easy to mod some rcs thrusters to run on intake air and electricity to simulate a compressor and jet nozzles. the harrier jet has a compressed air system that takes bleed air off the engine and directs it to nozzles on the wing tips, nose and tail for better control in hover. roll control would be handled fine with reaction wheels in hover and with some forward airspeed with ailerons on stub wings. maybe some degree of yaw control by using torque limits in concert with variable pitch. a tandem bicopter might work, giving good control on the pitch axis where it matters. I could also probably assist with your single rotor designs.īuilt a quad that came out pretty good without the need for reaction wheels. I just call em "Kerbo-Kopters" and use a reaction wheel as my pseudo-cyclic controller.
What this means is that in 1.7.3 the traversal or rotation rate you request from a part will now impact how much EC/ LF is used by the part, where before it was not a factor in the resource usage calculations. With 1.7.3, we’ve now improved our resource usage simulation for robotics parts, though it is still by not 100% accurate to the real world. While we endeavor to simulate physical systems in as realistic way as possible, that has to be balanced against fun and development feasibility. Be aware that you absolutely don’t need to always keep the motor size at 100% - for many applications, a lot less torque will be more than enough. Rather than reducing the available torque, we’ve increased the resource usage and weight/cost requirements for a given motor power. Further, our initial pass for rotor power gave too much torque. However, just as a rocket can reach any velocity in space regardless of how much thrust you use - lower thrust just means it takes more time - now a rotor can do the same, barring things like atmospheric drag that would oppose it.įinally, rotor RPM is more stable, you won’t see the RPM numbers vibrating as much. Before the rotor RPM and torque were unrealistically interrelated. Further, now you can reach that RPM limit regardless of how little torque is applied. Now all rotors are set to max out at 460 RPM – near the limit that our physics engine allows.
Rotors have seen a significant set of changes and improvements, as well as the addition of the liquid-fuel consuming rotors, which model a turboshaft engine for a propeller plane and for a helicopter. Using aero-debugging visualization – F12 by default – can assist you by letting you visualize the lift off of the propeller – your aim should be to adjust the pitch so that the yellow arrows are as long and as far forward as possible.
KAL-1000 can assist you with coordinating the settings on multiple sets of propellers if you build a multi-engine plane. In KSP, you can adjust the angle of our propellers by setting their ‘Deploy’ field to ‘Extended’ in the PAW, and adjusting the authority limiter, as pictured below. You could increase RPM, but RPM is limited in both KSP and the real world because propellers lose effectiveness if the propeller tips go faster than mach 1. This is why propeller planes either have to change the angle of propeller blades – called their pitch – or remain limited to a low airspeed. Now the airspeed across the propeller comes from both the rotation of the propeller and the movement of the aircraft.Ĭonsequently, the angle of attack has gone down dramatically, and you get less lift. Now, picture what happens when the plane starts moving. The angle of attack is still large and the propeller can generate a lot of lift, though it also causes a lot of both drag and the lift in a direction not fully parallel with forward – both of which the torque of the rotor has to counteract. In this case, all the airspeed is coming from the fact that the propeller is moving through otherwise still air – pictured below for what one section of the propeller would see. Now, consider a spinning propeller on plane that is not flying – just sitting still with its brakes on and the propeller spinning. In level flight, that just means pointing them above the horizon. When you want to increase angle of attack, and get lift - at the cost of more drag – you point the nose – and your wings - above prograde. So, what makes propellers so difficult to manage for a pilot? It’s because you have to manage the angle of attack of the propeller – which is basically just a spinning wing.įirst, consider the case with a normal fixed wing aircraft, illustrated below: