A full worked conceptual design of a small fixed-wing survey UAS — weight build-up, wing loading and area sizing, drag and power required, battery sizing for a 2-hour endurance target, and a CG-vs-neutral-point static stability check.
The project brief: an agricultural survey operation needs a hand-launched, autopilot-flown small UAS carrying a 1.5 lb mapping camera and gimbal, flying automated grid patterns for 2.0 hours per charge at a 45 mph cruise. Framed as this program's baseline conceptual-design project, it walks the same iterative sizing loop a small-UAS design engineer would run — an initial weight guess, wing sizing, drag and power estimation, battery sizing against the endurance requirement, a weight build-up check, and a stability check on the converged design.
This module works every number the way a real design pass would: a 12.5 lb initial MTOW guess converging to 12.0 lb after one build-up iteration, a wing sized to a 1.5 lb/ft² loading with a 2.1x cruise-to-stall speed margin, a battery that ends up 45% of total weight once the 2-hour endurance target is converted to Watt-hours, and a neutral-point calculation that sets the CG target relative to that same battery's placement. The full worked numbers, complete parts list, and finished design reasoning are part of the unlocked module below.