Working Helicopter anyone?

[stoani96]

Hey guys!

Has anyone yet sucessfully built a working helicopter with the new parts?

And with 'working' I mean like a reallife helicopter with collective and cyclic pitch.
The helicopter blades react to the pitch/yaw/roll input, but it seems they do not do it in a 'unique' way. It seems they react just like a normal control surface which decides based on its relative position, if and how much it has to move. 
For example when the blades are perpendicular to the roll axes, they move when I input a pitch (W or S), but they are not moving when aligned to the roll axes. 
So yeah, we seem to have cyclic control, but a very useless one.

Has anyone figured out how to do a proper control? How we get cyclic control (collective is easy as you can use deployment)
Would it somehow be possible to use a KAL? 

 

Edit: One thing that might work: use 4 blades. set one to pitch control and the next (perpendicular to the first one) to yaw/roll (depends on craft orientation). that way you would have some sort of cyclic pitch control, but not sure how well this works....

Edited July 12, 2019 by stoani96

[AHHans]

15 hours ago, stoani96 said:

Has anyone yet sucessfully built a working helicopter with the new parts? 

Nope. (Well, at least I didn't, although I tried.)

A quadcopter with servos between the rotor and the blades as the collective and the blade deflection as cyclic does work.

[stoani96]

How did you do the cyclic? Like I mentioned (using pitch/roll/yaw input) or did you discover something smarter/better/easier?

[AHHans]

2 hours ago, stoani96 said:

How did you do the cyclic? Like I mentioned (using pitch/roll/yaw input) or did you discover something smarter/better/easier?

Yes, I think I do it they way you mentioned. For pitch/roll/yaw control I essentially just do not set the authority limiter of the blades to zero. (Setting it to 30 works well for me.) Because it is a quadcopter and the rotors and their thrust-vectors are all well away from the COM, this works reasonably well.

The one thing I really did, is to use servos between the rotor and the blades for the collective control.

 

[IkranMakto]

On 7/13/2019 at 12:25 AM, stoani96 said:

Has anyone yet sucessfully built a working helicopter with the new parts?

Yes. 

 

[Balto-the-Wolf-Dog]

I've been doing some testing on this subject with small helicopters. The bizarre thing is the rotors appear to behave like swashplate rotors on the roll axis, and I've consistently been able to make helicopters that control smoothly on the roll axis without the use of reaction wheels. Following the rotor blades through slow rotations while giving them control inputs confirms that roll inputs work as they should in a swashplate helicopter. Pitch does not, however. Unfortunately I think the correct behavior of roll may just be an odd side effect of the way KSP assigns angles to control inputs normally. That's unfortunate given how promising it is.

[Daniel Prates]

This thread is very reassuring to me. I've been working like crazy to make a decent controllable helicopter, only to fail miserably everytime. I am glad to see I'm not the only one.

Edited July 23, 2019 by Daniel Prates

[Nuke]

On 7/13/2019 at 5:25 AM, AHHans said:

Nope. (Well, at least I didn't, although I tried.)

A quadcopter with servos between the rotor and the blades as the collective and the blade deflection as cyclic does work.

you dont need the servos. deploy the blades and use the authority limiters. quad copters work very well. i tried a khinook style helicoper but it had a nasty nose down tendency i couldnt get rid of. a tricopter might work, two fixed forward rotors with a servo driven tail boom for mounting the third engine. pitch and roll work pretty much the same as a quad, but yaw control is provided by the servo instead of differential pitch on kitty corner pairs.

Edited August 13, 2019 by Nuke

[AHHans]

5 minutes ago, Nuke said:

you dont need the servos. deploy the blades and use the authority limiters. quad copters work very well. 

Also without reaction wheels?

[Nuke]

16 minutes ago, AHHans said:

Also without reaction wheels?

they help improve stability but i was able to turn them off and survive a flight from the island to the ksc. joystick helps.

Edited August 13, 2019 by Nuke

[AHHans]

Hmmm...

Maybe I'll try it sometime. First I'll need to unlock all that good stuff in my career save. ;-)

[Rpatto92]

On 7/12/2019 at 10:25 PM, stoani96 said:

Hey guys!

Has anyone yet sucessfully built a working helicopter with the new parts?

And with 'working' I mean like a reallife helicopter with collective and cyclic pitch.
The helicopter blades react to the pitch/yaw/roll input, but it seems they do not do it in a 'unique' way. It seems they react just like a normal control surface which decides based on its relative position, if and how much it has to move. 
For example when the blades are perpendicular to the roll axes, they move when I input a pitch (W or S), but they are not moving when aligned to the roll axes. 
So yeah, we seem to have cyclic control, but a very useless one.

Has anyone figured out how to do a proper control? How we get cyclic control (collective is easy as you can use deployment)
Would it somehow be possible to use a KAL? 

 

Edit: One thing that might work: use 4 blades. set one to pitch control and the next (perpendicular to the first one) to yaw/roll (depends on craft orientation). that way you would have some sort of cyclic pitch control, but not sure how well this works....

I just wrote reply on this topic... So, I'll just quote myself: 

"There's a bug or untended feature I've noticed when blades or control surfaces are too close to the centre of spin/centre of mass in the horizontal plain. Control surfaces become inverted and rotor blades get some weird control input mixing/inversion, that means pressing up/down will induce roll left/right and vice versa. 

The solution is to move the blades or control surfaces away from the centre of mass/spin. So, move them out from the centre of spin, put them on a bigger rotor hub or just offset them."

Also, recently posted a helicopter guide.

here's a link: