I Tried to Use a Tail Propeller the RIGHT Way!

Welcome to another episode of Trailmakers!

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About Trailmakers:

In the toughest motoring expedition in the universe, you and your friends will build your own vehicles to cross a dangerous wasteland. Explore, crash horribly, use your wits to build a better rig, and get as far as you can with whatever spare parts you find on your way.

Welcome to the Ultimate Expedition!

Journey over grueling mountains, hazardous swamps, and bone-dry deserts on a distant world far from civilization - it is just you, your fellow adventurers and the amazing, jet-powered hover-buggy you built yourself. Explore, crash your vehicle, build a better one, and get as far as you can with whatever spare parts you find along your way.

Trailmakers is about building very awesome vehicles and machines, but you don’t need an engineering degree to get started. The intuitive builder will get you going in no time. Everything you build is made from physical building blocks. Each block has unique features like shape, weight and functionality. They can be broken off, refitted and used to build something new. Individually the blocks are fairly simple, but combined the possibilities are endless.

Expedition Mode is the challenging campaign mode of Trailmakers. You are competing in an off-world rally expedition with only a few building blocks to get you started. You must build, tinker with and rebuild your machine to progress. Journey through a big world, overcome deep gorges, angry wildlife and dangerous weather to progress and find new parts that will juice up your machine. The world in Expedition Mode will test your survival skills and ingenuity.

Sandbox Mode is where you want to head for an unrestricted, sandbox, vehicle-building experience. Here you can build anything you can dream of, and play around with it in the world of Trailmakers. It is a great place to test out crazy machines, and experiment with the physics engine. With tons of different blocks, hinges, thrusters and interactive vehicle parts - the skybox is the limit.

Trailmakers is even more fun if you play it with other people. Build cool vehicles and compete in mini-game modes with your friends or other Trailmakers online. Build a helicopter, send it to your friend, and shoot them out of the sky. Put two seats on a tank, and let your friend control the turret. As we get further in Early Access development Expedition Mode will also be adapted to multiplayer.

[Chris-okzo]

This man's helicopter making skills have evolved from "sticking a ceiling fan onto a V8" to "acquiring an advanced degree in mechanical engineering". Truly, a sight to behold.

[nighpaw]

Something you gotta remember with highly complex machines like helicopters is that they are not made for on/off inputs, they're made for joysticks which you can vary any amount you want and use trim to level it off, no plane or helicopter is perfectly balanced

[fs]

I did an introductory course on helicopters at uni but I'm still amazed that they actually fly.
Real helicopters sometimes have a teetering rotor head which could help here. Also, the blades flex quite a bit irl as is intended. Additionally, there is a dissymmetry in lift if you're not stationary. I.e. if you fly forwards the receeding half of the propeller disk produces less lift causing a roll and then there's also gyroscopic effects of the rotor.
Piloting a helicopter surely is a difficult task. Both hands and feet have to be on the controls at all times and from what I know much of the controlling is still done manually as autopilot is limited to cruise situations. (especially on small helicopters)

[andreyemelyan]

18:30 it probably the difference of thrust on the blades itself. Parasitic roll comes from the fact that lift of each blade is dependent on the speed, at which the blade are moving through the air. So when you start moving forward or backward yours vehicle linear speed start affecting the lift of blades moving in collinear directions with the vector of the speed. It means, that blades which are moving the same direction with your vehicle - are gaining lift, and the opposite happens with blades moving opposite to yours vehicles speed.

[locke_ytb]

Tail Propeller: Hello there! I'm here to solve your helicopter torque proble--.

Hinges: Bro.

[aidenaune]

a rotation on two axes equals a rotation on the third, along with a change in orientation. the second propeller you are using to counteract yaw torque is itself adding pitch torque. yaw plus pitch equals roll. unless you get the tail propeller to perfectly counter the yaw torque all the time, then the helicopter will constantly try to roll, and at the same time, It will try to change your orientation, causing you to enter a death spiral.
to fix this, you could either use a third propeller to counter roll, or you have to get the two propellers to coincide perfectly (which requires the ability to tilt your main propeller along the pitch axis).
theoretically, the best way to do it would be to use a main propeller that can be tilted slightly in any direction, along with a tail propeller that is tuned precisely to stabilize your craft.

[Nolin-Kumar]

if you remember the formula for torque, lengthening the lever arm will give you more torque (ie. extend the tail so the effectiveness of a single tail propeller generates more force to counter the torque from the main engine.)

[DavidVYoutube]

I feel like your journey in this video including the weird looking helicopters that you're making throughout the process mirrors what happened in real life with helicopter design

[Axolotl_]

Idea: Stealth dogfight. Turn off name tags and smoke trails on all the engines and set the time to night.

Idea 2: Make a plane that is stable without a vertical fin using logic.

[theodoric]

The stability issues are a combination of an unbalanced center of mass, gyroscopic precession, and asymmetrical lift. Most of these have been explained in other comments, but I feel like gyroscopic precession was most overlooked in this video, and had you not been stopped by some of the other problems, precession would have stopped you until you realized what it was.

Now that you have one rotor, not only is the torque unbalanced, but the precession is as well. As your helicopter pitches forward, it also rolls to the left. Instead of countering this, real helicopters use it to control: They tilt the rotors right (or left, depending on the direction of rotation) to pitch forward.

[smiteey]

maybe trying the actual Helicopter blades vs the small wing pieces you were using might make a difference?

[omardengel]

I think the main issue with the torque being so great, is that you are not using actual helicopter rotors, but actual wings, which are most likely orders of magnitude heavier, causing a lot more torque from rotation.

[SinnerD]

Heli engineer: Wait you mean i could replace the whole flight computer with just steering hinges?🤣

[Kav_Games]

"Im going to use it the right way!"
"ok, im not going to use another propeller."

[yorifant]

that's actually very interesting that you're able to completely get rid of the torque by puttin the rotor on hinges lol

[joshuamartin]

something you probably didn't think about is asymmetrical lift. which is, as you gain airspeed the receding blades' relative airspeed reduces, and produces less lift until they provide none at all. this will cause you to roll in the direction of the receding blades. this is the limiting factor on real helicopters max airspeed. hence why military use dual rotors for fast heli's.

[matheuscabraldasilva]

The "roll" effect you are experiencing is due to gyroscopic precession

[locke_ytb]

Yeah, I believe this Tail Prop block will probably be getting a buff or change.

[buckduane]

Basically, what you’re looking for is a cyclic, collective, and swashplate. It changes the orientation of the blades in order to rotate the helicopter. This also means when in a wind sheer, it allows the blades on the incoming wind side to rise up a bit to counter that force. The more aggressive the cyclic, the more the blades bite into the air, the more they push down, the more lift is produced. When landing on a ship, they reverse the direction causing the blades to go from producing lift to producing suction to keep from sliding off the helipad. If you think of a single blade as a wing and the attachment point to the crank shaft as the body of a plane and center of mass, basically the blade has both roll and pitch, but not yaw. The blades are, in the end, the actual wings of a helicopter, and the make lift the same way as a plane does, the only difference being where a straight-wing aircraft uses engine thrust to push it forward and move air over the static foils (wings), the helicopter engines rapidly rotate its foils (the blades) to provide the thrust in a similar (but not the same) way as an air screw (“prop aircraft”) design. A modern jet engine is little more than an propeller aircraft with the blades internal rather than external, hence why they’re getting bigger and bigger on the 777, 737-Max, and so forth. If you want to learn more, Scrapman, I recommend the channels “Mentour Pilot” and “Mentour Now!” where he breaks down how most of this works… and how in some incidents things went wrong.

[ppbutnotbig]

Idk if this applies to trailmakers.
In torque, the longer the lever, the stronger the torque. So, if you make the tail longer, it should generate more torque.