Originally Posted by
megan
To put the gyroscope notion to bed I'll offer up one example. A helicopter running on the deck of a wildly pitching and rolling ship, providing there is no SAS engaged, the rotor will maintain the same path relative to the helicopter and ship.
The primary reason the rotor disk follows the ship deck is because the swashplate stays aligned to the deck, and the rotor disk follows the swashplate. Disconnect the pitch links and the rotor doesn't follow the ship deck nearly as readily (hinge offset and other extraneous forces like elastomeric damping-friction-springiness are the cause for the alignment).