[Stock Helicopters & Turboprops] Non DLC Will Always Be More Fun!

[Gman_builder]

9 hours ago, selfish_meme said:

A new day and a new bearing, mixed my two bearings for 1.25m size and an easy 4 junos per engine, best level speed yet, stock aero, all landing and taking off equipent attached

 

What RPM are those engines making?

[Gman_builder]

This is why I'm using the sled as gear

[selfish_meme]

2 hours ago, Gman_builder said:

What RPM are those engines making?

About 44 to 46

1 hour ago, Gman_builder said:

This is why I'm using the sled as gear

I am limiting myself a bit by trying to fit it into a normal looking and behaving craft. It is certainly challengong though!

[Gman_builder]

13 minutes ago, selfish_meme said:

About 44 to 46

I am limiting myself a bit by trying to fit it into a normal looking and behaving craft. It is certainly challengong though!

thats good RPM for sure. more than my engine makes but im using a much bigger prop.

[qzgy]

Some guy on reddit challenged the subreddit to make an Mi32 replica. I did i in stock. Sorta works. Just.

 

[RoadRunnerAerospace]

That looks very.... Kerbal for some reason

[qzgy]

4 minutes ago, RoadRunnerAerospace said:

That looks very.... Kerbal for some reason

It's russian/Soviet. Aren't most of their things quite kerbal (cough N1 oh lets just add more engines cough)?

In actuality, the legs making the triangle might be bent slightly. Not sure.

Edited September 3, 2017 by qzgy

[selfish_meme]

9 hours ago, Gman_builder said:

This is why I'm using the sled as gear

How do you guys deal with the torque from single engines? I would have released a single engine version by now but the torque is dreadful and makes the handling atrocious, that's why I have been doing contra-rotating designs.

[Gman_builder]

33 minutes ago, selfish_meme said:

How do you guys deal with the torque from single engines? I would have released a single engine version by now but the torque is dreadful and makes the handling atrocious, that's why I have been doing contra-rotating designs.

Long wings

I went for a biplane design because the aircraft would roll uncontrollably with a single wing. The biplane effectively double the wing surface without sacrificing rigidity and mobility.

Edited September 4, 2017 by Gman_builder

[boomchacle]

my first stock helicopter! It is so realistic lol... it just needs a tail rotor which I am working on.

 

 

[klond]

On ‎9‎/‎3‎/‎2017 at 11:26 PM, selfish_meme said:

How do you guys deal with the torque from single engines? I would have released a single engine version by now but the torque is dreadful and makes the handling atrocious, that's why I have been doing contra-rotating designs.

 If you place wings individually, instead of mirror or duplicate, you can give one a little twist - or do it with wing flaps or even elevators instead of the whole wing.  If you twist just a tiny bit it won't show.

[NoobTool]

I built a Chinook-alike:

https://kerbalx.com/NoobTool/Kernuck

She's not quite as easy to fly or as durable as my other copters, but she handles pretty well.

[Azimech]

On 9/4/2017 at 6:26 AM, selfish_meme said:

How do you guys deal with the torque from single engines? I would have released a single engine version by now but the torque is dreadful and makes the handling atrocious, that's why I have been doing contra-rotating designs.

Prop pitch has an effect. Adjust and notice the difference. Longer wings help, I usually clip multiple ailerons together. This might seem like cheating but nothing stops you from mounting multiple ailerons at different locations. I just do it for aesthetics.

[selfish_meme]

6 hours ago, klond said:

 If you place wings individually, instead of mirror or duplicate, you can give one a little twist - or do it with wing flaps or even elevators instead of the whole wing.  If you twist just a tiny bit it won't show.

I did have a similar thought and tried a wingtip extension that was angled, but it did not work that well at low speed which is where you need it really. I think as others have said, wing length and clipped ailerons is probably the way to go.

[klond]

2 hours ago, selfish_meme said:

but it did not work that well at low speed which is where you need it

  Try the long wings gman was talking about and put a little weight at one wing tip to act like a lever to counteract some torque.  I know more weight aint great for a plane, but it'll work at all speeds (when parallel to the horizon anyways.  And upright).  If you just use one blower you can put it on the side that needs the weight.  I did asymetric weight on 2 lil planes, but they were just for cruisin level mostly.  GL

[selfish_meme]

Tried the long wings, but I also tried some other things, 2 Panther engine in vanilla aero

Top speed no afterburners

Top speed afterburners 103ms, this screenshot was like a second later and it was already decelerating

The fairing drive wheel overheated and blew, might have to change it out for a heat shield

Edited September 6, 2017 by selfish_meme

[Azimech]

54 minutes ago, selfish_meme said:

Tried the long wings, but I also tried some other things, 2 Panther engine in vanilla aero

Top speed no afterburners

Top speed afterburners 103ms, this screenshot was like a second later and it was already decelerating

The fairing drive wheel overheated and blew, might have to change it out for a heat shield

For these kind of applications I advice a cooling system. See this example.

 

[Krog34]

17 hours ago, selfish_meme said:

Tried the long wings, but I also tried some other things, 2 Panther engine in vanilla aero

Top speed no afterburners

...

Top speed afterburners 103ms, this screenshot was like a second later and it was already decelerating

...

The fairing drive wheel overheated and blew, might have to change it out for a heat shield

Wow, funny enough I was experimenting with some completely internal turboprops similar to yours but also kept running into the overheat issue! When I removed the outter fairing (exposing drag in all the bad spots) the overheat issue went away almost like it models insulation effects...which it might... I don't know enough about the KSP physics engine.

 

On a separate note, I had a small break through on forward flying single-turboshaft helicopters that use a powered main blade (as apposed to auto-gyrating.) It seems that simply canceling the counter-steer engine, powering down the main rotor, and applying a forceful push from behind (gigity?) you can start to fly your chopper sorta like a weird jet. It's fun, and enjoyable to fly! The main blade and bearing hold up to a lot of abuse, a surprising amount in fact. But like all turboprops/shafts they have their limits  

The only noticeable issue I have with this helicopter and it's handeling is that it wants to constantly corkskrew when flying forward. It can be easily counter-steered though, it just takes a steady hand. I suppose using a keyboard isn't the most efficient way to fly a helicopter though in the first place! 

Kermansky VK-01 Roxanne

Spoiler

Edited September 7, 2017 by Krog34
spelling

[selfish_meme]

Watch out boys, stock turboprop fighters got a step closer (stock Aero)

Edited September 7, 2017 by selfish_meme

[selfish_meme]

A little video of it in action over the KSC

 

 

[klond]

7 hours ago, Krog34 said:

The only noticeable issue I have with this helicopter and it's handeling is that it wants to constantly corkskrew when flying forward.

 This might just be a thing helis do IRL.  Maybe @EpicSpaceTroll139 could give us the short explain?

3 hours ago, selfish_meme said:

stock turboprop fighters got a step closer

 That is sure nice looking.  Doing the Quitessa bearing inside there?

[selfish_meme]

5 hours ago, klond said:

 

 That is sure nice looking.  Doing the Quitessa bearing inside there?

A variant, I will need to beef it up so it doesn't fall out, like at the end of the video. Though I already detuned it a little to stop cubic struts overheating

[NoobTool]

I've been trying (and failing) to build a tilt wing/rotor turboprop. I did manage to make a heavy duty bearing that works pretty well.

Spoiler

Full 90 degree range of motion. If you play around with the position of the actuator, you can probably get close(ish) to 180degrees. Not the smoothest, but it works. This craft can hover, but can't transition to forward flight. The engines are good for helicopters. Airplanes? Not so much. There are also a lot of balance issues to work out. I was more interested in load testing the bearing.

Here's just the mechanism:

And internals

Once it's docked, autostruts hold everything together making the airframe rigid.

If anyone's interested in testing out the mechanism, let me know and I'll upload it.

Thanks for reading!

Edited September 8, 2017 by NoobTool

[Castille7]

7 minutes ago, NoobTool said:

I've been trying (and failing) to build a tilt wing/rotor turboprop. I did manage to make a heavy duty bearing that works pretty well.

 

That's no Noob Tool that's slick man!

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

@NoobTool I'll have to search around for where I posted it, but my collective kOS script should be able to manipulate the blade pitch on those prop/rotors so that they can transition moderately well to forward flight. It won't be able to compensate if they simply don't have enough torque for forward flight though.

 

Anyways, having been getting experience with gears making my clock, I'm trying to adapt them to helicopters.

The trick is making the gears turn smoothly. This shaft stays on at full throttle (need to determine what rpm that is), at least for a few minutes, but at low speed it can be seen to be fairly rough. I'm thinking that by increasing the number of teeth to 5, 6, or more, the meshing can be smoother, thus allowing better operation at all speeds. I'm hoping this could be useful for driving a tail rotor from main engine power.

Also this could be useful on inter-meshing rotor and tandem rotor designs.  While so far my own tandem rotor helis haven't needed a geartrain, since the height difference is enough to keep rigid rotors from colliding, if I add articulation to their rotors, a method of synchronizing the rotors would be useful. (It also might just look nice in screenshots to have the rotors lined up)

Edited September 8, 2017 by EpicSpaceTroll139