Graviman,
I have been following this post for awhile now and I am very excited to hear some of this stuff from engineering folks like you. I'm not an engineer by any means but I have had some ideas in my head for some time that are very similar to yours. This being the case I"ll share my ideas and let everyone fire away.
I have often wondered why we connect the collective directly to the rotor control system and then have to engineer a way to make the engine maintain RRPM. My idea, however crazy it may be, is to connect the collective to the engine power control only and use a flyweight driven governor in the rotor system to automatically maintain RRPM. The flyweights would be allowed to swing outward with increased RRPM and when they do they would be linked to the pitch horns and could increase blade pitch. With this system if you lost engine power the collective would automatically be lowered due to the flyweights retracting (under action of a spring) from reduced RPM. This could be a handy feature in a non forgiving aircraft like the R22 where the reaction time needed is very fast. The problem with this design would be in autorotation where we are expecting the RRPM to decay but we still want to raise the pitch in the blades. This could be remedied by a simple magnetic brake assy. which would lock the collective to the pitch change mechanism. I have this all worked out in my pee brain but explaining it in text is a bit tough.
Now that we have a set of flyweights near the head controlling the RRPM we could possibly incorporate your gyro stabilization set up. If the weights are there and already connected to the pitch horns for rotor control you are halfyway there.
This whole thing is similar to the governors in fuel control units on turbine engines. You can even anticipate a droop in RPM by changing the tension of the spring in the system which we could also do in our new rotor system. I think this set up would have some good qualities in that it would almost be impossible to get behind the power curve as the pitch of the blades would only increase as fast as the engine power. Lowering pitch in case of an engine failure would be an automatic event and not one the pilot needs to perform conciously. Couple all this with Gravimans gyro cyclic control and you could have a pretty safe small helicopter. I agree that once the aircraft grows in size that electric stabilization equipment may be better suited as you would need some type of power assist anyway be it electric pneumatic hydraulic or whatever.
Ok so now is your chance to tell the grease ball mechanic to go back to his tools and leave the engineering to the pros! Hope I didn't get too far off topic. I just thought it was interesting that smart folks were coming up with ideas not far from my hair brained schemes!
Max