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O-7 HF Firefly

The O-7 HF Firefly, like my other ornithopters, is a "true" ornithopter. No cheating, here. With the exception of an XML edited cosmetic pipe running through the wing spars, what you see is what you get.

The O-7 flies like an extreme-STOL airplane, and is capable of vertical landing despite using only one pair of single-joint wings. Gone are the issues of thrust line and shake. The high frequency, low amplitude design allows the wings to be placed close to the center of mass and built from a single unit, eliminating many of the inconveniences earlier designs suffered from. If you ignore the more exotic controls, you can expect behavior just like any other stormworks aircraft. If you experiment with them, you'll find it has a little up its sleeve in addition.


This is the first of a new generation of true ornithopters that bring us much closer to the "Dune" ideal: high-frequency ornithopters. My previous ornithopters have been limited in wing beat frequency by physics desync. This design overcomes that limitation, allowing its wings to be much shorter, and its wingbeats to be much smaller in amplitude. This allows the design to be physically simplified, and also enables arbitrary thrust vectoring through the deliberate de-synchronization of each wing's stroke with its respective control surfaces. While the O-7 uses this thrust vectoring for STOL performance and vertical landings, I hope to get a slightly larger ornithopter flying vertically using it. If I am successful, much smaller, simpler VTOL ornithopters will become possible. For now, we can at least take off and land like a small songbird.