Hovering a VTOL

[Oafman]

I'm getting to grips with VTOLs. There's lots of useful advice on this forum, which has helped me get over the challenges of balancing CoM/CoT etc. So I've made various different VTOLs which can fly, and which I can steer.

What I really want is a craft which can hover, to lift things with a magnet or winch. Whilst I've built ships which can do it, the problem lies with me as a pilot. I can constantly tweak the thrust to make them hover (more or less), and I can tilt them to steer. But what I really struggle with is doing both simultaneously. When I put my mind to steering, I look away from the vertical speed for a while, and it starts to rise. When I focus on the vertical speed, my steering goes awry. This is probably confounded by the fact that tilting the craft to steer it affects the degree of vertical thrust, meaning that this is the time when I should be most focused on that thrust, but instead I'm busy steering.

This inability to spin multiple plates might well be one of the reasons why I'm not a military test pilot (there are a variety of other reasons!). But that is not about to change, so I need to find another way to do this.

I guess what I would really like is a mod which takes over my thrust control and tweaks it to maintain a fixed altitude, freeing me up to tilt the thing so it's moving in the direction I want it to. Does such a mod exist? MJ doesn't seem to offer any such functionality.

Edited July 8, 2014 by Oafman

[Red Iron Crown]

You could add an RCS system to your VTOL. That way you can set the throttle for hover and use the translation controls to move laterally without tilting (over short distances, anyway). The hover will gradually turn into a climb as you burn off fuel mass, though.

I'm pretty sure MechJeb has a "maintain vertical speed" setting, though I don't recall which window it's in off the top of my head.

[Oafman]

You could add an RCS system to your VTOL. That way you can set the throttle for hover and use the translation controls to move laterally without tilting (over short distances, anyway). The hover will gradually turn into a climb as you burn off fuel mass, though.

I'm pretty sure MechJeb has a "maintain vertical speed" setting, though I don't recall which window it's in off the top of my head.

Yeah some googling suggests 'Keep vert' is an option in the Translatron. Which tbh is not something I've ever used. I'll try it out tonight and report my findings.

The RCS is a good shout, and well worth a try. It would still need me to do 2 things at once, but it would at least mean that one of the things (steering) did not have such a large effect on the other (vertical speed). But I did have a rather heavy craft in mind, which in atmosphere might take a lot of RCS to shift. I'll give it a go.

As for hover increasing with reduced mass, that ought to be pretty slow to change, so more manageable.

[Voculus]

I found this video to very helpful in my early days. I went from being terrible at VTOLs to just being bad!

[peadar1987]

Real life VTOLs generally use "puffer jets" to maintain attitude. Some of the jet exhaust is diverted to vents at the nose, wingtips and tail to provide a long lever arm for the force to act. Such a system is impossible in KSP, so RCS is probably your best approximation for that.

[Diazo]

As you are open to mods, I'll point out the Velocity Control mod I made to deal with exactly this. (Link in my signature.)

Pretty much exactly the issues you are running into is the reason I created it.

D.

[Oafman]

Thanks Diazo, sounds like it's exactly what I need. I'll give it a go later.

And thanks to all for the advice. That video is good - I liked the tip about limiting thrust