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Starter Dock VTOL Seaplane

This plane was built to be the maximum sensible size VTOL plane that can fit in the starter dock. At first it was just an exercise in seeing what I could fit, and ultimately I ended up fitting a lot in there. Obviously it's VTOL, but it also needed a stowing wing so the wingspan would fit in the dock, thus the entire wing rotates 90 degrees. It's a bit unstable until the wing is deployed, but it floats. It can tip over in the dock though if you don't get in and close the door behind you quickly. Fastest way to get in is to jump into one of the seats. When under power, on mission, the lift from the rotors and the gyro doing its thing make it completely stable.

Interior has a pilot and nav/ops seat, ten passenger seats, a medical bed, and a sleeping bed. Toward the rear there are a pair of hatches under the plane, two harnesses on winches lower through them, one for rescue and one for the operator. The rescue harness is on a hose and has a fluid port on it, which feed a water cannon under the nose, controlled by the nav/ops seat. The operator harness is on cable, and has a mag-all on it which can be used to pick up small cargo. The nav/ops seat also opens and closes the hatches, and lowers and raises the winches. The hatches can also be opened by physical buttons adjacent to them, and they serve as an airlock if you need to do some diving. As such, the sidewalls of the airlock are where all the diving gear is stowed. Other gear is stowed above the seats in overhead compartments (well, they're just normal open equipment inventory blocks, but still). Some gear, outfits which don't fit overhead, is in the back, opposite the medical bed and behind the sleeping bed.

The plane is powered by two 12 cylinder modular engines, embedded in the wings. Throttle is tuned to keep RPS between 9 and 22.5. 9 Is just below power necessary for conventional flight, you'll need about 10% throttle to stay airborne. Minimum necessary throttle to take off vertically is about 60%. The engines each have two 5x5 radiators cooling them, and reach equilibrium around 50 degrees- there's a lot more room to push those engines, so you could raise the RPS cap (by editing the properties of the "throttle and clutch" microcontrollers in the wing tips) to get more speed at 100% throttle if you so desire. It can lift a fair amount as well, though it is not built to be a heavy lifter so has none of the tools to do so. But, the fuel tank is gigantic, 14000 of whatever Stormworks volume units are, so the lift capacity is useful for transporting fuel. I spawn it with about 2500 in the tank (its fairly efficient so doesn't need much fuel for its own operation), and use it as a small tanker to bring fuel back to base when convenient to do so. I do not recommend landing in the ocean with a full tank, and fly carefully in VTOL mode because it can tip over irrecoverably if you lean it back too far.

The flight mechanics are decent, but not excellent, I must admit. You can't fly it extremely recklessly. I don't know if I just lack a full understanding of how to make it fly beautifully, or if this is simply as good as this airframe is going to fly given the short wingspan, weird aerodynamics of the float wings, and poor mechanical advantage of the short descending tail. But, as long as you don't bleed off all your speed doing aggressive rolling turns or loops, it flies fine. In VTOL though, I think it is excellent- very easy to land precisely. Taking off and landing conventionally being overly difficult with this plane doesn't matter that much since landing VTOL is simply what you should do. Transitioning from flight to VTOL is done by the spacebar, and you pretty much can do so whenever and wherever you want. I recommend against switching out of VTOL inside your hangar, though, as the collective is turned all the way up instantly and the plane rockets up in altitude before the nacelles rotate all the way forward. You can, though, take advantage of this quirk to switch from sitting on the ground directly to forward flight, the plane will jump off the ground and take off forwards- no need for complicated take off rituals.

Speaking of takeoff, there are a couple steps to know to start up the plane. Spawning in the starter dock, you want to first turn on the water taxi prop, it's one of the three buttons above the cockpit windscreen. When on, you can use W/S to go forward and reverse. It's slow, but fast enough. A/D control the small rudder accompanying the prop, it is also enabled and disabled by that same button. Once you're in open water, turn off the water taxi prop, and use the next overhead button to deploy the wing. Now, you're ready to turn the key to fire up the engines.

Update: I've made the plane fly like a tandem helicopter when the wing is stowed, flies just as well in this mode as the normal VTOL mode. Sort of makes the water taxi prop pointless, as you can now fly out of the starter dock (carefully, I implore you), but I'm not removing it. You can switch between Helicopter and VTOL mode in flight- the plane does a little dance as the gyro gets momentarily confused by the rotating wing, but you don't really lose any altitude. I could make the controls transition smoothly by making a big mulitplier add chain based on the current rotation of the main wing pivot, but I don't think it's worth the complication. As long as you are a few meters off the ground, you should have no problem switching modes.

The throttle is pre-set to 75%, an appropriate power level for all modes of flight. You can turn it up or leave it, up to you. Like I mentioned earlier, you need about 60% throttle to hover, going lower than that will prevent you from taking off (vertically, at least). From a hangar, you want to first deploy the wing, then unlock the wheels (the last of the three overhead buttons). Turning the key, you can immediately hold the W key to keep your rotors pitching forward, which will pull the aircraft out of the hangar, and once clear you can lift off as normal. When landing temporarily, I generally just touch down, lower the throttle to 0%, and let it run. When landing for a more extended period, I just turn the key off.

This plane has no fancy systems, only a basic map (adapted from SpookyNachos' GPS Navigation Display https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2834153999 ). There's a bit of room on the Nav/Ops side of the cockpit for more stuff, if you value such accouterments more than I.