@WinsWings
Thanks. As for the neglect, well autogryos just are not very popular around here, probably because most people don't know what they are, and just take them for being helicopters. There were only four entries in the Autogyro Challenge, and only half of those were actual autogryos.
@WinsWings
It's sort of the Fisher-Price version of Little Nellie for the Eggcraft Challenge. I'm working on the actual "Little Nellie", WA-116, but it's not finished. Some stuff in SImpleplanes acts weird at lower weights.
If I recall correctly, This one has a flaw with the guns not being zero'd out properly, although I might have spotted and fixed that before posting.
It's a pretty standard early gryoplane design. Back when Juan de la Cierva invented it, he used an airplane fuselage. The idea was that this design was safer than the more conventional fixed wing airplane, since it would be stall proof, and if the engine gave out, the gyroplane would auto-rotate safely to the ground. Some designens even had fixzed wings in addition to the rotor blades.
Even today, this sort of design is considered safer than the modern pusher-propeller autogyros, with maybe the Benson-Wallis designs being the exception, because, well, Ken Wallis probably knew as much about autogyros as anyone.
@Kendog84
Actually the FT code for determining the heading and distance is the easy part. People do it in real life. check out: https://www.igismap.com/formula-to-find-bearing-or-heading-angle-between-two-points-latitude-longitude/
I probably take a stab at that later and use Wright Airport as a test.
To me, the hard bit would be selecting the destination. I can see a few ways to do it.
1) Each of the islands (and the Kraken/Cthulhu) could be it's own table, perhaps tied to an activation group. This would be easy, but lead to a lot of locations and clutter up the dash board.. Perhaps it could be put on some sort of rotating part (think revolving license plate) that use use a slider so as to only show one location and heading at a time.
2) The VTOL and Trim sliders could be the X and Y coordinates. Since the SP world takes up around a 200 mile by 200 mile area, we'd have to multiple the sliders and add the result to a centrally placed location. This means you could find the heading and distance to practically anywhere worth going to on the map, but in fairly large increments (about a mile per 0.01 difference on the sliders).
3) Somehow each locations and it's coordinated could be assigned to a position on the Trim slider. Something like Avalance, Krabola, Wright Island, and Maywar. I think it's possible to do that, but a bit beyond my current understanding.I might be able to program 3 locations to a slider. Maybe if I used a slider and an activation group I could get more.
@WinsWings
I get your point too. A true autogyro needs to by able to fly with the many rotor unpowered and many so-called autogyros posted on SP don't do that.
@Kendog84
THe slow flying on autpilot thing is more when I'm testing a build to see if I got the fuel rate and range right. It's annoying to run out of fuel while island hopping.
As far as the circling thing goes, yeah, it seems possible. Basically it would have to check the coordinates to determine if the plane was within a certain distance from the island, and then initiate a slight bank and a bit of pitch to hold altitude. And then hope the plane doesn't fall into the sea or fly into a mountain, as there is nothing that prevents a plane of autopilot from doing either of those things.
What I think might be easier to implement and a bit more practical would be to select a destination (in SP, one of a handful of islands) and then the nav system displays the heading and distance to that destination. So if someone was in the ocean north of Wright Island and they wanted to go to Krakabloa it might show a bearing of 60 degrees and a distance of 20 miles/32km.
@Kendog84 Well getting lost depends a bit on what type of aircraft I flyy and how I
fly it. If I'm flying fast jets and fly near an island or fly from one to another, then I almost always know where I am. But if I am flying something slow like a small prop plane or autogyro that is going under 200 mph, then I might use more autopilot when going from one island to another and watch a video. At those time I might overshoot an island or undershoot it and not know quite where I am.
This is nice, thanks. It can really help me figure out what direction to turn to when I get lost in the middle of the ocean. I just need to visit all the islands and get their general coordinates.
BTW, if you want an 360 degree heading instead of the +180 to -180 use {Heading<0? floor(Heading+360):floor(Heading)}
The problem seems to be that the center of lift is too far back and the tail is too big for the main wing. Try increasing the wingspan to about 24 feet (7.3m) or so, and maybe reduce the tail a little.
Since this looks to be a combat airplane, you also might want to consider adding some elevators to the main wing to give it bit more pitch control (the forward wing lifts up while the tail pushes down) to assist in it's climbs and dives.
@FirstFish83828
If you want I could take out the pre-rotator. It doesn't really help much on this build. During testing I mostly just did AG1 and full throttle and waited until I hit 47 mph and took off.
@FirstFish83828
Sure it does. Once you got the rotors up to speed you hit AG2 again to disengage the clutch and the pre-rotator turns off. You can test this out on the ground.
Basically the propeller and the rotors are never powered at the same time.
@FirstFish83828
No, it's a pre-rotator. Many, if not most autogyros use the power of the engine to pre-spin the rotor blades before take off to shorten the takeoff run.
For example, check this out youtube video at about the 2:50 mark
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu_y0angRqY
You can take off and fly this without turning on the pre-rotator. Just start off with AG1 and throttle and it should take off at around 47 MPH.
@mlksback You might be able to get away with one or two degrees. It probably won't completely stabilize the airplane (It didn't when I tried it), but it might be enough to work with some other method.
If it makes you feel better you're not really cheating by adding other stabilization. Simpleplane physics are not quite the same as real world physics and often we have to tweak a few things in game to get them to work like the real thing.
@BlackGearCompany
It really depends on what you are trying to do with it. Some things are easier, others not so much but you get better at them as you use them again and again. It can also be frusting when something that looks like it should work doesn't, and you have to look it over ans figure out what you did wrong.
It;s not all or nothing though. I suggest that you try out one or two features at first to see how it all works and then add more things as you get more conformable with it. It really helps if you got something you are trying to do and work to figure how to do it rather than just do random stuff.
@TheFlightGuySP
Thanks again. Oh, and if you want to see what sort of monster you helped to bring into the world: https://www.simpleplanes.com/a/XriRWP/725t-Autogyro
Note- it's a testbed, not a finished design. But it does help to reverse engineer how some things work so as to the desired performance out of a build. Because autogyros are weird.
seems to work in the HUD to change the speed from green to red when it stalls. I did reduce the IAS factor as 5m/s is borderline "too late" for this particular build, but the code does the trick.
Thanks, you saved me a lot of work. I was going to try and use the rate of change of the latitude and longitude with trig to get a direction of movement and then compare that to the heading to see if it is moving in the direction it is facing or not.
@Kevvelry
No problem, we've all been there. . It's frustrating when something doesn't work and you can't figure out why. I'm still learning new things about how Simpleplanes works.
The shaking is usually caused by the forces/stresses on the aircraft being greater than what the wings can handle. Some ways to deal with the problem are:
1) Don't go fast at low altitude: Since the forces on the airplane depend on the air density, and density drops at altitude, the greater the altitude the faster a plane can go before it breaks apart.
2) Use structural wings instead of normal wings. They are stronger and can take a bit more stress before shaking. This will require editing the wings in overlord to have control surfaces.
3) You can reinforce the wings somewhat by embedding them partially into the fuselage and/or by adding fuselage supports or wing coverings. The extra fuselage can take up some of the stress that would otherwise affect the wing.
4) You can try editing the wings drag. Lower drag should reduce the stresses on the wing.
@edensk Perfect! Not only does that work, but the ability to alter the pitch was already built in, so I didn't have to change anything to get it to work. Thanks.
6000 mph at 70000 feet would be a Mach 9 cruiser! The speed of sound varies with altitude. At 70,000 feet, Mach 1 is 660 mph. It handles very nice at 150,000 feet up.
Very Impressive. It can even fly on only one of it's three engines, which would be really nice for anyone trying to get home in a damaged plane. No doubt about it, you need to see more Cutangus!
@AicE There is nothing you need to fix. For prop planes SP uses "Horsepower/Weight Ratio", which is shown to be 0.779 on your aircraft, which is correct (2000HP/2566lbs= 0.779).
SP uses Power for Jet Thrust, and since the plane doesn't have a Jet Engine "Power/Weight Ratio" is N/A. It probably would have been better if they had called this Thrust/Weight Ratio instead.
Not a bad first glider.In fact it's better than you think. "Primary Wings" tend to start with fuel in them, as most designs would want that. But you don't want that for a glider, and all that fuel is adding over 1000 pounds to the weight. Your plane glides a lot better without it.
@spefyjerbf Thanks, you solved both of my autogyro prerotator problems with your example! Now I can prerotate the blades without torque, and get the prerotator to automatically disengage when I start the actual engine.
Let's see:
1. It didn't blow up -that's better than my first plane.
2. It took off - that's also better than my first plane, and my second.
3. Once in the air it flew-better than my next 3 or 4 planes.
4. It didn't crash- Now better than anything I had in single digits
5. It landed on one piece without flames or anything- Better than my first dozen airplanes.
6. When I landed it, the tail went over the nose three times and the aircraft ended up rightside up and undamaged. - I've never built a plane that could do that!
@BlackThuNDR
If you do make it scout craft then you will probably need to add more weight back. I'd suggest scale the pilot's torso back to x1 and add 150 lbs. for Commander Bond.
BTW, Pity you don't need a sea attack craft. It would be a killer with some mini-torpedoes, and air-to-ground missiles instead of the air-to-air ones. It can use ground effect to skim at sea level and launch tiorps.
@BlackThuNDR Yea 43.5 points! That's better than I expected. I had a ball, or should I say egg?
As far as deployment goes, It's a decent scout craft for flying around the canyons and mountains, and has enough reserve lift thanks to collective (VTOL) to avoid mountains. I believe the actual WA-116 was first submitted as a scout craft. The weapons were just props added on for the movie.
It's a flawed ground attack craft at present, as the rocket pods are accidentally 5 degrees above the point of aim. This was one of a half dozen pesky errors that slipped by me until after I submitted it. I did correct that, reduced Yaw in the gyroscope, added additional pitch control for improved take offs, and the ability to fly level at very slow speeds- say 20 mph at 15 feet above sea level. The improved, fixed version would probably make a nice tank killer, I've done it around the volcano at Krakabloa (it's similar to the volcano in the film). But the fixed version would be something created after the deadline and thus unfair.
So I vote for scout craft. Without the weapons it will actually be lighter and faster.
Thanks for the contest. I had a lot of fun building and flying this, and had to learn new things to get the design to work.I found a bug with Rocket Pods, that causes an aircraft to stop flying, too. So thanks again.
@BlackThuNDR Thanks. I sort of ran out of time on it before I could add in the air mines and fine tune everything. I should have an improved version in a few days. Thanks for the contest- I learned some new stuff about SP building this.
The primary problem is that you have 236 gallons of fuel in each wing. 472 gallons weights approximately 2832 pounds, and that is about half your weight of the aircraft..
The second problem is that you have 500 pounds of dead weight in the nose of your airplane making it nose heavy.
I reduced the fuel, took out the dead weight, and even changed the main wings to flat-bottom for extra lift. It can now fly level, but you still need to add quite a bit of trim to do so. BTW, trim controls are 1/4/7 on they keypad.
Here is the modified version, hope it helps: http://www.simpleplanes.com/a/4TNFUJ/Bannafire109s-Prop-Plane
@WinsWings
+1Thanks. As for the neglect, well autogryos just are not very popular around here, probably because most people don't know what they are, and just take them for being helicopters. There were only four entries in the Autogyro Challenge, and only half of those were actual autogryos.
@WinsWings
It's sort of the Fisher-Price version of Little Nellie for the Eggcraft Challenge. I'm working on the actual "Little Nellie", WA-116, but it's not finished. Some stuff in SImpleplanes acts weird at lower weights.
If I recall correctly, This one has a flaw with the guns not being zero'd out properly, although I might have spotted and fixed that before posting.
+1@gigachad What's silly about it?
It's a pretty standard early gryoplane design. Back when Juan de la Cierva invented it, he used an airplane fuselage. The idea was that this design was safer than the more conventional fixed wing airplane, since it would be stall proof, and if the engine gave out, the gyroplane would auto-rotate safely to the ground. Some designens even had fixzed wings in addition to the rotor blades.
Even today, this sort of design is considered safer than the modern pusher-propeller autogyros, with maybe the Benson-Wallis designs being the exception, because, well, Ken Wallis probably knew as much about autogyros as anyone.
So this build is the real deal.
+1@FirstLandFish83828
Urgent care? Sorry to hear that. Get well, the aircraft can wait.
@Kendog84
Actually the FT code for determining the heading and distance is the easy part. People do it in real life. check out: https://www.igismap.com/formula-to-find-bearing-or-heading-angle-between-two-points-latitude-longitude/
I probably take a stab at that later and use Wright Airport as a test.
To me, the hard bit would be selecting the destination. I can see a few ways to do it.
1) Each of the islands (and the Kraken/Cthulhu) could be it's own table, perhaps tied to an activation group. This would be easy, but lead to a lot of locations and clutter up the dash board.. Perhaps it could be put on some sort of rotating part (think revolving license plate) that use use a slider so as to only show one location and heading at a time.
2) The VTOL and Trim sliders could be the X and Y coordinates. Since the SP world takes up around a 200 mile by 200 mile area, we'd have to multiple the sliders and add the result to a centrally placed location. This means you could find the heading and distance to practically anywhere worth going to on the map, but in fairly large increments (about a mile per 0.01 difference on the sliders).
3) Somehow each locations and it's coordinated could be assigned to a position on the Trim slider. Something like Avalance, Krabola, Wright Island, and Maywar. I think it's possible to do that, but a bit beyond my current understanding.I might be able to program 3 locations to a slider. Maybe if I used a slider and an activation group I could get more.
+1@WinsWings
I get your point too. A true autogyro needs to by able to fly with the many rotor unpowered and many so-called autogyros posted on SP don't do that.
@Kendog84
THe slow flying on autpilot thing is more when I'm testing a build to see if I got the fuel rate and range right. It's annoying to run out of fuel while island hopping.
As far as the circling thing goes, yeah, it seems possible. Basically it would have to check the coordinates to determine if the plane was within a certain distance from the island, and then initiate a slight bank and a bit of pitch to hold altitude. And then hope the plane doesn't fall into the sea or fly into a mountain, as there is nothing that prevents a plane of autopilot from doing either of those things.
What I think might be easier to implement and a bit more practical would be to select a destination (in SP, one of a handful of islands) and then the nav system displays the heading and distance to that destination. So if someone was in the ocean north of Wright Island and they wanted to go to Krakabloa it might show a bearing of 60 degrees and a distance of 20 miles/32km.
+1@Kendog84 Well getting lost depends a bit on what type of aircraft I flyy and how I
+1fly it. If I'm flying fast jets and fly near an island or fly from one to another, then I almost always know where I am. But if I am flying something slow like a small prop plane or autogyro that is going under 200 mph, then I might use more autopilot when going from one island to another and watch a video. At those time I might overshoot an island or undershoot it and not know quite where I am.
@Kendog84
+1Yes, very useful. Sometimes I get lost between islands, especially when using weather effects.
@MAPA
+1So are you going to enter the MAPA challenge?
This is nice, thanks. It can really help me figure out what direction to turn to when I get lost in the middle of the ocean. I just need to visit all the islands and get their general coordinates.
BTW, if you want an 360 degree heading instead of the +180 to -180 use {Heading<0? floor(Heading+360):floor(Heading)}
+1@FirstFish83828
Fair enough. It's just that I doubt you're going to get more entries. No love for autogryos. :(
@FirstFish83828
With only 3 entries maybe you should extend the deadline, and maybe lift the one entry per person limit? Not a lot of people build autogryos here.
The problem seems to be that the center of lift is too far back and the tail is too big for the main wing. Try increasing the wingspan to about 24 feet (7.3m) or so, and maybe reduce the tail a little.
Since this looks to be a combat airplane, you also might want to consider adding some elevators to the main wing to give it bit more pitch control (the forward wing lifts up while the tail pushes down) to assist in it's climbs and dives.
@FirstFish83828
If you want I could take out the pre-rotator. It doesn't really help much on this build. During testing I mostly just did AG1 and full throttle and waited until I hit 47 mph and took off.
@FirstFish83828
Sure it does. Once you got the rotors up to speed you hit AG2 again to disengage the clutch and the pre-rotator turns off. You can test this out on the ground.
Basically the propeller and the rotors are never powered at the same time.
@FirstFish83828
No, it's a pre-rotator. Many, if not most autogyros use the power of the engine to pre-spin the rotor blades before take off to shorten the takeoff run.
For example, check this out youtube video at about the 2:50 mark
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu_y0angRqY
You can take off and fly this without turning on the pre-rotator. Just start off with AG1 and throttle and it should take off at around 47 MPH.
@mlksback You might be able to get away with one or two degrees. It probably won't completely stabilize the airplane (It didn't when I tried it), but it might be enough to work with some other method.
If it makes you feel better you're not really cheating by adding other stabilization. Simpleplane physics are not quite the same as real world physics and often we have to tweak a few things in game to get them to work like the real thing.
You could angle the main wing so that it is a bit V-shaped. That would make it provide vertical stabilization on it's own.
+1@BlackGearCompany
It really depends on what you are trying to do with it. Some things are easier, others not so much but you get better at them as you use them again and again. It can also be frusting when something that looks like it should work doesn't, and you have to look it over ans figure out what you did wrong.
It;s not all or nothing though. I suggest that you try out one or two features at first to see how it all works and then add more things as you get more conformable with it. It really helps if you got something you are trying to do and work to figure how to do it rather than just do random stuff.
Always fond of erasing aircraft.
+3@WinsWings
+1What about autogyros that have a pre-rotator? They would have a powered rotor but not power it during flight.
@TheFlightGuySP
Thanks again. Oh, and if you want to see what sort of monster you helped to bring into the world: https://www.simpleplanes.com/a/XriRWP/725t-Autogyro
Note- it's a testbed, not a finished design. But it does help to reverse engineer how some things work so as to the desired performance out of a build. Because autogyros are weird.
+1@TheFlightGuySP Yeah that does seem to work, and
<color=#{ IAS>5&(AngleOfSlip>90 | AngleOfSlip<-90) ? "FF0000":"00ff00"}>mph
{round(IAS*2.236936);}
seems to work in the HUD to change the speed from green to red when it stalls. I did reduce the IAS factor as 5m/s is borderline "too late" for this particular build, but the code does the trick.
Thanks, you saved me a lot of work. I was going to try and use the rate of change of the latitude and longitude with trig to get a direction of movement and then compare that to the heading to see if it is moving in the direction it is facing or not.
Your method is a lot simpler! Thanks.
+1This is fun to fly
Nice seagyro!
It's not a bad autogryo.
+1This is impressive.
+1This made my day!
Nice. It's a shame that most people won't be familiar with the show, or you'd get more credit.
@Kevvelry
No problem, we've all been there. . It's frustrating when something doesn't work and you can't figure out why. I'm still learning new things about how Simpleplanes works.
The shaking is usually caused by the forces/stresses on the aircraft being greater than what the wings can handle. Some ways to deal with the problem are:
1) Don't go fast at low altitude: Since the forces on the airplane depend on the air density, and density drops at altitude, the greater the altitude the faster a plane can go before it breaks apart.
2) Use structural wings instead of normal wings. They are stronger and can take a bit more stress before shaking. This will require editing the wings in overlord to have control surfaces.
3) You can reinforce the wings somewhat by embedding them partially into the fuselage and/or by adding fuselage supports or wing coverings. The extra fuselage can take up some of the stress that would otherwise affect the wing.
4) You can try editing the wings drag. Lower drag should reduce the stresses on the wing.
Good Luck
It is pretty cool.
This looks so cool in flight.
This is really clever, and deserves more upvotes.
@FabioGalvao5679 Thanks for trying to help.
+1@edensk Perfect! Not only does that work, but the ability to alter the pitch was already built in, so I didn't have to change anything to get it to work. Thanks.
@FabioGalvao5679 Thanks for the reply, but the aircraft doesn't use a car engine. In fact the car engine weights more than the (empty) gyro.
+16000 mph at 70000 feet would be a Mach 9 cruiser! The speed of sound varies with altitude. At 70,000 feet, Mach 1 is 660 mph. It handles very nice at 150,000 feet up.
Very Impressive. It can even fly on only one of it's three engines, which would be really nice for anyone trying to get home in a damaged plane. No doubt about it, you need to see more Cutangus!
@AicE There is nothing you need to fix. For prop planes SP uses "Horsepower/Weight Ratio", which is shown to be 0.779 on your aircraft, which is correct (2000HP/2566lbs= 0.779).
SP uses Power for Jet Thrust, and since the plane doesn't have a Jet Engine "Power/Weight Ratio" is N/A. It probably would have been better if they had called this Thrust/Weight Ratio instead.
+2Not a bad first glider.In fact it's better than you think. "Primary Wings" tend to start with fuel in them, as most designs would want that. But you don't want that for a glider, and all that fuel is adding over 1000 pounds to the weight. Your plane glides a lot better without it.
@spefyjerbf Thanks, you solved both of my autogyro prerotator problems with your example! Now I can prerotate the blades without torque, and get the prerotator to automatically disengage when I start the actual engine.
Let's see:
1. It didn't blow up -that's better than my first plane.
2. It took off - that's also better than my first plane, and my second.
3. Once in the air it flew-better than my next 3 or 4 planes.
4. It didn't crash- Now better than anything I had in single digits
5. It landed on one piece without flames or anything- Better than my first dozen airplanes.
6. When I landed it, the tail went over the nose three times and the aircraft ended up rightside up and undamaged. - I've never built a plane that could do that!
So it's a great start!
+1Good plane.That 150mm cannon is nasty!
@BlackThuNDR
If you do make it scout craft then you will probably need to add more weight back. I'd suggest scale the pilot's torso back to x1 and add 150 lbs. for Commander Bond.
BTW, Pity you don't need a sea attack craft. It would be a killer with some mini-torpedoes, and air-to-ground missiles instead of the air-to-air ones. It can use ground effect to skim at sea level and launch tiorps.
@BlackThuNDR Yea 43.5 points! That's better than I expected. I had a ball, or should I say egg?
As far as deployment goes, It's a decent scout craft for flying around the canyons and mountains, and has enough reserve lift thanks to collective (VTOL) to avoid mountains. I believe the actual WA-116 was first submitted as a scout craft. The weapons were just props added on for the movie.
It's a flawed ground attack craft at present, as the rocket pods are accidentally 5 degrees above the point of aim. This was one of a half dozen pesky errors that slipped by me until after I submitted it. I did correct that, reduced Yaw in the gyroscope, added additional pitch control for improved take offs, and the ability to fly level at very slow speeds- say 20 mph at 15 feet above sea level. The improved, fixed version would probably make a nice tank killer, I've done it around the volcano at Krakabloa (it's similar to the volcano in the film). But the fixed version would be something created after the deadline and thus unfair.
So I vote for scout craft. Without the weapons it will actually be lighter and faster.
Thanks for the contest. I had a lot of fun building and flying this, and had to learn new things to get the design to work.I found a bug with Rocket Pods, that causes an aircraft to stop flying, too. So thanks again.
+1@BlackThuNDR Thanks. I sort of ran out of time on it before I could add in the air mines and fine tune everything. I should have an improved version in a few days. Thanks for the contest- I learned some new stuff about SP building this.
+1The primary problem is that you have 236 gallons of fuel in each wing. 472 gallons weights approximately 2832 pounds, and that is about half your weight of the aircraft..
The second problem is that you have 500 pounds of dead weight in the nose of your airplane making it nose heavy.
I reduced the fuel, took out the dead weight, and even changed the main wings to flat-bottom for extra lift. It can now fly level, but you still need to add quite a bit of trim to do so. BTW, trim controls are 1/4/7 on they keypad.
Here is the modified version, hope it helps: http://www.simpleplanes.com/a/4TNFUJ/Bannafire109s-Prop-Plane
Carrier? More like it's a flying airport!
+2