Auto propeller blade pitch control

[fourfa]

Regarding airplanes with Breaking Ground propellers... it’s been my experience that at any given speed, there is one blade pitch that gives maximum thrust. Seems to change more or less linearly with speed up to a max around 53*, and seems not to matter much (or at all) which size of blade. Corrections welcome if you’ve found differently, of course...

I’ve searched a lot on the topic, many guides to manual pitch control but haven’t found anything on auto pitch control outside of real-life mechanisms.

This seems like an excellent opportunity for a mod to provide an Automatic Blade Pitch Controller, which when engaged would automatically set blade pitch proportionally to forward speed. This would greatly simplify takeoff and stall recovery, where speed changes rapidly and the pilot is often stumbling to find the correct pitch manually before crashing...  Then disengage auto-pitch for landing (perhaps bound to landing gear deploy?), where manual control gives you excellent control over approach speed.

Questions: 

1. Can this already be done with some existing smart parts mod that can sense speed and control sliders in closed loop?

2. Would this need a gain control? Is there enough variation between parts to need it?

3. I talked about maximum thrust, as I’ve been looking for max speeds in my planes. But are there other modes of interest, like best efficiency?

4. Altitude? So far it seems that the same pitch angle for sea level also works well at altitude... but I wouldn’t be shocked if the controller needed altitude compensation as well

5. Advanced controls for feathering (min drag), braking (max drag), compound propulsion (ie props to reach altitude then light rockets etc), etc.  @Stratzenblitz75  has found an interesting exploit using heat shields as props, and there are other supersonic builds out there that might have special needs... Open to discussion

I put this topic here since it seemed right for general mod musing, but if it’s so specific to Breaking Ground that it needs to go in  the graveyard of the BG sub forum, so be it...
 

Additional thoughts?

 

Edited December 2, 2020 by fourfa

[fourfa]

This exists now!