"Like a drone, but better at killing you"
"noisier than a helicopter, without the ability to auto-rotate" That's the thing people forget about helicopters: you can land them with a dead engine. They also have aerodynamic qualities that make them stay in the air. multirotors drop like rocks. They're also terribly inefficient. Compare and contrast: E-Volo: 450kg, 2 passengers, 100km/h cruise (projected), 6500 ft ceiling (projected), 20 minute flight time (1 hr projected) Dynali H-3 Sport: 450 kg, 2 passengers, 130 km/h cruise, 10,000 ft ceiling, 3 hour flight time. The Dynali? 110,000 Euros. e-Volo? 300,000 Euros. For the price of this thing you could buy a brand-new Robinson R-22 and bring along a couple friends, or rent it out for aerials, or, you know, not have to pop the ballistic parachute if you forget that it's a cold day and you have 2/3rds the battery capacity. Over a lake. Better be at least 300 feet up, though, or your chute won't work.
I don't really think this particular multirotor will make a dent in the current heli market. What interests me about this is that this might be a new avenue for developing better helicopters. Earlier electric cars were also much more expensive, inefficient and deadly than current ones. That the current one is kinda shitty doesn't rule out future succes. Do you think this might one day become good enough or is the lack of autorotation and other real heli features too big of a constraint?
You're right in that it won't make a dent. You're wrong in that it's an "avenue" for better helicopters. That's a VS-300 from 1939. It's pretty immediately recognizable as a helicopter, with all the helicoptery stuff we know and love. It took Sikorsky 16 years to develop the VS-300 from this: Which is pretty clearly an airplane with "what if we try and put an unpowered rotary wing on top?" added to see what would happen. And that's the thing - hang a big rotor in the slipstream and it will spin automatically and it will create lift. The Nazis actually towed unpowered autogyros with spotters in them behind u-boats like kites to look around for shipping to harass and destroyers to avoid - you can literally tow a helicopter with a boat and the fucker will fly. Comes from the big goddamn blade up above. People think it's a propeller. It ain't. It's a wing. Airfoil cross-section, variable pitch, whole nine yards. This, by comparison, is a rock trying to fly: The thing about multirotors is there is zero aerodynamic advantage to them. Those spinny things create only the lift generated by the motive force you twist them with. Blow sideways on a propeller and nothing happens - the pitch is way out of spec for aerodynamic lift and if it weren't, they'd need to be so huge that... well, your multicopter starts to look like a helicopter. And while you can certainly account for a rotor or two stopping on you, you aren't gonna fly great. And you better be able to land in a hurry. If you've ever messed with a quadcopter that loses a motor, you've experienced the things veering for a wall as if it were a black hole. What makes multicopters work is orchestration of the rotors and when that gets a little bent the whole affair comes crashing down. They'll argue that it's a mechanically simple device with few moving parts. I'd argue that you've got 18 rotors and if you lose one, the other 17 aren't really going to compensate much. And yeah - you lose one rotor on a helicopter and you're sunk. Except you're not. You need to know how to do it in order to get your license. The rise of multicopters in the toy sphere has nothing to do with their efficiency and everything to do with the fact that now any fuckwit can fly something. It's a triumph of technology for the toy industry but nobody else cares, really. Here's a "multicopter" as used by NATO for spying on shit, starting in 1977: It didn't exactly light up the universe because it's (A) loud as fuck (B) inefficient as all hell (C) has no real dwell time. And that's with a 150HP Williams turbofan. The multicopter thing is awesome for toys and purt near useless for everything else. If you want something to fly, give it wings. Full stop.
I know next to nothing about helicopters, but when I was a kid, I used to enjoy assembling aircraft models, and I recall this one weird helicopter model I built with interleaving rotors, spinning in opposite directions - the model was tricky to build because the rotors were attached to a gear assembly so that they had to spin together. The weird bit was that this arrangement meant that no tail rotor was required. I guess that configuration must have had some flaw in it though, as the idea hasn't been advanced further since then, far as I know.
That's a Kaman HH-43.. German dude named Flettner, that got spirited to the US under the same banner as Werner von Braun and others, came up with that. The reason counter-rotating designs of all kinda fell to the side is that you lose a lot of efficiency when your two rotors are busily sucking down each other's rotorwash. The two side-by-side idea is arguably less mechanically complex than the way the Russians do it But even the Russians, who did fundamentally ludicrous things with helicopters Got it down to one when they got serious about it.
You are truly a fount of knowledge, my friend. That's the one. I noticed a couple of your image links didn't embed - and those links start with "https://" - I thought that #bugski was fixed? mk ?
Aaaand now, they seem to have repaired themselves. Edited, I assume.
The argument I've heard is that a quad copter is like flying one of those magic arm machines that you grab toys with. A coax heli is like trying to balance a ball in a bowl - it'll stay there largely of its own accord. A fixed-pitch is like trying to balance a ball on the back of a bowl - you're fine until you get a little out of kilter, then you better correct in a hurry. A collective pitch is like trying to balance a pool cue on the back of a bowl. I know this - quads are boring as fuck. I should probably pick one up because they teach you perspective. Coax are easy. They're fun to launch and land. I gave away three IR coax helis and bought a Blade mSR. I embarrass myself regularly. It's a bitch to fly. It's to the point where I'm thinking of installing a simulator so that my crashes are less expensive.