XLjedi

Comparatively unstable hover and/or finicky controls... So it's difficult to land/hover with precision and doesn't track straight without constant yaw input/adjustments. I don't see your helos on KerbalX, but would be happy to fly them. I can imagine a coax design with a tail rotor might be 'OK'. ...but you have no counter-rotation to offset, so you're just using tail rotor as a directional fan. Then of course people say, "What coax helo IRL needs a tail rotor? ...that's not a helicopter." I guess I view the reaction wheels in a coaxial helo design to be "that mechanism" that allows yaw to be controlled without the tail rotor. I'm gonna try one last time for the stereotypical single rotor 'pristine helo' that people love to refer to but can't really get right in this game. Problem is there's just no good way to map the lift vector of the tail rotor so the thing will track straight. So you just end up with an interesting but not very useful toy to fly around and try to land on KSC pads.

Go play Stormworks. To me, they are helos in kerbal-world. You're not gonna get "real" helos in this game anywhere near as controllable without use of reaction wheels. Not without some better control interaction between main and tail rotors. ...or adjustments based on airspeed, etc. I have a third (new) helo airframe that I'm gonna try one last time to linkup rotor and tail control with KAL blending... Everytime I've tried in the past though, the result has been a pretty iffy flight model and I just scrapped it for actual mission use. Nothing better than toy quality. I haven't seen where anyone yet has a better control approach/scheme than what I'm using, but always willing to take a look and revise.

At least that rules out the green vectors as applying some sort of force that was causing unwanted yaw. Thanks! I might use some of the text to fill in a definition for that one since it is info that came from @SQUAD. Would be nice if I didn't have to piecemeal it together and someone would just tell us how they all work?

10/10 Human Affirmed Only a human would converse in such a mediocre programming language. I am undoubtedly human because I have a mild vision impairment. I would appreciate your assistance in determining whether or not this picture contains a stop sign. Thank you!

Is there a technical explanation of these things somewhere from @SQUAD that someone could point me to? Some of the vectors seem pretty obvious... Not sure why propellers throw magenta vectors way out beyond their rotational diameter? Someone also mentioned to me that just because a part does not have a red drag vector, it doesn't mean the part has no drag? (ladders for instance) Is that true? If so, at what point are the drag vectors displayed then? I'd really like to know what each of these vectors are trying to tell me from the perspective of the people that created them. As opposed to educated guesses... Vector Colors: Red Green Yellow Magenta/Pink Dark Blue Teal/Light Blue ...did I miss any?

So far, I'm not really a fan of this update... I commend the effort, but It seems to have introduced something squirrely in the aerodynamics that causes unwanted yaw in multi-engine (non-helicopter) craft resulting in a performance loss. ...while trying to appease a crowd that wants to build some sort of pristine helo simulation in an aerodynamic/flight/control-system model that is just NOT up for that challenge. I'm not sure we really gained anything here, but we do seem to have lost something.

Well try flying these and tell me if you consider them "helicopters" ? https://kerbalx.com/XLjedi/MH-45-Cyclone-III https://kerbalx.com/XLjedi/AH-11-Dragonfly I get into irritating semantics arguments regarding these at times... People telling me they are gyrocopters (they're not) and not helicopters and complaining about cyclic controls. Technically, the craft would be classified as either "Compound Helicopter" or "Gyrodyne" which simply means they have a forward propulsion component that makes them fly fast like a jet. Which is what actually makes them useful in this game. As for the lack of true cyclic... If it were implemented or functioned a little better in game; I would use it. As it is now, I ignore it. To start, I would recommend: Ignoring and disabling cyclic controls on the rotor blades Go with a coaxial design and no tail rotor Use a reaction wheel or two (five... ten?) for yaw control Look at how I setup the KAL-1000 as a helo ECM (engine control module) So you would be focusing almost entirely on your control setup, the collective and stable hover. ...from there you can expand and build in about any direction you want to go. Even dabbling in the use of the cyclic and a tail rotor, although... it's just not that good. My "spinny things" guide here is still valid, although I had to add a few notes at the bottom of the OP to deal with changes that occurred between 1.7 and 1.9.1.

Ah... I just didn't notice them at a glance today. Was expecting something added to the last step. All is good! I did get it to import a craft file. Now I just need to devise some reasons for why that might be useful to me? Appreciate the app, thank you!

Question is, Do you want something that's actually usable for missions? ...or are you bent on the idea of modeling some sort of pristine vision of "accurate helo" without reaction wheels and relying purely on cyclic and tail rotor? Although the idea of "accurate helo" in this game with the physics engine and control system "as-is" is just a misnomer to begin with. If it's the former; I can definitely help you! If it's the later; it has no in-game mission use. A useless toy for KSC landing pad play and not of any value to me, so I can't really recommend them in this game. Go build one in "Stormworks!" a far superior rescue vehicle sandbox game and infinitely better engine for building helos and rescue craft in general. Interesting that Stormworks has begun adding solid rocket engines to their repertoire. If they manage to nail orbital mechanics, there would be no reason to play KSP anymore.

Going back to my previous post where I already suggested it... you eluded to it with this comment: "maybe you haven't configured the KSP GameData directory in the addon's config panel (in user->prefs->addons)" My gut response to that is, "Well, you didn't tell me in the directions that I needed to do that or how to do it?" Step 9 would be where specifically to look in blender (user->prefs->addons etc.) to find your installed app. Step 10 would be your instructions (click on yellow triangle?) to make the input section appear where you can enter the default directory... and then to enter the KSP gamedata default directory This is not in any way obvious. Whether that's 1, 2 or 5 steps is up to you... it's just missing from the OP directions. Edit: oops, my bad... did you go back and add it as sub-bullets there in step 6? I don't actually recall seeing that before. But that seems to be fine. I just didn't notice it was added. If I missed it originally, I concede I must be blind.

Thanks I got it to work, but you're still really missing a step 9-10 in the OP so folks will know how to get the thing functional.

Due to the poor performance of the regular props, I finally started building cowl "turbo-chargers" into my warbird designs so they can fly. This one for instance: https://kerbalx.com/XLjedi/F5U-Crusader Prior to the turbo charger design, I could not adequately power this type of craft. I particularly like how they are pretty care-free in flight when it comes to maneuvering and recovering speed in the 2/3 throttle range.

@Redacted post your example craft to the bug report... it has a spot where you can upload it. Links here are worthless.

This is pointless... all we got on our bug report is one down vote and a fanboi arguing the behaviour is "Expected". Which honestly, is pretty much what I expected would happen.

That one's easy; it's a Unity limitation on max rotation speed. The devs actually reported that one pretty early on. You don't even need to use accel speed to see it. Just stack two rotor engines slap a pair of blades on and watch what happens.

Ya know... I don't know? I'm just not seeing a problem with yaw in this example craft? http://www.xl-logic.com/KSP/Example/Green Vector Rotation.craft I would've thought the green vectors would cause this thing to yaw right or left and they just don't? I did however go ahead and post a bug report anyway: https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/25120 Because regardless of green vector yaw, SOMETHING goofy did get introduced to the aero-modeling with cyclic controls in the 1.9.1 update that now causes the rotor blades to tilt badly in one direction or another at higher speeds. Aside from looking stupid, I also took a performance hit and lost 20 m/s on max airspeed. If you have additional comments and examples to share, please add them to the bug tracker!

I'm just about exhausted with reporting errors on this game... I think this will be my last attempt at helping them fix it. I give it a very low probability of being addressed.

Well, I went to see if auto mechanic was on sale (it's not)... and then I saw they had "Demolish & Build 2018" for a freakin' dollar! How can I not buy that? I also may have heard rumor of a roller coaster mechanic... you should probably ignore that, purely rumor.

@AHHans What version of the game are you running? You should only need to apply positive deploy angle for both CW and CCW rotation. That was one of the changes they made for cyclic control in 1.9.1.

I like Mechanic Simulator 2015... and have the latest 2018 version on my Steam Wishlist to pickup the next time it goes on the cheap. I've seen that they have since spun-off a number of "Mechanic Simulator" related titles: Semi-Truck, Aircraft, Tank, and now Rover What makes the original (Auto) Mechanic Simulator fun to me are two elements that the other titles will just completely miss. I wanted to actually learn some basic auto mechanics from the game to apply to my own vehicles/repair work. Believe it or not, this game actually taught me a lot! I even repaired a big part on my Dodge hemi engine (the water pump) which prior to this game I would never even attempt! So learning about all the parts in the engine allowed me to pickup a digital code reader and self-diagnose most engine issues I have and I know stuff like, "Oh that part is on the outside of the engine and is just a few bolts to remove." I also replace my own brakes and rotors now. As for gaming, I was having some fun in the 2015 version playing a very shady mechanic! I had a nice 69 Camero that I was working on restoring, and I would deliberately take jobs to do things like replace brake pads on cars with parts that would fit on my rusted out Camero. So I was removing the newer parts from these jobs and swapping them out with my rusted junk. LOL! Boosting the value of my "restoration" project for sale at auction. I don't see where either of the two things I mention above would be applicable in the other titles, so they are of very little interest to me. ...now when I drive by that local gas station with a bunch of restoration jobs parked around their service garage, I'm like, "Ain't no dam way I'm leaving my car here overnight for a brake job!" LOL!!!

Did you try reversing the engine rotation and blade orientation on both engines to see if it then pulled in the opposite direction? When I did this on my craft, it continued to roll in the same direction... so I thought I had ruled out the green vectors as a result of why my specific craft was losing control at speed. LOL, that was also my initial question... @SQUAD WTH are these green vectors?

@Redacted Do you happen to have a link to the craft file?

I don't see that though... seems to get worse or more pronounced dependent only on airspeed. I can hover at full RPM load and there's no visible impact.

For comparison, here's the same exact craft in v1.9.0 prior to the introduction of cyclic controls: Sadly, after looking at one of my flight test videos (screenshot above) it did take a performance hit. As seen here, I was getting the craft up to 179-180 m/s in level flight. ...and notice the rotor planes are fine! In v1.9.1 the same craft struggles to get above 160 m/s. So I took a 20 m/s performance hit on this craft as a result of what they did with the cyclic.

Oh I think there's a problem with it; I'm just not sure exactly what the problem is at this point. So far, I haven't really been able to see a significant performance hit in my craft (except the multiengine I posted to this thread, which I thought was more related to instability due to length/width ratio). I do know exactly when it happened. They introduced something goofy in the rotors/blades when they added the "cyclic" ability for helos. No question. I notice in particular, that at high speed the rotors now have forces on them that cause them to "tilt" in opposite directions depending on rotation direction. For example take a look at the rotational plane on this helo when hovering vs. traveling at speed. There is definitely something going on with the lift forces that is impacting the blades (in a mirror fashion) that is dependent on their rotation direction. I also suspect that similar forces are being applied to the props, you just don't notice the tilt because the rotational plane is smaller and maybe not as obvious. So far, it hasn't drastically impacted the performance of this craft, but it certainly looks goofy! The rotors did NOT behave/look this way in version 1.9.0. So has to be something to do with the cyclic changes they made. The error that was introduced (whatever it was) is more pronounced when the craft are traveling at speed through the atmosphere. If you are just hovering around at 20 mps no one is going to notice. It may not have been so much an issue if the stupid BG parts were not so "bendy". The tilt forces on the rotor blades seem to be causing the engine rotor parts to bend. If we can all agree this is a bug, I'd be willing to post or upvote a report on the @SQUAD bugtracker.