Create Aeronautics Reaction Wheels Demo

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:01]Okay, so I have been working on a new project and in the middle of it had to learn a new technology because I am severely struggling with it and that is reaction wheels. I haven't seen any other videos at least none that popped up quickly on YouTube about it. So I figured I would just quickly cover it.

[00:00:21]Uh if you need any kind of rotational correction or movement in general, this is a pretty good thing to consider.

[00:00:31]If I power this, assuming this is your ship or whatever, you can rotate by spinning a wheel or any even mass on top of it.

[00:00:47]You don't even need uh you know, doesn't have to be a wheel. As long as it's balanced, so you're not wobbling all over the place.

[00:00:58]Uh so you can switch it, you know, and with the proper setup, this can keep you uh perfectly level if you use it for roll. You know, just rotate this whole thing upwards and you could do roll.

[00:01:13]This is doing yaw right now. So you could use this to turn a ship if you wanted to.

[00:01:22]Um just you have to keep in mind that it needs to be proportional to the ship. So bigger ship you need a bigger wheel.

[00:01:32]And it's, you know, not complicated.

[00:01:37]You just Oh yeah, there's string here by the way. Uh because I find that it's nice to have string if you need to walk around in the area and it still works for connecting. Yeah. Basically, you just place down your swivel bearing, uh, put your connecting blocks, whatever you want, on there, and then put your weights on the, uh, edges. And you just have to power it with a cog on the side.

[00:02:05]And you have to remember to, uh, power that, I think.

[00:02:12]Oh, I broke it. Anyway, the glue's gone. You have to glue it.

[00:02:23]Why isn't it working?

[00:02:37]There you go. Fixed it.

[00:02:40]So, now I'm going to move over to a different world that I've got my new project in and show you a much larger example of it.

[00:02:51]And here it is. So, this whole outer wheel is the reaction wheel. Um, and the pitch on the ship is still messed up, but this handles the roll.

[00:03:04]If I do that, I'm going to lock it. You can see it starts spinning.

[00:03:10]And then if I unlock it, let me stand here.

[00:03:14]You see the ship level out. The wheel stops and it levels it very well. Right now I have this on max speed. It doesn't need to be. If you want to be smoother, you can turn this down a little bit. But yeah, this is a massive ship.

[00:03:35]Stop it again cuz it's drifting. Um, and this can completely correct any tilt. And the great part about it is, well, you can't tell right now.

[00:03:48]Let me do that.

[00:03:53]Wonderful. Discord notification. Uh, it maxes out at 1,000 stress units.

[00:03:59]It It never even really reaches that because it never turns that far.

[00:04:04]So that this one swivel bearing does all this only uses that much stress units. When opposing this, the other option would be propellers or something else. Uh that would require far more stress units.

[00:04:23]So now I will show how it works quickly. Yeah, there you go.

[00:04:31]So, we have the cog going into the swivel bearing. This is all glued up. I don't think it'll show it if I pull it out. Um, the analog transmission, the gear shift, and just a creative motor for now.

[00:04:50]So, right here we've got the gimbal for rolling the roll.

[00:04:56]You've got your signal coming out. This one is only on this side because it controls the gear shift.

[00:05:03]Uh, which may vary which side you have to put it on depending on how you set it up and what rotation everything is set to.

[00:05:11]So then it goes in here and this is just to extend the um signal. It doesn't actually do anything.

[00:05:20]We take a full signal, then the ones from the gimbal into the side, and uh only one will be on at the side, but the higher one will get subtracted from the torch and go to the analog transmission.

[00:05:38]So, if we tilt it that way, this now has a power of 11, which allows this to unlock and start spinning.

[00:05:50]We tilt it more.

[00:05:53]Got a power of eight. Spins faster. And then if we just unlock this, it corrects and shuts off the wheel.

[00:06:05]So you want to copy that, pause it, whatever.

[00:06:10]It's a pretty simple thing. There's the uh cups in case you need that or whatever.

[00:06:22]Yeah, honestly kind of busted.

[00:06:25]So, consider using it. Thanks for watching.