To start off, I'm going to talk about propeller and helicopter blades. For those of you who don't know, it is actually possible to get more than 3 types of propellers on a prop engine. The 3 defaults are "Cessna", "Warbird", and "Scimitar". However, if you open the XML editor, find the section where the blade type is contained and type in "HB-Cropped", you will get cropped rotor-blades as a propeller. You can type in any helicopter blade type, as long as it has "HB-" in front of it. (HB-Cropped/Swept/Tapered/Rounded)
Ok, so technically this is more specific to dual-rotor helicopters. Dual-rotor helicopters are great in a lot of ways, but without a tail rotor, they (not in real life, I'm talking about Simpleplanes) tend to lack yaw-control, unless a user puts a gyroscope on their build, but that's no fun is it? So here is a simple solution I recently found; replace your collective pitch input with this if reverse rotation is false: <input of your choice>+(Yaw times <number of your choice>), but if reverse rotation is true, then put a "-Yaw", instead of "Yaw". Apply the above steps to both rotors, then experiment with the "<number of your choice>" to change the sensitivity. Example: "Trim+(Yaw×0.5)" and "Trim+(-Yaw×0.5)". If put in correctly, this should have no immediate effect on lift (I think), but it will most likely change rotor rpm for both rotors, causing one to spin faster than the other due to differences in drag from the collective pitch.
Here is a more well known feature: if you take a WW2 propeller engine, open the XML editor, go to "CowlFlaps", and set "hide" to "true", it will hide the entire engine section, leaving just the propeller. This is very useful for making custom propeller engines.
Lastly, for more lift with rotors in forward flight, angle the rotor(s) slightly back (no more than 5 degrees at best, otherwise it looks weird). This works well with autogyros. If you want more speed in forward flight, angle the rotor(s) slightly forward (again, no more than 5 degrees at best, otherwise it looks weird).
Thoughts or suggestions? Let me know!
Note: if it is unclear how adding yaw input to collective pitch makes the helicopter yaw, let me briefly explain: the inputs cause one rotor to have increased pitch and the other to have decreased pitch. The higher the pitch, the more torque that's generated. Essentially, the input creates controlled and unbalanced torque, which leads to yaw movement.
I have no idea why the text is in italics in the middle of the page. I'm not sure how to fix that.
Edit: I did some research and discovered that it's the "*" marks. I fixed the problem with multiplication symbols.
@MRM19 Great!
@TheFlightGuySP I have done a little bit more testing and, I found that for building purely visual “fans” you can also use the tail rotators as the make virtually no noise… it’s also a little easier on the part count…
@Kangy Thanks! It means a lot to be getting support at an early stage!
you're gonna be going places buddy
there's a lot of potential from a user like you making forum posts like this already!
@MRM19 Nice! Under "JointRotator" in the XML editor, add a text field, type "audio" for the name and set it to "false".
@TheFlightGuySP That actually just might work perfectly… especially since I’m not building something that needs to fly…
@MRM19 I don't know of any way to do that through Overload. But it can be done with rotators, which can be used to create helicopter rotors.
@TheFlightGuySP Do you know of any way to disable the audio on helicopter rotors? Or at least change it to something that sounds less glitchtastic when you have 5 of them…
@XD69 ?
Idk what u wanna say
Ok, I had no idea that you could put helicopter blades on propeller engines. That's pretty cool!