Ask Lemmy

VTOL is always ass, every aeroplane should be slung on a massive slingshot into the sky because its cool as shit. No propulsion, the slingshot has to throw you the whole way.

So 99% of the time this thing is in level flight using one motor to carry 3 paperweights.

Without going into the aerodynamics, which plenty of others have gone into, the main problems I see are:

• The structural integrity of the wings is effectively kneecapped by those 2 rotors. There's almost no material remaining where the wings meet the body and there's a lot of force that needs to transfer through that area.
• Unless the center of gravity is within the triangle defined by the rotors, you're going to have a really bad time trying to control that thing during vertical flight.
• Where would all the fuel and drivetrain for 4 props (which all take up significant space) live? There is almost certainly minimal room for any sort of cargo or payload.
• Why would you want a "thick unitary" frame (I'm assuming you mean unibody here)? We put thin skin with a supporting skeleton on aircraft to reduce the weight of the craft itself without sacrificing too much rigidity, which makes more weight available for fuel and/or cargo.

Is this a generated image? In addition to the font being the one that generated images tend to use, there's some callouts here that also just don't make sense: the double "pure one-piece static frame" and "thick, unitary body frame" callouts are, I think, saying the same thing in two unintuitive ways, and along with the "long clean wings" callout, none of them really have anything to do with the design concept here. Additionally, you've repeated the "maximum efficiency winged vtol configuration" and "cheapest minimalist one-piece construction" notes on the side, neither of which are necessarily true or provable from first principles based on the design- quite the opposite, if anything.

You don’t really gain anything from putting the props in the wings, and you lose a lot of wing strength.

Take a look at https://elroyair.com/ for a real-world vtol drone with fixed wings.

No. The rotors are far too small. Simplify the problem down to a ratio of the weight of the craft to the surface area of the rotor blades. What kind of material would you use for them that could withstand that many pascals, and not fail catastrophically when spinning at the required RPM? Compare the surface area of helicopter rotors, or even rotors on FPV drones. They all have rotor diameters that exceed the dimensions of the aircraft body for a good reason.

Did the ai that made this slop know it was supposed to fly?

I'm pretty sure I've seen small (i.e., handheld-sized) commercial UAVs that fly like this. But as others have pointed out, at any realistic size you start to run into a lot of problems:

• The VTOL rotors will create massive drag when they're not in use. There's a reason virtually every aircraft with embedded VTOL jets engineered ways to cover them up during level flight. This cascades into a whole bevy of complexity issues.
• When you're not using them, you're lugging around 3 out of your 4 rotors for no reason.
• You're also sacrificing a lot of internal volume for your lift fans. This isn't so much a problem in small UAVs, again, but it's not great if you were hoping to use that capacity for fuel or cargo.

So yeah, like others said as well - now that we have tailsitter drones of moderate size, there's not really a use for this layout.

Maybe, but what's the advantage over tailsitters like this?

Or even the tilt-rotor quads/tris like the Flightory Stallion

It would probably be possible to make functional (especially on a small scale), but wouldn't be very efficient. With four rotors to drive, you're going to have significant weight, and on top of that you have the flat profile that will make it difficult to fly vertically. At the same time, the large spaces for the propellers mean it won't be as sturdy or aerodynamic, and you've only got one propeller for forward thrust, so it won't be able to go very fast. Very optimisticly, I expect that you'd be left with a vehicle that can barely take off or land, although might perform a bit better than something like a helicopter once in the air, but not competiting with existing VOTL designs.

Rotor spin needs to even out or else it would spin all the time, that's why drones have an even amount of rotors AFAIK.

Your wings would fall off. There is almost no material where they should be the strongest because there is a giant hole in it.

The center of gravity has to be forward of the side props or you'll have a hard time balancing it. This means the mass of fuel/battery, engine and payload have to be around there.

You've seen how big the props are on toy drones, helicopters, or the V-22 compared to the rest of the thing? They need to be that big to provide enough lift.

The major issues I could see with this design are:

• the pitch is going to be really hard to control with two aft rotors and a single forward rotor in vertical flight
• structural challenges with the wing since there's a big hole now where the spars go through
• depending on the type of fuel it uses, it has limited capacity in the wings for a wet wing and would take up a significant portion of the fuselage for a large capacity battery setup

Maybe but prop planes have pretty short takeoffs and landings anyway, from the little I know.

The issue you have here is weight, how many engines do you need to power those 4 props.

Doesn't a drone like this already actually exist? At least as like a remote control toy, surely.

It could be made to work, yes ... but it's not really optimal and I don't see any way it's better than other already-existing designs.

I know fuck-all about aerodynamics and that kind of design stuff, but if you have the resources for it, would you be able to 3D print and wire a small-scale version of this as an RC flier? You could then test how it handles first-hand, and perhaps put it in a small wind tunnel (iirc Mythbusters had an episode where they made a cheap DIY one with a shop fan and plastic straws)

Is this a post by an AI chat bot? The replies are odd.