A year ago, I posted this thread about my R/C Lunar Module Quadcopter project.
It has been a few months since my last posting, and a few months since it last flew.
I took it to NARAM-59 and flew it a few times. Took second place in the Imagination Celebration, Chan Stevens and I did a dual effort with Chan’s Estes Saturn-V launched, followed by the LM, but the Saturn did not take off (turned out the pad leads were swapped). Peter Alway took this photo during some other flying:
And here is one of Chris Taylor’s:
Here is a video by Chris Taylor of some other flying at NARAM, queued up to a flight of the LM. It was pretty windy, was buffeted, and I did not have a GPS lock, so I could not fly it as well close-up as Chris & I really wanted. Vibrations caused a couple of the legs to rotate so that is why some footpads look tilted.
Use this time-queued link:
https://youtu.be/zjhYeMJhU8I?t=166
Or, click below and go to 2:47 into the video:
[video=youtube;zjhYeMJhU8I]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjhYeMJhU8I?t=166[/video]
I flew the LM a couple of times back home, but had a disaster in late August. It was hovering at about 20 feet up, when one blade acted weird and it fell vertically to the ground in a powered tumble. What happened was a prop nut had come loose, and a Quadcopter can’t fly with only 3 props trying to control it. I didn’t have a camera with me at the time, and still haven’t felt like getting it out to take photos of the damage. The damage was not TOO bad, all things considered (good thing it was not 200 feet up, as it had been a few minutes before). The Ascent stage got a bit dinged, but the main damage was to the legs, which already had accumulated some damage over summer. So I need to get some more Alumilite and cast new replacement parts for some of the leg strut assemblies and footpads. And make up some new main leg struts. This also has delayed adding final touches such as antennas, and upgrading the Descent engine from a cardboard cone to a vac-formed bell of a more accurate shape.
I still plan at some point to make a "serious" edited video of the model, maybe a couple of videos. But some of that will require shooting new video, one planned for a different more "moonish" location. And I hope sometime to get good air-to-air video of the LM flying, with a second multicopter flying near it to get the video. But none of those video shoots till next spring.
It has been interesting to look at a videos from the first two days I flew the model. I had not yet changed it to fly in "altitude hold" mode, so I had to jockey the throttle stick a lot, so it did not flay as smoothly. And accounted for some hard landings that damaged the crude landing legs until I changed to Altitude Hold. And it had not been tuned yet. So it wasn't the smooth flying model early on that it became later, but I knew from the first 10 seconds of flight that it was working pretty well anyway (my fear had been it would be a marginal flyer which would not be worth continuing). I will say that the way I HOPED it might fly when I first planned it, it indeed turned out to fly just that good, or better! Plenty of power, smooth to fly after tweaks and tuning. With a nice flight duration capability, at 8 minutes with a safety margin on 3000 mAh LiPos and about 12 minutes with a safety margin on 5000 mAh Lipos (I got two of those).
Do I have some other neat space model multicopter project in mind sometime?
But it won't have anything to do with Apollo.