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[STOCK] Messier 1-Leg Powered Helicopter


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Bubbadevlin Presents: The Messier 1

n8LZ8ZV.jpg

          This craft is the first of its kind to utilize my new leg-powered propeller. It has been a long time in development, and is my first craft release in over a year! Most of the importance of the design is the core, a coaxial rotor setup which can vertically lift over 100 tons on no fuel. The rest of the craft has been built around this, and is designed mainly for looks it does however fly well.

 

 

             At the center of craft lies something I have struggling with for a long time, an alternative engine. It works very similar to the well known turbo prop, but varies in the fact that what does the pushing is landing legs. If you ever saw those cannon designs from 1.2, this works the same way. The "turbine" of structural panels spins, colliding with the suspension part of the landing leg and is then pushed off again by the landing leg's suspension force. This can be an incredible source of power, but many troubles plague these types of engines. First is the fact that they can be over stressed, unlike electric or turboprops leading to all of, or some of, the landing legs undergoing spontaneous combustion. The other problem is weight. For unknown reasons, when colliding with other craft landing legs believe that they are on the ground. This means that if you have any sort of weight on the craft which they are on, the legs, will again, blow up. To get around this, many of my designs have the landing gear on the outside, or part that spins with the propeller. The rest of this center core is simply a refined bearing, and a fairing to encompass the spinning landing legs. While this design has no advantage to an electric propeller in simplicity, or size, and will not beat turboprops in coolness factor. Leg powered propellers are more powerful than both, and I hope they will become very useful in the future.

 

 

 

         The ship itself is, as said before, designed around just looking nice and being a stress test for this new type of engine. It features some forward thrusting jet engines, however they can make the craft somewhat unstable, so use at your own risk.This engine has been tuned for this specific craft weight, however that can be easily adjusted if you want more power by adding more pitch to the propeller blade. While there is some decent spam of reaction wheels in the craft, i still believe it is surprisingly nimble for the size. Using a propeller deploy based throttle (easier than the explanation seems) I even managed to land on the VAB roof!

 

DOWNLOAD - Instructions are in craft description

 

 

Edited by Bubbadevlin
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 You might have finally talked me into looking into this technology.  I might be ready to abuse stock physics some more as long as no kerbals are harmed.  I did see the cannons people made a while back but did not make any inspections.

 What version is the download?

 Also this is a nice writeup and your test platform there is pretty neat / kinda futuristic.

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Download should be for 1.3, but afaik the update did not change anything (so would work with 1.2 w/ config file editing)

Also no kerbals we harmed :wink: totally automated test craft

Edited by Bubbadevlin
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Wow, it's actually significantly larger than I expected. Taking off on an empty runway doesn't really do the size justice, I flew it out to my aircraft carrier (also stock) parked in the bay north of KSC, and the size really became more apparent. (Carrier is over 215m long bow to stern) It was also amazingly controllable vtoling it down, and I had no real trouble setting it down on the deck, although taking the engines above 50% throttle seemed like a very bad idea. :P Quite impressive. I'd be curious if there is any way to shrink the mechanism to fit on a smaller plane, or enable re-docking into a single craft so one could be used for Duna/Eve exploration. (pretty sure it wouldn't fly on Duna as is, but the mechanism itself should work with a different body)

Here it is landed on my carrier;

 ySXQYku.png

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Thank you everyone! Yea, it is strangely quite once the legs are deployed. Making the engine smaller is quite possible with the smaller legs. I have already tried some of my designs on Eve (with hyper edit) and they work quite well. With some modifications it should also work on Duna. Redockability should also be possible.  Nice engine Klond, but i have to say be careful, form my experience if you make that little chassis any heavier (or start moving fast) the landing leg will over stress (hence why the legs are on the rotor of the helicopter) 

BTW! nice carrier lol :wink:

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27 minutes ago, klond said:

 Work has already begun.

Also, you gotta advertise that carrier.  What a beast.

 

14 minutes ago, Bubbadevlin said:

Thank you everyone! Yea, it is strangely quite once the legs are deployed. Making the engine smaller is quite possible with the smaller legs. I have already tried some of my designs on Eve (with hyper edit) and they work quite well. With some modifications it should also work on Duna. Redockability should also be possible.  Nice engine Klond, but i have to say be careful, form my experience if you make that little chassis any heavier (or start moving fast) the landing leg will over stress (hence why the legs are on the rotor of the helicopter) 

BTW! nice carrier lol :wink:

That micro version is quite impressive :) So just as my luck is, the entire thing exploded mid-flight on the way back to the runway after taking that picture. One of the legs over-stressed, but I'm not quite sure why, I wasn't doing anything fancy.

& Thanks, you'd think at that size landing on it would be pretty easy right? Nope, not really. Could really use another 100m of runway length & a bit more width for non-vtol landings, but that starts jumping the part count crazy fast. Here's hoping for some larger flat parts with making history lol.

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So I have started trying to compact this design, and found that strangely, the smallest landing gear does not work with the original design i had. My guess is that they just do not have enough spring strength. I have however, found a new design which is much smaller, but has much less torque and what appears to be an even smaller window between good thrust, and exploding legs.

 HT1Dc71.jpg

 

The landing lets push on the slanted elevons creating a spinning force. This obviously shrinks the diameter quite significantly, and works with the small legs too (VERY low strength though).  Oddly enough i have yet to get this type of engine to  work with the largest landing legs. More testing is needed, but unfortunately seems like a simple reaction wheel propeller is much stronger than this for the weight. 

 

 

Another possible way of making this mechanism appear smaller is to had the legs clipped into the propeller blades (hence hiding the legs somewhat)

Edited by Bubbadevlin
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