Hello and welcome to Games With Hank! I'm Hank, and today the game is Kerbal Space Program. I have some things to show you. Some things I've been working on. [Evil laugh]

This is the beginning of my screw-loose series. Uh, and the goal of the screw-loose series was to create an Archimedes screw-based helicopter that would actually fly. So an Archimedes screw- well, let's just talk about what screws are first. Screws are basically- so you know what an inclined plane is? I-it allows you to transfer motion in this direction into motion in two directions, both up and down. Um, now, a screw is an inclined plane wrapped around a cylinder. So when you stick a screw into the wall and you start screwing it in, that rotational motions gets, uh, transferred into motion pulling the screw- pulling, or pushing- the screw into the wall. It actually, uh, depending on the bite of the screw, uh, you can have this magnify your mechanical energy of the turning of the screw, uh, into being able to drive it into wood, which you would not normally be able to do just by poking at something. Like, you can't just like poke a nail into a piece of wood, but you can screw a screw into a piece of wood, and that is due to the marvels of simple machines and engineering.

Uh, and so, you've seen the Da Vinci helicopter. The Da- the goal of the Da Vinci helicopter was to basically screw its way into the air. And so, this was my first attempt at building basically a rocket-powered Da Vinci's helicopter in Kerbal Space Program. And we're going to see how that does. Now the idea here is that instead of biting into the wood, the inclined plane on the outside of this, uh, aircraft, I guess you would say, will bit into the atmosphere.

Now, these are solid rocket boosters, so I can't crank them up, I just have to press the button and watch them go, and you'll see here that, uh, that interesting aerodynamic things are happening, but, uh, it is not getting lift. Uh so it is not coming off the ground, but there is, there is some lift because otherwise it would just be falling right over. And uh, it basically just spins like a top, which is why I saved this one of all of the ones that I built, and I was like, "Look at that! It's spinning like a top!" And I did not expect that to be a thing that would happen. Umm, but it never actually lifts off, and then, remarkably enough, Matt Barry Kerman is just very dizzy and fine at the end of the process.

So that was Screw-Loose Attempt 1.  We're gonna revert to the vehicle assembly and uh, load up Screw-Loose Attempt #2, which, uh, ohhh, something happened.  Alright, well, we're gonna load up #3, 'cause I don't know what happened to #2, or I guess I'm gonna load up #4.  So, #4's got a, so basically, you will see here, I lost a couple of designs, um, unfortunate that that happened, because uh, this design, wait, come on, really??  There was, there was a hilarious--there was just one that had it, maybe, maybe it's this one, is it this one?  Nope.  Hahahaha, just loadin' up random things.  

Let's, let's launch this one, I don't know what it is, I just named this one Gyro-Boop, apparently there was a reason why I saved it, there's gotta be a reason why I saved it, so let's see what it does.  Who knows?  I mean, obviously, this is not going to work.  Uh, other than--it's gonna tear itself apart instantaneously, there it goes!  Tore itself apart!  Uh, and then exploded. Uh, I'm--let's, let's let's try that again and uh, we're gonna--oh, I didn't mean to do that.  And we're gonna rev the--rev it up a bit and see if we can, see if we can make something more interesting than that happen.  You never know in Kerbal Space Program.  How instantaneously can I rip the wings off of this thing?  Pretty instantaneously!  But then this bit, this is why I saved this one, actually just flies.  It's like, well, this is a really interesting way to build a rocket.  Uh, I should have throttled down, 'cause now Matt Barry's in trouble.  This is not gonna end well for Matt Barry, but we're not gonna watch it happen, that's just gonna happen in the background.  

Screw Loose 2, 45 parts, it says.  Where are the 45--oh!  There it is!  Okay, okay, we got it, here it is.  Um, so we got some aerospike liquid fuel engines on the bottom here, I never--I didn't add wheels to the bottom of this one, 'cause you don't--who needs 'em?  And I tried to just sort of, uh, give it a little more stability and a little more height uh, to see if that would help.  It didn't.  Uh, spoiler, but we're gonna go ahead and launch this thing and see what happens.  Push the button.  Yesss, yesss, yesss, power it up, power it up, alright, oh yeah, hahahaha, I love it!  What the frick is this?  That's not what I wanted to have happen, you guys.  Oh God.  This is power down.

How, how far can I power down before this thing actually starts to run into the ground?  I think it just pop--I think it's just bouncing off the ground now, it's just rolling, it's just rolling off the--ohh, there we go.  Oh, whoa, whoaaaa, whee, alright now push it, push it now, push it now, push it now!  OH, bouncing, whoo, uh-oh, that's not good, that's not good.  Ohh, keep tryin', keep tryin', uh-oh, not the gas tanks.  They're rubble now, whoaaa, and they exploded, I don't know why they disappeared before they exploded but they did and it did, that's it, that's what happened with that one.  So um, I uh, yeah, this is a lot of, there's a lot of fire.  So I realized, I actually thought for a while that this wasn't going to work, which is hilarious looking back, because of course, this is so janky and there's no space and the wings don't bite enough, and the lifting surfaces are tiny.

So what I needed to do... so basically at this point I could increase the thrust -- the amount of spin -- which eventually with enough spin this would get lift. Or I could increase the amount of lifting surfaces or I could increase the amount of lift each lifting surface has.

So basically with the next version I did all of those things. So let's load up Screwloose 4 here and see. Here we go. We've got-- we've increased the lift-- the amount of lifting surface, we've increased the amount of-- it's much prettier, it's actually much more like da Vinci's helicopter. I've increased the thrust by pulling the engines out from the body of the craft. I've added wheels, so that it has a little less trouble getting off the ground and it's not sort of bouncing around with all the friction there, and I've added more lift surface by adding a lot more wings, and I've also increased the bite that each wing has, and so instead of going around twice it goes around once, and that shouldn't matter too much so we're gonna launch here.

And I'm pretty sure that this -- spoiler -- will not work. But I wanted to show you the whole process. So here we go, much prettier. We're going to throttle down before we launch so that we can see a little bit of this thing in motion, and you can see this is indeed, you know, screwing the atmosphere. You know what I mean.

And so we're going to try to throttle up, slowly, to see if we can get enough lift without this thing -- so screwing the atmosphere really hard now, we're screwing the atmosphere really so hard it's -- now we are at maximum and it's just going to tear itself apart, and indeed my Kerbal is going to die. So that is sad. Matberry was killed. Matberry Kerman was killed. So that's sad.

We had a lot of thrust, a lot of spin, I mean it looked very much like it was screwing itself into the atmosphere. So at this point, what we can do is to try and make the craft lighter, which I didn't do, but maybe that would help. Or we can try to increase the lifting surface again. So right now we only have one blade and what I ended up doing -- and let's get that loaded up right here -- is adding another blade to the exterior of this craft so that now, not out to the -- not like out on the edges like I've been doing with the helicoptopodes, but a flatter surround so I could add some more lifting surface without having to add a ton more blades. So I only had to add like half as many blades as the first round.

I also pulled the engines out from the body a little bit more and added a lot of struts so it wouldn't pull itself apart. And yeah. We're gonna see how this works now. We are going to, I think, for real this time, screw ourselves into to the atmosphere. It's gonna be great.

I mean it looks a little less impressive, because it looks... you know... more blades less screwing, but it does look a lot like da Vinci's helicopter looked, and I wish I had sort of like... this took me... I don't want to talk about how long I worked on this, but basically I could've walked you through the entire process, I could've been with you through the entire process and it would've been more exciting to be like "will it lift off? will I? I bet it won't! I bet I'm just gonna give up after this one," which I probably, I was ready to give up. But now you know that this thing is actually capable of lifting off, and hopefully I'm not wrong about that.

Alright, here we go. It actually shouldn't take much. So you can see this thing grabbing the air, screwing itself into the air a little bit, let's see right when we get the moment of lift off, has not happened yet. There it goes, guys, there it goes! We have lift off! And I can actually power this guy down and he'll land just fine, which is pretty great.

I've given myself, by bouncing there, I've given myself a little bit of wobble, but that's okay. And then I can just, I can just power down a little bit and like just hover. I can totally just hover in space. And then I can power up and see how much -- whoaaaaaa the wobble that I introduced during that bounce is not great. Oh, but I didn't expect-- nooo don't land on your head. Ooh you landed right on your head, oh that's sad. Okay, let's revert to launch here.

Aw I hit the space center button, aaargh. There was very clearly a button that said revert to launch, and I didn't click it. Alright, going back to the launch. I'm going to do not the wobbling, because that was introducing all kinds of instability that was bad for my final Screwloose design here. Let's just launch with regular thrust. We're going to take off pretty instantaneously there. I'm gonna try to throttle up a little bit.

It still has some wobble that I don't -- I guess I do know what's introducing that. It's the fact that these winglets are not in any way, you know, symmetrically positioned. But yeah, we've now got... we're going five meters per second right now. I'm gonna try to power down and land the Screwloose 5, the final version of the Screwloose. Which, yeah, is an Archimedes Screw-based rocket powered aircraft that is based on da Vinci's design for, the first design of a helicopter. As far as I know.

So this is indeed a helicopter of sorts, and I'm going to try and... yeah, I'm just going to sit here for a while this decides to slow down and head down toward the ground. I, hopefully, will not run out of fuel before I get there.

Oh man this is so hard. Huuuuurgh, okay, well that's not great. I mean, let's just touch down on this fiery fireball. Alright, no worries. Fiery fireball it is. Alright. (various groaning noises) Okay I'm going to call that a succe-- eeeeeugh okay. Oh you're still rolling, huh. Well it would've worked if there hadn't been that explosion. Alright, we have settled into a stable position.

That, my friends, is the epic story of the Screwloose 5, piloted by Bartvis Kerman, who has managed to survive one of the most treacherous and peculiar space flights or just not even space, not even trying for space, just air travel, flights of all time.

Now I'm going to turn the engines back on, see what happens. WHEEEEE not a lot! We ran out of gas really fast. Alright don't DON'T EXPLODE BARTFOUS DON'T. Oh thank god that was -- good thing we built those things sturdy here on the planet Kerbal.

Thank you for watching this episode of Games With Hank, I have been Hank, and the game has been Kerbal Space Program. Flying my little helicopters is my favorite thing. Let's let Bartvis get out of the crew capsule here. Hey, Bartvis, where are you? EVA. Yeah, walk around. You're upside down. Yaaaay. Bartvis is fine!

(singing) I am fine! I am the most successful Kerbin in the history of the planet Kerbal. I just spun like a thousand miles an hour, but you can't mess with me I'm a Planeteer, I go to planets and planefljskljf. I go to planets far, but mostly planets nearby, which I mean planets here on Kerbal.

Okay. Well that was a good ending. DFTBA.