EpicSpaceTroll139

While I do plan to replace the ibeams on the rotor with something else (they look ugly anyways), there is definitely going to be something pole shaped there because I want to get the sort of blade shape that you can see in this picture. The heatshield was to try to replicate the smooth rotorhead top cover. I'll have to get back to you on the mass as I'm on mobile at the moment, but part count is in the upper 200s at the moment, and I'm expecting it to be something around 350-400 when I'm finished. Depending on what it is (and whether the heli has trouble flying) I may or may not try replacing some of the side, roof, and floor panels with radiators. I'll see what I can do on the stub wings without making them look wrong. Thx for the tips

I've been doing further work on the Super Stallion. It's coming along nicely. Not quite sure how I'm going to do the cargo ramp though. Probably some kind of thermo-rcs hinge actuated with levers and wheels. I'm going to need to redo the rotor, partially for looks, but mainly because it excites the kraken. I hope it will be able to fly. It's hard to pack a very powerful or efficient engine in there.

Ouch... you could have just swapped out the corrupted sfs for a backup sfs in the save too. Anyways, I've finally gotten back to work on replicas. I'm modifying a 707 airframe into a E-3 Sentry. I thought I could make the dish out of a fairing, but that didn't go to well in my earlier attempts, so I've now been making the dish using heatshields and curved radiator panels. I don't have picture of it at the moment tho . Been fiddling with a sort of passenger heli, designed for reasonably long range crew shuttling trips to drilling platforms, mountaintop bases, or to act as a high endurance search and rescue aircraft (if that is at all useful in KSP). I want it to have the compactness of a medium sized single rotor heli, but that is making it unreasonably slow. Either I need to figure out that KOS swashplate script, or make it some kind of coaxial or something like that... probably. Also I've been working on a Sikorsky CH-53E Super Stallion. I brain-farted and didn't check the dimensions before working on the fuselage, and thus made it too small, so i need to redo that. https://www.nonameships.pw/screenshots/EpicSpaceTroll139/2017-02-15 18-28-15.png -darnit why is it not showing up this time? In case people don't know exactly what that is (I'm not sure exactly how well known it is), it's this fella v

Hmmm... wasn't there some kind of K-OS constant speed propeller script on here a while back? Maybe it could be useful here? ofc it wouldn't be fully stock then tho... Perhaps action groups on the propellers for changing to cruise pitch could allow mode change with just a quick couple switches. At least you would still have throttle on the main craft.

I had been thinking just a few days ago about a similar no-switch-needed tilt-rotor design. Glad to see someone else thought of it and made it work. But does it fly? In my experience horizontal flight and vertical flight typically require drastically different blade pitch. That's why I haven't really pursued it. (I might now though, if it works).

Been working on a drillship inspired by Azimech's drilling platform. It worked great. (Larger drill pending) Until I added autostruts to keep the cable/pipeline stored until needed... The kraken apparently likes metal noodles seasoned with autostruts.

That reminds me of last night. I wanted to try installing my own equivalent engine on the Hyperion*, only to find I needed to take the whole thing apart to do so lol. I'm thinking I'll let that wait a bit. *I wanted to do this so I could somewhat scientifically determine what the strengths and weaknesses of different engine types such as efficiency, vNE , response time, etc

Also small rotors have a lower moment of inertia and thus have a quick response time (especially when combined with panther blowers). This allows, for example, my Titan Mk1-3 to recover from a freefall within only 100m (or roughly the height of the VAB, I haven't measured exactly).

I've temporarily abandoned the heavy synchrocopter design, and have taken to testing other multirotor designs.

Been working on that cyclic script. I've managed to get a basic thing running that will cyclically change the pitch of blades, but that's the easy part. I need to make it so that that it is actually controlled by the pilot, and compensates for rotation speed. On the latter I might end up having to combine it with a collective because it would be a lot simpler if the rotor spins at a constant speed.

It has 346 parts. Only the front bit has engines, the rest is the orange part of mk2 drogue chutes. I don't know exactly how many engines it has. Anyways: @Cunjo Carl and @EBOSHI nice cups of tea haha! I'm hoping to get a few more entries before I put anything on the leaderboard.

I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say there...

I've been working on a helicopter that flies more like a plane. It should theoretically be really, really, really, loud when traveling at speed because the advancing blade tips break the sound barrier, meaning it produces about 28 sonic booms per second. Good thing I don't have a mod that makes that actually happen.

seems cool, but won't airplanes make helicopter noises when they taxi then?

Ok so here's my example: the Oskar Mayer Weiner Mobile. Acts as a stylish ride and snack transport for Jeb.

This is basically a continuation of the original Kerbal Spice Program run by @Badie (this is with her permission). The goal is to create a craft that looks like food/something that looks like food. The rules are that: The parts should be stock (I might add a modded section later, but right now I'm trying to avoid mod pizzas and procedural corndogs). It should have some kind of (at least theoretical) purpose, however vague. Ex: flying advertisement, food stand, Mun rover, etc. The scoring system is kind of arbitrary.* I guess we can periodically update a set of categories. First entrant: @Cunjo Carl Cup of Tea Most detailed: @EBOSHI Cup of Tea Most (plausibly) useful: @martiplay28yt ISRU Popsicle *if anyone has a better idea for how to work this, please let me know. @ moderators If this should be somewhere else, feel free to move it.

Ok, I've done work on the rotor head that I showed earlier, and I've gotten it to work up to 130rpm. I have found this to be a sort of brick wall for this specific design unfortunately. Using a mod to slow down time, I have been able to trace the problem to something I mentioned earlier, which is that it doesn't have a teeter hinge to let the blades fly up and down. Because of the lack of this component, the blades exert a huge torque that tries to wrench them out of the hinge that allows them to change angle of incidence, so eventually it snaps and this happens. (note it was spinning a lot faster than 69rpm when it broke, my screenshot was a little late It might take me a while to design a new rotor head with this extra component, but I think I might be able to get higher rpm with it.

@klond These thermo rcs linkages are working miracles! My swashplate can now reach over 120rpm, which is actually fairly reasonable already, considering one of my lower disk loading helis operates its main rotors at about 60-70rpm. It's still less than half of what my higher disk loading helis work with though (300rpm, sometimes higher). (I'm here excluding the tiny ity bitty helicopters and tailrotors, which can go as high as 460rpm, and are obviously too small to add a contraption like this anyways). I can't wait to see what kinds of RPMs this thing works at once I've gotten the lower swashplate tilt mechanism smoothed out (currently it doesn't always keep it well centered, which means it can throw things out of whack).

Ah yes I removed those and replaced them with the control surfaces + ibeams. It didn't change how it worked though. Anyways, in a few minutes I'm going to modify it to use @klond's thermo rcs ball-socket style linkages. I get the feeling it will work much smoother.

Nice! I'd been thinking about trying out your thermo rcs bearing for this kinda thing. I wonder what would happen if you attached a turboshaft motor to it. On a side note, perhaps mine would work as well if I didn't put a probe core on every single component. I got in the habit of doing that because debris typically gets autodeleted on DMP servers

Oh it might be that I added those control surfaces on the short ibeams to demonstrate how it would be moved... if it worked... Unfortunately it does not

I think it might have some slight modifications (not sure), but nothing that made it work better or even differently.

Good luck. I've looked back through all my contraptions and this was the most "successful" (more like least bad) rotor head I made. It only has cyclic because giving it a true collective would mean I would have to separate the blades into 2 units instead of having them as one beam, thus pretty much guaranteeing they would come flying out due to centrifugal forces. Even though I put effort into making sure the COM of each component was on the axis of rotation, it only survives for a little while at around 15rpm, without having been moved from neutral position. It's also missing the important teeter hinge to allow the blades to fly up and down as lift distribution changes. However I'm worried that would also result in the blade separation problem I mentioned earlier

@_Rade @Gman_builder Both of you are right actually. The control is called the cyclic because it changes the pitch of the rotor blades cyclically. The result is to tilt the rotor disk in a particular direction, resulting in the helicopter moving in that direction. -Wikipedia

Been working on a heavy-lift helicopter that uses intermeshing rotors. ' It works great! Until it goes faster than 25-30m/s, at which point something happens, not sure what, that severely slows the rotors, and sometimes makes things explode, and the thing falls out of the sky.