To be honest, 10%, at best, of quad design is actual engineering that might affect flight characteristics. The other 90% is more akin to interior decorating – moving furniture around to maximize the available space (apologies to interior decorators). Almost anything that holds 4 motors rigidly in space will fly, so most of the time we're just shuffling parts around and drawing pretty lines around them.

My friends Chuck and Josh wanted a 130 to call their own and asked me to whip something up. I was dragged kicking and screaming into designing a 180 and that went pretty well so I thought I'd better give this a go.

Like the Mitsuko, the biggest problem when you go small is dealing with the 36x36 FC footprint. For Mitsuko I rotated the FC 45 degrees and eventually made it a + quad. I could've just shortened Mitsuko's arms to make a 130, but I thought Mitsuko's vertical stack would be too much for a little 130. Since a 130 is more about winter fun than ultimate performance, I thought it better to go with an H.

I started by laying out the main components in Sketchup. Even though I'm morally against dead cats I pushed the rear motors in a bit. The arms take the longest possible path to the body so there's ample room for an esc. The idea was to use Sketchup to make a grid and then take the dxf to Illustrator and put pretty lines around it. But even at this early stage I could see this wasn't going to be easy – there's an unavoidable big belly right in the middle. I started to get a real appreciation for the RotorX Atom. They made something really cool looking from an impossible starting point.