Propellers in stock game?

[Zosma Procyon]

Is there a way to make functioning, preferably electric, propeller engines in the stock game, without having them be a separate craft? I know of one youtuber who built a cool fan boat, but his design required stage separating the propeller assembly and controlling it as a separate craft. I'm looking for a way to propel an amphibious base on Eve's bodies of explodium, so jet engines are out of the question, and rockets would be extremely inefficient.

[lunardog15]

it is possible but the craft its self must rotate 

[Not Sure]

Yes, sort of. It requires some very complex mechanics with claws and i hardly understand it, but I’ve seen it done by one person.

 

But there is another way and that requires a standard separate electric prop, but you can re connect it to the craft via a claw. I’ve done something similar to this for a solar powered plane and it was not too hard. Beware about its reliability, they like to spontaneously explode. A bonus about it being able to re connect is being able to quicksave often.

[KerikBalm]

I've made stock propellers that work on Duna and Eve, in the atmosphere... but they don't work in the ocean (so much for an Eve submarine without mod parts). They seem to just create drag vectors in the water without any lift vector. The atmospheric forces should still be present though, maybe if I did two counter rotating ones, the water drag would cancel out and I'd have very weak aerodynamic thrust...

The OP seems to have a similar goal that I had in this thread:

I've made some re-dockable (the ship needs to undock to have one part propel it, but that part can rejoin/redock) paddle-wheel style boats, but I couldn't get them much over 1 m/s... less than 4km/h... not practical at all.

On that thread, someone posted an air-boat or fan-boat design that go a decent speed on kerbin. That may be the way to go.

This one initially had docking ports at the front and back. You could undock from the front, fly around, then stop the prop and use air resistance (or put it in reverse on the ground) to have it slide back and dock at the back. (a quick save and load helped here as I sometimes had problems with the docking ports resetting).

I also made a design with 2x structural fuselages instead of a fairing:

To try and improve its usability with physics warp (but mostly: nope, going over 2x physics warp still broke it). Also note that the prop blades sort of stretch farther out at high RPM, they don't start with such a gap between themselves and the rotor.

That design had a single docking port part, but I could move the rotor far enough forward and back to have the docking ports reset and enable them to reconnect.

So I was thinking of using that as a sub-assembly, and mounting a pair of them (counter rotating of course) on some sort of air-boat on Eve.

 

 

[lunardog15]

@KerikBalm

could you post the plane's part files?

[OHara]

In general KerbalX.com is a good place to find craft files, when the designers feel ready to post them.

There are lots of propeller craft there, some redockable, and a couple 'klaw copters' from jfrouleau that answer the question of the OP.

[lunardog15]

thanks