Igor Sikorsky Prize: Stock Helicopter Challenge

[zekes]

I challenge thee to make a FULLY STOCK helicopter capable of taking off and landing. It Must:

-Be 0.16 stock

-Fly more than 10 seconds 10 meters off the ground

-Land without Damage

I have done it, and At the end of this I will show you mine.......

But I don't want to give a way the secrets!!!!

You thought the moon was hard to get to, this is 1000 times worse!!!

Winners:

"Little Hop":

-Zekes

-EndlessWaves

-Iplop

"Five-OH!":

-Zekes

-Nao

"Tenners":

HEAVY LIFTERS:

-VincentLaw

-Zekes

Edited September 6, 2012 by zekes

[Giggleplex777]

The Mun is easy to get to, but this is really hard. Helicopters are impossible to land intact unless you use landing gear... hmm, I just got an I idea!

Wait a minute... you didn't say it has to have a spinning rover, so I just make a VTOL instead. >

Edited September 5, 2012 by Giggleplex777

[Gojira]

Stock is impossible.

[nhnifong]

How on Kerbin am I supposed to make a stock helicopter?

[MaverickSawyer]

BIG Hint: Roton!

[princessjane]

Stock is impossible.

No it's noooooot.

[Sbowyer28]

XD Im so ganna do this, Got a plan.

[-Gamah]

Swash plates are impossible on stock

[iplop]

My two stock heli experiments:

Rockets are mounted completely horizontally on both helis.

Neither of them had happy landings... ;D

Edited September 5, 2012 by iplop

[togfox]

Ingenious.

[AeroPelican]

What do you mean by swath plate, and why is it not possible?

[eppiox]

Hmmm not being very experienced with the wings and such, can one do this using only the lift value? most of my experiments rip apart on the launch pad but they do spin at speed. Should I use the Command & controll wings and do they matter which way they face? Not much luck so far.

This wing however managed to float horizontally all the way out here from the launch pad

http://imgur.com/bcaUx

Edited September 5, 2012 by eppiox

[EndlessWaves]

My two stock heli experiments

Do they still work if you replace the canards with fixed winglets? I wonder if that's getting any assistance from the magic turbine bug.

[MaverickSawyer]

My two stock heli experiments:

Rockets are mounted completely horizontally on both helis.

Neither of them had happy landings... ;D

Excellent! that's pretty much what I had planned... Glad to see the technique works.

Now, off to my secret rocket lait... The VAB awaits!

[Bluejayek]

[EndlessWaves]

Excellent! that's pretty much what I had planned... Glad to see the technique works.

Tried some experiments myself. These do seem to be magic turbines rather than true helicoptors.

Basically the wings are useless and it's the canards doing all the lifting, you can replace them with fuselage sections and it'll still work:

But replace the canards with static winglets at the same angle and you won't even get into the air.

Having the canards further out amplifies the effect and wings are generally the lightest way to span distances but you probably want to angle them to minimise drag rather than to get lift out of them.

[Nao]

Idk if it was before the forum move, but i can't find my posts and the thread with the same challenge that was posted here before.

anywayz, that was my submission:

Direction of flight can be controlled in the same ways as in real heli - thats why I needed to rebind my controls 90deg in rotation direction (or turn the keyboard ), and since it's 4RPM its perfectly fine working as a swashplate

Max speed is around 2m/s since more would be unstable. It is almost i perpetual flight after launch.

edit: Now that i think of it, with the twisting KSP physics give us, it could be possible to add a Flybar probably maybe even in Bell-Hiller setup... here goes another night messing around in KSP sigh

Edited September 5, 2012 by Nao

[zekes]

EDIT TO RULES!!!

Cannot be VTOL, and you must post a pic inflight AND safely landed ( breaking off parts is not allowed)]

There are Four categroies:

"Little Hop": Single Flight Capable (safe takeoff and landing)

"Five-OH!": 5 flights in one launch ( 5 safe takeoffs and 5 landings)

"Tenners": 10 flights in one launch (10 safe takeoffs and 10 landings)

"HEAVY LIFTERS": (use the 3-man capsule instead of the 1-man)

Videos would be better to prove the 5- and 10- flight ships.

Best of luck! And remember NOTHING CAN BREAK OFF so I suggest adding wheels to rotate on (that worked well for me).

Edited September 5, 2012 by zekes

[-Gamah]

What do you mean by swath plate, and why is it not possible?

helicopters fly by maintaining a near-constant rotor RPM and varying the pitch of the blades to move about

the up/down movement move both (or all four) blades with positive/negative pitch (called collective)

the cyclic movement (forward/back, left/right) is "added" to the collective input (the swash moves up/down for collective, but is unrelated to the cyclic tilting.) cyclic is an inverse reaction on either side of the rotor blade, if the heli is to roll left, the blade at the right will be increased a few degrees in pitch while the blade at the left will be decreased. due to physics reasons, the maximum amounts of pitch actually occur before their 90 degree counterparts, but that is the best way I can think to simplify it.

the duty of the swash plate is to mix all of these inputs up to the rotor blades smoothly and efficiently.... however from the video here I think you can see it is quite clear that swash plates are not a viable option in KSP

[zekes]

Well, Me and Nao's theory is that if There are enough control surfaces on the rotors, we can torque the rotors enough for control......

Like My Heli......

The Roteothopter

When it turns, by hitting left roll it actually speeds up the rotors, and so rpm is adjusted by this method. Trim it out for hover, turn SAS on and it will try to correct its spin and it will Rise. It works really well....

But yes, no swashplates.

Edited September 6, 2012 by zekes

[iplop]

Yes, you can make a helicopter without using canards/control surfaces!

[VincentLaw]

I noticed no one had done a 3 man helicopter yet, so I decided to do one. It also turns out that parachutes work very well as an auto stabilization system to keep the helicopter from tipping over in flight. I have included the craft file for anyone that is interested. It has far more fuel than you could ever possibly want. (also no control surfaces)

Edited September 6, 2012 by VincentLaw

[iplop]

*Helicopter*

Awesome helicopter and ingenious use of parachutes!

Edit:

My goal was to make a similar ship while cutting the piece count.

Those parachutes work great!

-Will post more pics once the mission is finished.

Flight ceiling/decent: http://imgur.com/a/eSTMf

Unfortunately the parachutes decided to release 3/4 of the way down. I'll give it another go later.

Edit_2:

Edited September 6, 2012 by iplop

[RedDwarfIV]

This was my attempt:

It failed - the rotors couldn't even lift themselves upwards, let alone the entire craft. But heck, this is closer to a real helicopter than all the magic turbines I see being pumped out.

Edited September 6, 2012 by RedDwarfIV

[EndlessWaves]

From the aperture rocketry division (motto: we do what we must, because we can) comes the 190t lag-o-coptor:

Ascent is so slow that it'll happily fall back safely if you cut the power after 10 seconds and given that it's made of fuel tanks it should be able to operate for hours, although it slows down KSP so much the flight to verify it works is plenty for me.

Edited September 6, 2012 by EndlessWaves