EpicSpaceTroll139

The low pitch blades may be true for helicopters, but planes need higher pitch to get any significant speed. Also, I have a plane or 2 that flies on SAS power. If there is a probe core and sufficient electricity on your propeller shaft, you can use the [ ] keys to switch to it and rightclick the blades to adjust their flap deflection/deployed settings.

Are you increasing the pitch of the blades as the plane accelerates? Without doing that it will never get any significant speed.

Sorry Dave, mobile problems ^ Wasn't that in FAR tho?

An update on that MD-88 replica. It's got its basic form. It just won't fly. Even tho the COL appears to be right under the COM... It just wants to slowly nose down into the water... gonna have to work with it a while. Also I've been working on an extremely fast air-breathing plane, the Javeline Mk2-2. Well, at least that's the version in this pic. It can do 1.7km/s. The design is "secret" for now, so this is the closest pic we've got

Could you send a picture of said helicopter? Also, what speed is this pitch-up problem occurring? I've found in my work with helicopters that assymetric lift (caused by the retreating blade moving slower through air than the advancing blade) and the gyroscopic effects from the spinning rotor can cause odd handling characteristics such as what you are describing. I imagine the gyro effects would be especially pronounced on a tip-jet helicopter, as there is now significant mass at the tips of the rotor. A picture and a bit more descrption could help me to confirm this and I could offer some advice! Also it can help to bend down the tips of the rotor blades. Don't ask me exactly why it works, but it does wonders for fixing nose up problems at speed.

I've been working on some wheel-less bearing planes. It It doesn't get going fast because I can't change the pitch without it going out of control (it's a feisty beast). As for the engine exploding, I'm not sure which out of 3 it is. One, it starts to overspeed since I can't change the pitch to a steeper angle. Two, I can't design a good turboprop plane to save my life (I always have the shaft bending or something). Or three, the wheeless bearing. I'm inclined to think it is a combination of the first two. Probably mostly the second one.

Well ofc it probably wouldn't work well on an airplane, it was designed for a helicopter. Plane engines don't work well on helicopters, and helicopter engines don't work well on airplanes. They are fundamentally different! Remember your propeller engine that wasn't working well when you tried to make a heli with it?

Oh yah forgot about that. I didn't work much with helicopters back then

That thing looks like it could have worked well if the blade angle was lower!

Cyclic controls attitude in a helicopter, not collective.

mine doesn't have collective and it worked fine lol... anyways, perhaps that same KOS script for the constant speed propeller could work for collective on a helicopter?

I thought it blew up when he tried to loop?

All I have to add is this:Out of curiosity, how many other helicopters here can do aerobatics?

We forgive you for your transgressions of logic! We all do this xD

But my helicopters aren't powered by SAS rotors

Well, somehow my helicopters are performing great with their wheeless bearings, which have almost no friction. And only two blowers for the main rotor.

Well yah, the blades pull away on all my helis too. It's just on this one they pull away so far that they snap. Might add some screenies Ok so I did the math on the control surface heli blades idea. So on my "traditional heli", at hover power, the main rotor spins at just over 1800deg/s. I'm just going to say that that's what it spins at, for simplicity. This means that it takes 1/10th of a second for it to make 1/2 rotation. The fastest moving control surfaces are the Big-S Elevons & 2, at 40degrees/sec. 40/10 = 4 degrees Considering that the rotor blades on this particular heli have only a 5 degree angle of attack, this is the difference between having lift and having almost none at all! Perhaps this could have something to it? Also, perhaps a better system would be to have a swashplate that only controls cyclic and have a KOS script do the collective? This way the blades could be one piece and thus centrifugal forces wouldn't make them fly off?

Bingo! I attached tip jets to the blades of the traditional heli posted earlier. As the rotor spins up, it begins to expand, and eventually shatters before the heli has enough lift to take off. Half the time, the hub is left spinning in the middle. Without the tip jets it works fine. As for the bearing, it actually uses a sort of "upgraded" version of the thermometer hinge. Instead of using thermometers in a tube, it has a disk of the small static solar panels. The core antenna is the same however. This hinge isn't quite as small, but it is much stronger. I think it has to do with the distance the antenna would have to clip to get outside the tube/disk.n

Thanks for going to the trouble of figuring that out! I guess my rotors are flinging themselves apart because they're shorter, allowing them to spin quite a bit faster. With tip jets added, the stresses are just too much. Maybe tip jets are better for large helicopters.

Is your cap 1800deg/s? Bcc I just calculated that is the regular stock limit

Well there is an angular velocity limit coded into the physics.cfg that, unedited, hard limits the spin of vessel and thus rotor to 31.4159 radians per second. My guess is this is what you are running into and that your blades simply aren't going faster. I know that the display works above the stock angular velocity settings, so I doubt you found a true inaccuracy. Is your cap 1800deg/sec?

You actually don't need mods to tell rpm. If you open the alt+f12 menu, click the physics then aero tab, and click display, you will get a whole bunch of stats. Switch to the rotor and it will give you it's "roll" ---> spin rate in degrees per second I would do this myself except I'm on mobile right now

By the way I've been meaning to ask, how fast do the rotors on your Kinchook spin? I've been testing tip-jet rotors for efficiency but they keep ripping apart on me!

@Gman_builder I find that helicopter main rotors typically work best with very low blade angles. As in about 5 degrees, possible less at the tips for large rotor. They need the low angle of attack to maintain rpm and thus lift under the load of the heli

Well what I meant by individually actuate was actuate them all by different amounts to get cyclic and collective inputs. And yah, you're probably right that the rotor just spins way too fast... Ima go take a look at the actuation speeds and see how far the fastest ones could move in 1/2 rotation of my heli's rotor. Probably like 1-2 degrees