I was wondering if there is a way to declutch a propellor (like a the rotor is declutched on a helicopter) to allow the prop to free spin in the wind ?

As far as I know, it is not possible.Which, given that propellers are either direct driven or gear driven, makes sense...

As far as I know, it is not possible.Which, given that propellers are either direct driven or gear driven, makes sense...

Unless your gearbox has just given up.... :( -DaiOkay, so it wasn't that funny.

With some autogyros it was possible to run up the rotor via the engine on the ground to enable them to make a near-vertical take-off. The rotor was declutched before take-off.

It would be a nice feature to have for turboprops, but since they are so poorly modeled in the sim to begin with, I guess it's just another brick in the wall.regards,Joe

Fortunately, the turboprop example can be done...a prop wind-milling on the ground - engine off, doesn

dmaher - my situation is not any different then a turbo prop free spinning in the wind, as you described. I just used the word de-clutch because I was hoping it was a possibility.Can you produce what you spoke of ?>> So, it's just a visual effect done with a custom (prop) object script. If engine off and windy and prop not tied...spin prop :) << to match the following:IF engine off AND (airspeed OR windy) THEN spin prop.More detail please on where that script/code would be installed (i.e modeldef.xml) ?

I haven

Well it mostly works. It will free spin in the wind, when on the ground or in the air, but it continues to spin after landing and there is no wind.

BTW, What "Speedfactor" are you using?And what RPM are you getting?

RPM is zero as I just cloned prop0_still and moved the clone to the side a bit, so I could see the reaction.Speedfactor...hmmm...I was supposed to do something with that, somehow, somewhere ? :(

els{ 1 (A:RELATIVE WIND VELOCITY BODY Z,Feet per second) (P:Local Time,Seconds) * * rnor 50 * }1 is a multiplier to increased or decreased the RPM of the windmilling...try 10 or 0.1 or 1000Also try this animation section instead...the prop will only windmill if the wind speed is over 15 ft/s (head on)

<Animation>	<Parameter>		<Code>			(GENERAL ENG COMBUSTION:1,Bool) !			(A:RELATIVE WIND VELOCITY BODY Z,Feet per second) 15 >			and				if{ 1 (A:RELATIVE WIND VELOCITY BODY Z,Feet per second) (P:Local Time,Seconds) * * rnor 50 * }				els{ (A:PROP ROTATION ANGLE:1,Radians) 50 * }		</Code>	</Parameter></Animation>

I set the SpeedFactor to 2 and loaded up the new code.The animations spins at the right time and stop at the right time, so we are good there.The animation is twitchy, instead of smooth spinning. What will correct that ?

After the </Code> and before the </Parameter> statements you'll need to add a "lag" statement.Such as:<Lag>400</Lag>You will determine the best number to use through testing....From the SDK....

<Lag> A lag can be entered so a part will not jump instantaneously from one state to the next.Lag is measured in the maximum number of keyframes per second.So, for example, if the animation frame length is 50, and the lag is set to

400

, the animation will take a minimum of 50/400 or one eighth of a second to complete.

dmaher - I tried the Lag 400 code, but it actually made things worse by causing the animation to not really spin much at all. Is there somthing opposite of Lag, which would speed things up ?Also I found this, and wondered if it has an affect on using the number "rnor 50" ?****************************Posted: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 11:01 PM"" So, our friend Rafael dos Santos pointed out to us last week that there was a bug in the rnor function that can be used in XML scripts (in both gauges and modeldef.xml).He noticed that 4.0 rnor should be 4.0, not 0.86 as FS returns. The problem is that we're doing a mod by pi instead of 2 pi. (oops)What to do about this? I would suggest taking a number and converting to degress (using the rddg function), then using dnor (to normalize the number of degrees to a range between 0 and 360). and then convert back to radians using dgrd. Take care to mind your d's and r's and g's, though!And yes, this will be fixed at some point in a future release... ''"