also 3 full 6S capable electronics setups. The weekend after, I was flying one of my original Morningstar builds and swapped the old Gemfan 5152 biblades for some 51466 Hurricanes - what a night and day difference, it flew spectacularly. And so I decided to put together a 6S one using the bits out of the first Fortress.

As all my recent builds have used micro rather than fullsize FPV cameras, I decided to update the pod to accomodate those - whilst I was at it, I made a few updates to improve on the (2 and a half year old!) design. The pod thickness was reduced slightly, the fin was redesigned to accomdate stubby antennas, and I added a NACA duct to each side to provide cooling for the electronics, along with rear vents. The baseplate remained the same 12mm of hefty HMWPE sheet, except my new pillar drill let me countersink the bottom holes to stop motor wires getting shredded on them.

I'd forgotten how much room there is in these! Made the build a piece of cake; the rear of the pod is limited to 23mm stack height, but the front can easily take 30mm of components. I put the Matek VTX up front, and it turned out that there was plenty of room to the side of the pod for the MMCX right angle connector.

With flying, it was a surprise - I'd somehow found the box build a little underwhelming, like it was underpowered. This build, however and despite running the same components, was anything but - practically teleporting from gate to gate. It does have a weird low frequency oscillation off certain manoevers which needs some attention, but that didn't stop it from being seriously quick around the track. Think once I get that tuned out it'll be a strong contender for my 2021 race rig!

Update: tried stock BF 4.2 PIDs and lo and behold it flies great!