A Tribute to Airwolf, with a Kaman Synchropter because moar rotors!

[Goddess Bhavani]

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From Focke-Wulf Triebflugel to Mil V-12, I have been reading up on wacky/highly advanced rotary wing concepts from an earlier age of aeronautics and wanted to build a crazy rotorcraft of my own after seeing members of a KSP Facebook group have a go at creating models of turbo-shaft engines.

To keep part count down, I decided to use the Fw Triebflugel's rotor-tip engine setup and try my hand at replicating the twin rotor configuration of intermeshing rotors used by the Kaman K-MAX. This would give me all the fun of trying to make a twin rotor setup work without the massive bulk of the V-12's huge wings and struts.

I then added stub wings to my copter, again an idea borrowed from old Russian cargo helo designs with wings to off-load the rotor system during high speed cruise - this is crucial for KSP as the 62.5cm parts I used have a limited load capacity (about 6 tons for each 62.5cm docking washer, before it will shear off under load regardless of how many struts there were).

Without further ado, here's what Airwolf on Kerbin could look like with B9 aerospace parts and a engineering philosophy of moar rotors

The craft file can be obtained from KerbalX

Edited March 8, 2015 by pandoras kitten

[Yukon0009]

The vid is borked

[Goddess Bhavani]

The thumbnail doesn't seem to work, which is strange because they appear fine when I published it. The video at http://youtu.be/yrgLMPRzuGA seems to be viewable though.

edit: fixed the thumbnail. Browser cache issue was causing it to disappear on the video editing page at youtube.

Edited March 8, 2015 by pandoras kitten