Is there any easy way to "Hover?"

[Rainbow-Dashie]

I've been trying to build some form of a "Speeder Bike/Hovercraft" thingy, but I can't seem to get my dang ship to hover...

The plan was, for the first stage to fire normal facing rockets, and lift the craft a meter or two off the ground, then another set of rockets would fire the opposite direction, counter-acting the upward pushing rockets, which in my mind, would make the thing hover off the ground a bit.

I tired an equal number of rockets going either way, but realized that the downward pushing rockets had gravity on their side, so reduced the number of those... But no matter what I try, the rocket will either continue flying upwards, or be pushed into the ground by the downward rockets... I can't seem to balance it out. I tried wings for a bit but they didn't improve much.

So is there any trick to this, has anyone else tried to do this and got it to work? Would adding some more wings, or something help? Is there any way to calculate how many rockets I would need to counter each other out?

( If Pictures would help, I can try to post them)

[blizzy78]

Too much thrust. Perhaps you should go for a traditional hover design with lifting engines only? If there's any need for downwards-pushing engines, it's only to compensate for too much thrust from the lifting engines.

[Lheim]

Yea, I don't see the need for down-thrusting engines. Just fine-tune your throttle till it's moving as little as possible.. and have some RCS fuel and thrusters to give yourself lateral velocity.

[Johnno]

Easy way, no.

Difficult way, yes.

The way I've done it is downward facing engine(s) and then throttle control. The lighter your craft becomes, the more you have to throttle down, like a regular lander. I built a hoverbike of sorts where I also added rocket engines forward and back, then toggled what direction I wanted to fly by switching on/off action groups.

The more engines you add the harder it becomes to fly though, VTOL aircraft as such are easy enough since you're either taking/off landing, hovering, or flying forward, where only the latter uses horizontal thrust. But trying to multitask a lander/hoverbike where you have to focus on craft attitude, speeds, altitude and toggle engines on and off is quite difficult. Been there, done that, sticking with simple landers and VTOL.

[Wallace]

There is a stock VTOL flying bedstead thingy you can load up and try out, it hovers fairly well, maybe giving that a try and lookies will give you some ideas.

[annallia]

I would ask what engines you are using and how big is your craft.

I recently tried making something a bit like that. Tried various forms of jet engines to hover but I found their changes in thrust to be hard to keep steady with , they also seemed to require larger crafts (mostly because of the size of their smallest tank). Rockets however the little orange ones did the trick for me.

I didn't expect the four little rockets to shoot up so fast so I got kinda high but landed, re took off and was flying around sub 50m until I ran out of fuel.