KerbalX

Experiment with the hollow decouplers to make a working collective tail rotor. Has it’s issues like huge friction and a tendency to blow up.

Usage: stage and then Q & E for rotor pitch control.

Update: now with 4 blades and RCS balls as root parts instead of strut cubes so they can all be crammed between the decouplers instead of having them offset along the spinning axis. Otherwise it is pretty much the same.

The friction seems to come from having physicsless parts (strut cubes, rcs balls, etc) as rotor assy roots and it accelerates to around 7rad/s very easily, but after that requires massive amounts of thrust to gain more speed. Has the benefit of being very constant RPM.

If done with normal physics parts as roots then it’s very smooth, but changing blade pitch changes the RPM so heavily that it’s close to useless. You get only a second of increased/reduced thrust, but at max pitch it slows down and returns to almost neutral pitch thrust levels, and the opposite happens with min pitch, the rotors speed up and generate thrust about the same as with neutral pitch. Haven’t tested reaction wheels as means of powering the rotor, but suppose it’d be just the same.

A stock aircraft called Collective tail rotor experiment. Built with 137 of the finest parts.

Built in the Subassembly in KSP version 1.4.4.

Details

• Type: Subassembly
• Class: probe
• Part Count: 137
• Pure Stock