Pickup Drone and learning to fly

[Insane_Bolt]

I'm playing the campaign.The Pickup drone is the only flying vehicle I've unlocked. I can't master flying it no matter what parts I add to try and balance it. I've downloaded what seem like simple drones from the workshop, but these have parts I haven't unlocked and the only scrap left I have to collect need flying vehicles to reach. I haven't unlocked a plane either, as I don't have Modular Wing. I'm flummoxed.
Can someone please point me to an easy to fly workshop vehicle that uses the parts of the Pickup drone or less?

[DataMeister]

I'm having the same trouble. The pickup drone is impossible to fly.

If you are talking about the space crash campaign, one thing that did help was to build a fast little car with shocks, and a couple mini jet engines, plus 4 down firing mini jet engines. With that you can scale almost any wall. I was able to get all the part needed for the airplane and a few others.

The airplane isn't super easy to fly either, but it is possible to stay up in the air while you try multiple landing attempts. Unlike the drone which does an unstoppable nose dive or back-flip-plus-nose-dive after it decides you've been up long enough.

[kschang77]

I personally don't bother with the pickup drone OR the cloud copter. I use the gimbal car for all of my air pickups except medium and large items. Though I was lucky in that my driving skills allowed me to pick up the Dragon Jet (inside the volcano) so I have a variant of gimbal car with 2 dragon jets on the sides with thrust downwards so it climbs at a respectable rate. It's optional. My other two pickup vehicles are basically medium and large variations of the same vehicle as the gimbal car, albeit enlarged.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2372850120

This is my superlifter, capable of bringing down the large ball items from the sky:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2369701304

It also uses dragon jets.

[kschang77]

If you simply need a jumper, i.e. something that can jump up a simple cliff, I'd recommend putting 4 raw-jet in the corners of the 1st or second blueprint car you have (add some fenders if you can't attach them), then try a vertical take off. If your car tilts badly, add weight or blocks to the side that needed it until it can achieve ROUGHLY vertical flight. Then find a good place to accelerate forward and do the vertical takeoff, and hopefully you land softly.

[cT917]

Building yourself a simple plane would be the best bet to get some more advanced parts.

If you can get the propeller, the simple wing and at least one tailfin you're set to go.

With the simple wing you'll want a biplane: Two sets of wings.

If you have trouble taking off from short runways on land you can try to attach some pontoons and make a floatplane, but you'll need a lot more wings to deal with the weight.

(EDIT: Wow I just realized how old most of the discussions in this forum are... holy necro batman)