- Fully programmed, turn-key aircraft
- Self Stabilization (when STAB is on) for yaw, roll, and pitch
- Full-featured autopilot which controls altitude, speed, and heading while capable of following a target
- Drill, anchor, and container for hard-to-reach terrain
- Perfectly balanced (to the kilogram) ratio for center of mass and center of lift
- Belly docking port for ship landings
- Deliberate positioning of seat for maximum visibility
- Extra seat for a friend - user can easily install 2 more seats
- Organized cockpit with method to the madness

The Badger has many systems installed and ready for use. Some of which are features I've not seen anywhere else on the workshop and are simply things that I found useful. This aircraft's programming is complex enough that it was helpful in tracking down a nasty IDE crash in the game and has been dubbed one of the most complex programmed workshop creations and has had features added to the game specifically from ideas I wanted to implement in this craft such as a docking mode and the ability to switch user-input by the computer on the fly which both required some changes to the game's code.

Here, I'll go through each system and give a brief run-down on how to use them.

The controls are extremely basic.

Pitch = W/S
Roll = A/D
Yaw = Q/E
Brake = Space

The lever just to the right of the seat is the throttle and controls prop pitch or total thrust.

Without any stabilization or autopilot over-rides it is extremely easy to make this craft unstable.

The stabilization switch is located on the panel right of the nav instrument. While this switch is on, the computer will do everything possible to keep this craft level while attempting to 0 any lateral ground speed. That means when you yaw while going forward, the ship will automatically roll to neutralize the "slide" from that turn. The pitch will only attempt to level itself, it will not attempt to stop.

This mode is intended so you can have more of a "free-flight" without having to worry about keeping the craft entirely stable yourself.

Additionally, the throttle lever stops controlling the pitch of the rotors and instead controls the vertical speed or your rate of ascent and descent. That means by simply leaving the lever centered you should hover in place. Moving the lever forward you will ascend and back to descend.

While stabilization is on, the craft will provide increasing resistance to your input as the craft reaches a point of destabilization to prevent the user from flipping or wrecking the craft.

The autopilot in the Badger is one of the most complex pieces of code on the workshop and is packed with many features that would require a novel-worthy book to author. Instead I'm going to go through the basic features here paragraph by paragraph.

For autopilot to work, Stabilization ("STAB" toggle above) MUST be turned on.

The autpilot switch is located right next to the STAB toggle on the right side of the nav instrument.


While doing nothing else but turning the autopilot on, it will attempt to reach sea or ground level, zero it's speed and attempt to turn to a heading of 0. However, these can be changed from the autopilot panel above the pilot's seat.


All interface buttons that manipulate the numbers (arrow up and down) are programmed to increment the number by a low amount each press. However, pressing and holding the button will rapidly increment the number for faster, less tedious operation. The altitude increments by 5 when single-pressing the button, while pressing and holding the button will increment by 100.

THE HEADING

The heading allows for you to input any heading for the craft to follow. Toggling the switch next to the heading number that you've input to a "green light" will make your input active and the craft will turn to that heading and hold it. Toggling the switch off will cause the craft to hold it's current or previously input heading allowing you to enter a new heading without the craft immediately responding.

The TAR button will figure out the current heading of your beacon's target (set in the targeting panel, see below) and will follow and track that target, even if it is moving!

The REV button is the reverse course button which subtracts (or adds) 180 degrees to the current heading to immediately turn around.

THE ALTITUDE

The altitude is as simple as setting a number above sea-level you want to be in meters. The craft will climb to that height (+/- 1 meter) and hold it the best it can for flight conditions.

When the ground or sea level is less than 55 meters from the craft it switches to a low altitude mode and slows the craft's descent rate.

When the ground or sea level is less than 10 meters from the craft, it switches into a landing mode and slows the descent rate to only 1.5 meters per second.

Like the heading, when the switch is toggled for active, the craft will hold the user-set altitude and when set to "current" or off, the craft will hold any previously set altitude (but not the current altitude).

SPEED

Speed is in meters per second and every system in this craft responds to the speed at which you are flying including making controls less responsive at higher speeds so over-correction doesn't cause a loss of control. In addition, the rotors will increase in RPM when rotor pitch is reaching it's maximum which you will hear as you reach speeds over 40 m/s.

Specifically, this craft is designed to nullify all incompetence from the pilot and other errors a pilot may make while trying to piliot this craft, but as a word of warning, at speeds over 80 m/s, it becomes incredibly easy to crash this craft if you don't know what you're doing.

Most rotor-craft reach a point where the vortex effect interacts with the air-frame in a way in which it "nose-dives" at high speed. The autopilot does it's best to counter this at high speed but incrementing your speed to fast at these speeds will ultimately cause this phenomena to overtake the craft. However, if you have enough altitude and zero out the speed, the craft will automatically recover.

Slowly incrementing speeds past 75 m/s will ensure that this craft doesn't become unstable (i.e., waiting for it to reach 80 before incrementing to 85).

After 90 m/s, the craft manual user control inputs. While you can fly upwards of 110 m/s, the autopilot will not allow it and must be disabled. You may keep stabilization on to reach these speeds.

The speed hold current and active works exactly like the altitude hold except it only increments in 1 m/s and will fast increment by 1 m/s when held.

AUTORECOVERY

The craft will detect when it is upside-down in the water and will automatically recover so long as you are providing no user input. It is also helpful to hit the reset button speed and bring the altitude down to about 20.

AUTOLANDING

Auto-landing is initiated by pressing the "LAND" button to the left of the nav instrument. This button requires the autopilot to be ON to work, otherwise it will flash an orange indicator at you rapidly to remind you to turn the autopilot on.

Rotors are managed automatically by the computer, but the computer sometimes doesn't know what it is you're trying to do. In order to help the computer adapt to the challenges you are putting ahead of it, there are 3 rotor modes.

For all intents and purposes the "NORMAL" mode handles almost everything.

However, if you're wanting to save battery, you can arrow to the left and select "ECO" mode.

If you've strapped your 3 ton base to the craft and need to move it, you'll want to select "MAX" mode.


The rotor indicators to the top of the modes will let you know some critical information about the lift or your craft. Closely monitoring rotor RPM isn't as important as watching the LED's. If the LED turns red, your rotors are out of sync and there is a problem with the power going to those rotors (check your battery voltages).

If the light is flashing green you are reaching the maximum lift capacity of the craft.

If the light is flashing red, you have exceeded the maximum lift capacity of the craft for the altitude and you are losing lift.

The Badger comes equipped with a communications area to help you find targets and keep track of your many beacons.


The left and right arrow buttons simply allow you to scroll through your targets that you have set in your computer. There is also a clear reminder under the keypad to how to set these targets.

Simply enough you press "Code" on the computer (left side of the passenger chair) and find the file named targets.main.xc. It is extremely self-explanatory.


The last selection is "Custom" which allows you to input any beacon frequency in the NUM pad to help find your friends base or someone else... Hey, how you use this is on you.

The battery panel on the Badger gives you critical information about your power systems including what charge capacity your batteries are at, and even each individual battery by cycling through them with the arrow buttons, voltage, power generated by RGTs, and even how many KM you can travel on the current charge and how much flight time you have left.

The ship has a docking mode when the docking switch to the right of the nav instrument is enabled.

The switch is in an "orange" solid light state when off. When on, the orange light flashes to let you know the craft is in docking mode and the dock is armed.

When the light turns green, you have successfully docked your ship. Simply turn the switch off to undock.

It will automatically change the nav instrument from flight mode to target mode and switches the primary beacon on the ship to a beacon hidden just 1 block in front of the docking port. That means if you setup your own beacon with a tx frequency of 4018, with 1 block separating the docking port and the beacon while offsetting the beacon to the left, you will be able to perfectly align this ship to dock without being in third person (which the devs plan on removing).

If you are docking to a ship, it's a good idea to broadcast your ship's heading through the main antenna that the quad tracks so you know how to orient the quad before landing.

This ship is equipped with a drill and cargo container. The panel to the right controls the drill as well as has a built in ore-terrain scanner (for finding ore and navigating at night).

Under the scanner is the button to turn on the drill and to monitor for dill efficiency and how many rocks you have mined.

If the drill does not engage is because the anchor cannot engage. The computer checks to ensure the ship is anchored before engaging the drill for safety purposes.

The ship is packed with a lot of other features you'll simply have to experience.

From automatic lighting controls, to alarms, many systems on this ship are designed to keep you in the air and to make your experience as pleasant as possible.

This quad uses a time server to keep track of solar cycles (day/night).

I have included this code in the secondary "storage" computer to the right of the passenger seat. Simply build a computer, mini-router, battery, 2 beacons, and solar sensor (and point the + east) and load that code into the router naming the solar sensor "solar" while naming a beacon "time-beacon" and the other "cycle-beacon".

It will just work.

You can copy and paste IDE flows by selecting all flows by left-clicking and dragging and then pressing CTL+C to copy and CTL+V to paste on the new computer.

As funny as it sounds, restart the autopilot and stabilization.

Reason: This craft makes prolific use of PID's. PID's adapt various situations based on how I've tuned them. For flight, the PID's should be tuned near-perfectly. However, when you're on the ground and anchored with the rotors off and the autopilot on, the autopilot is STILL RUNNING and is registering that it is having trouble trying to increase altitude, pitch, etc and when you do start up the rotors, the Autopilot is using that data to over-compensate for the time in which it had no control.

Solution: Simply turning the autopilot and STAB off and back on again will reset the PID's back to a default (zero) state.

Best Practices: Always turn all switches off when the craft is not in use and turn the autopilot on only when you're ready to fly and all flight-disabling features are disengaged (i.e., anchor/dock).


You are either trying to push this craft to fast, you are trying to tow too much weight, or you are trying to fly too high. You have exceeded the limitations of thrust on this craft or you have stalled the rotors (stall = when the angle of attack is too great for the rotors to maintain lift, so stalling doesn't necessarily mean low RPM). When this happens, the autopilot will struggle to control the craft and keep it stable.

Reason: The rotors are losing lift or stalling

Solution: Fly lower, slower, or lighter

Best Practices: Ensure you are watching the rotor indicators. The craft will let you know when it is nearing it's limitations of lift.


The anchor is unable to deploy. Check your ground position and try again.

Reason: Computer will check for ground anchor status before deploying the drill. This is intentional.

Solution: Find a flatter spot to mine.


You are flying at unsafe speeds for the altitude.

Reason: Your altitude and speed are greater than the stop distance of the craft.

Solution: Slow down or fly higher

Best Practices: You should keep your speed under 10 m/s while less than 100 meters over terrain.


The ship is charging (even by RTGs)

Reason: The flashing green light is an indicator that battery charge is increasing (charging).

Solution: Turn the rotors on.


The normal rotor profile will give ample power to the rotors.

Reason: Rotors consume a lot of power and there are 4.

Solution: Select the ECO profile.

Best Practices: Keeping your speed under 50 m/s will ensure that you maximize your flight time, but you will lower your total distance. 80 m/s is the cruise speed for this craft (where km/charge goes down for every m/s you exceed over 80).