Daryo Aug 23, 2014:

that could make sense - the same bump is in proportion much bigger obstacle for a small airplane; but thinking of it, most models are flown on ordinary fields ... "normal" airports don't want them anywhere near them.

B D Finch Aug 23, 2014:

@Daryo No, I'm not Tony! But felt like answering your comment to him. A scaled down replica aircraft landing on a real landing field will encounter real life bumps, ruts, molehills etc. and that is what gives it a bashing. Nothing to do with the length of the airstrip.

Daryo Aug 23, 2014:

@ Tony An airplane "doesn't know" how long is the landing strip, so the size of the landing strip has no influence whatsoever on the bashing of the landing gear (as long as the runway is long and wide enough).

A small scale model landing on a strip of 4.5m or a full blown runway of 4500 m wouldn't notice any difference.

The difference is elsewhere - at landing a normal airplane produces a certain effort per cm2 of whatever is holding the landing gear; when reduced in scale the weight of the model is much smaller, but so is the lending gear - what they are saying in this ST is that the relative effort is not the same, the landing gear is taking (in proportion) more bashing.

As long as the quality of the road is the same, your car wouldn't notice any difference between a cul-de-sac of 5m or a 500 km motorway being in front of it.

Tony M Aug 23, 2014:

@ Asker Perhaps you can confirm whether the repetition of 'landing' is your own typo, or in the source text? I feel sure it is an inadvertent repetition, but could confuse potential answerers.
I notice that some of your other questions have had obvious typos in them too...

Tony M Aug 23, 2014:

nonscale Usually, this wouldn't mean 'without scale', but rather 'not to scale' — i.e. the surface of landing field is not to the same scale as the plane (in reality, it will be proportionately a lot rougher!), hence why these poor little components would "take a beating"