'Sold my soul to the Kraken

[klond]

 or

How I learned to stop worrying and love the glitch.  

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 @Bubbadevlin's beautiful and functional futuristic looking creation inspired me to look into what was going on here.

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I grabbed my tiny coaxial copter, lightened it up, and replaced each juno with one medium leg.  After some trial and error I found a fin/rotor/leg placement that I like.

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 Each larger leg has a piston with a slightly longer stroke, hence a better sweet spot for pushing power.  See technical diagram below for a generalization.

 Distance of leg from rotor fins has the most effect on power by far I've found.  @Bubbadevlin also might have more information on the BOOM relationship between the total mass of the main machine and the rotating mass, and whether legs should be on the main craft or not.

 Spring strength also changes the pushing power each leg has.  Too bad it's not adjustable in flight.

 Legs can be inside each other and work fine while adding to the total power.

 I've only tested with damper strengh at minimum, so I'm unsure if increasing it helps or hurts.

 I think choosing thin fins helps with leg retraction speed, but not all objects work.  I tried the little cubic things for fins, but the legs slowed down when retracting back through material.  Thermometers or solar panels work well.

 The max speed of the glitch, wow, I don't know.  If positioned right and allowed to free-wheel with no load the legs extend and retract so fast they don't look like they're moving!  It's really noticable in the 24fps video below.

 Legs get into a weird, unwanted state while being deployed.  They can really wreck things and just get in the way until fully deployed.  I left mine deployed all the time to avoid issues and instead slide the rotors up out of the way to stop power being produced.

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Here's the kraken copter in action.  This is about max power for these lil bearings.

KerbalX

 

Edited June 18, 2017 by klond

[Bubbadevlin]

Lovely! 

I have been doing more testing, and from what I can tell spring strength is always good, as it is how much the leg will actually "push" while the dampener is the amount of resistance the leg will have to being moved, This is a bad thing, as when the blades of your turbine intercept the landing leg, it is often automatically moved back very quickly. More dampener CAN provide a reaction to this push back, and therefore create more thrust, but too much will simply cause the leg to over stress and boom. The interesting thing about that is the dampener strength appears to tied to the mass of the craft the legs are on (meaning that on anything of decent weight even that .5  becomes too much dampener). My guess is to prevent heavy craft from becoming a Pogo stick, but i have no clue otherwise. I also have found that the closer the leg is to the blade, the more thrust it gives, and i believe this is due to more "pushing" time and  also it seems like leg spring strength has a curve. (weakest at the bottom and strongest at the top) This would actually make sense because you would not want your suspension to be rock hard, or automatically max out. I personally have 2 guesses on your "boom" zone though. First is that past that your blades are expanding with the spinning and hitting the legs. The other guess is based off of having recently installed the mod which provides a visible wire frame for hit boxes (the one azimech uses). From that you can see there is actually a part of the leg which goes slightly beyond where the piston part of it appears to start, and the blades once again might be hitting that. I have however done most of my testing with the large landing gear, so it might be true that the medium have a weirdness like this. From my tests I have not even been able to get the small ones to work AT ALL.

Sorry about the wall o' text, but I have been meaning to post about my more recent understanding and this seemed like a good enough place to do it

[klond]

 Thanks for the reply.  Lots of great info there!

 I had some success with the tiny legs, but the power/weight wasn't there for me, and tricky finding the sweet spot.

[Castille7]

Tried to land on the Diving Vessel but the Kraken would not allow it! 

[gamingknight]

cool idea but the kraken hates going on my aircratf carrier