afoolishmoon

100% right, thanks for the advice! I found by changing the angle 15-20 degrees I could force the craft to "auto-land" very gently.

Hello, apologies if this is redundant (I couldn't find anything relating to this when I searched). I've been trying to wrap my head around helicopter physics and built a pretty stable test design using a contra-rotating rotor to stop spin (thank you Brikoleur!). I can fly around pretty easy, but one thing keep going wrong: Landing. Basically can't do it. Here's what happens: I fly around a bit to test aerodynamics, then decide to land. I lower my blade RPM and descend slowly, but as I approach 0 m/s (descent) the rate of slowing increases very suddenly and I begin a free-fall like drop. I quickly jam the rotors back to max RPM, but there's a lag before the change starts reducing my descent and I'm typically around 20-40 m/s before it starts (slowly) reducing. Often this either ends in hitting so hard I explode, or just hard enough that I bounce hard upward and rocket back to high altitude (even if I drop RPM right before I hit). If I get it semi-stable I can ping-pong up and down, but can't maintain a slow descent. It feels as if the sweet zone for descending slowly is so VERY narrow that I can't stay in it, like balancing two spheres on one another. I can capture a video of this if it is unclear... Just hoping it's a known cause. To be clear, when the sudden drop happens, I am NOT touching the controls. SAS is on, but my hands are off the RPM. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? What's causing this sudden drop?

First real post, lurked a while. I'm sure others had thought of this, but I couldn't find any posts about it and wanted to share. So, I give you my fuel asparagus: Being very cheap, I don't like traditional asparagus designs because dropping valuable parts (engines) hurts. So, I removed the engines and used a central Skipper engine instead with just the fuel tanks in an asparagus array. Added a Hitchhiker module for carrying more kerbals, since I had to use a brand adapter anyway. Just the Skipper saves you around 3,000 versus an array of nine Reliants, and in practice more since you can recover the Skipper. This build gets 4 (or more if you ditch the drone core and go with a cockpit) kerbals into orbit with a fairly substantial amount of fuel left. It's good for early on in career when you don't have a lot unlocked. It's nice for putting multiple tourists into orbit and/or picking up stranded kerbonauts because of its seating. Notes: *Starts very slow, but don't worry... It gets there. *Since you won't be queued to drop tanks by an engine flame-out you need to watch the fuel levels as you fly. *Rarely a fuel tank will fall wrong and clip off the engine connector, usually on the gravity turn. Maybe some well-placed struts could prevent this? *The large number of parachutes is due to how it tends to land: auto-cutting some, then tipping over. The extra chutes on the top seem to help with this. I'm definitely open to suggestions on improving this, I'm sure it's far from perfect.