Originally Posted by
awblain
Gouli & Lonewolf,
Having lightweight rotors - which is effectively all low-inertia means, give or take some ability to pull some mass inwards through clever composite structures - isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Thanks for your post. I am modestly familiar with the weight bogey chased by aircraft design engineers, and chased^2 by helicopter design engineers!
@ chopjock:
About your RC drones ...
Please look up the term "scaling" as it relates to design.
Also for your consideration: on all of the helicopters I flew, we had in the maintenance manual seasonal adjustments for autorotative Nr as a factor in control rigging. Each maintenance check flight I ever flew had at least one autorotation within a test profile, which was matched against GW, conditions of the day, and compared to the performance marks in the manual. A slight lengthening or shortening of control linkages were sometimes called for to get it right.
If you start messing about with control linkages to get negative pitch, you can run into some unintended consequences.
This was over 20 years ago, but I cannot forget an example in an SH-2.
I learned that a misrigging could create ground resonance due to "flat pitch" (no, not quite flat) trying to slightly pull the helicopter into the ground. We noticed it due to the wheel struts being compressed and the bird beginning to shake a bit. Shut down, worked with maintenance, and a few control rigging adjustments were made to remedy that error.
Your idea on pitch changes and rigging is likely to have undesireable outcomes.