VTOL Avengers Quinjet

sevenperforce · May 30, 2022

I decided to try my hand at the Avengers Quinjet, but I couldn't decide which version to do.

There's the early one with the large in-wing rotor that can tilt:

Spoiler

There's an intermediate version with lift fans hidden in an intake underneath fixed wings:

Spoiler

And then there are several late-stage versions which don't appear to have any lift fans at all:

Spoiler

After some thought, I decided to try and replicate the mid-to-late-stage Quinjet from the end of Black Widow because I didn't really want to bother too much with rotors, so here you go!

There's really minimal part clipping. The Dawn engines are really just for show; they don't provide anything like a usable amount of thrust. You don't need infinite fuel or infinite electricity to fly it but I turned on infinite electricity just because it keeps the Dawns from flaming out.

This quinjet has thirteen Juno engines for forward thrust and two Wheesleys for vertical lift inside of a 1.25-meter payload bay. All of them are controlled with independent action groups. When the Quinjet is fully loaded with fuel, the Wheesleys don't have quite enough thrust for VTOL, so I added two clusters of Twitch engines inside the payload bay:

I turned off the gimbal on all of the Twitch engines and inside tied them to a couple of KAL-1000 controllers, one for roll and one for pitch. The throttle on the Twitch engines is bound to the main throttle, allowing me to easily manage hover, but the KAL-1000s can reduce the thrust limiter by up to 80% to control roll and pitch for stability.

There's not a lot of oxidizer on board because sustained hover really wasn't the point; you really only need 2-3 seconds of thrust from the Twitch engines to get off the ground and then you can turn them off and fire up the Junos:

It has ridiculously low wing loading (not by design, just a consequence of trying to match the appearance of the movies) so stall speed is stupidly low, like 34 m/s or something.

At the same time the center of lift is just barely behind the center of mass so while it is stable in level flight it is also ridiculously maneuverable. It can go from level flight at 200 m/s to a pitch-up, roll, and turn to 180 degrees in mere seconds by trading speed for lift.

Unfortunately it is not what I would describe as terribly fast. There's a LOT of drag and the Junos just don't have that much power.

If it can hit Mach 0.7 in level flight it's doing well.

It can land vertically with or without using the Twitch engines, although it is much more controllable with the Twitches or with a puff of RCS. Landing without the Twitches takes some finesse, as you basically have to cut the Junos, glide to your stall speed, then pitch up and fire up the Wheesleys at the exact same time: