I want to make a working RC pod racer. By working I mean actually hovering and by pod racer I mean the think from star wars that races. Because of the practicalities of such a difficult task, I assume that the design will have to be following form more than function (at least to start). Ultimately, I would like for it to be based on sebulba’s racer in episode 1 (orange, cool angular shape, largeish cockpit pod thing that already has tank shapes).
I imagine that making the levitating part will be difficult, and I don’t like the idea of it being basically just a stylized quadcopter (like some other “levitating” star wars toys are, looking at you x-wing). After very little thinking on the matter I believe that the easiest way will effectively be a bunch of cold gas thrusters using standard CO2 canisters (whip-its as they were called in my youth). You would probably need many of them, and the run time would be quite abysmal, but it theoretically could work if you made the craft light enough and had fine enough control over the valves. That last part is probably the harder part.
I think that the control logic for the more efficient “balance on a pillar of thrust” approach (see F-35C) will be too complicated for me, so I’m guessing it’d end up being more of a “quadcopter-esq” design with multiple pillars of thrust that can be balanced and maybe one or two thrusters in each lateral direction for propulsion (separate tanks I imagine). I think this will end up meaning that the connection from “engine” to “pod” (where the drive sits?) will need to be quite rigid and you might have a sort of triangle balance where there’s three main pillars of thrust for levitation, one on each engine and one on the pod, and then a lateral thruster to left/right on each engine and main forward/back on the pod itself.
I’m guessing that probably want separate tanks for levitation and propulsion, but I’m not sure why.
Now I just need to figure out how to go about making cold gas thrusters and doing some basic math to see if this is even remotely feasible…