04/06/2026
Tricopters have a unique advantage (especially in vertical inspections) that comes directly from their Y-shaped frame, and it's pretty simple once you see it!
Think about boats on a river. If you're following too closely behind another boat, you're fighting its wake the whole time. The water is choppy, you're getting tossed around, and it takes a lot more effort just to stay on course. Give yourself more distance, and everything smooths out. Rotors work in a similar way. When they're spaced farther apart, each one is pulling from cleaner air, instead of churning through the turbulence its neighbors are already kicking up.
On most multi-rotors, turbulence is manageable in forward flight (as we shared a couple of days ago, the Y-shape does provide superior cruise efficiency in forward flight). But in scenarios like vertical inspections, that turbulence really starts to matter. When a platform descends straight down, it's dropping back through the air it just pushed out of the way. Tighter rotor spacing means more of that disturbed air is getting caught up in the mix, and the platform has to work harder to compensate. That extra effort shows up as instability, and instability shows up in your data.
With more space between the rotors, a tricopter such as Vulcan SX doesn't have that problem to the same degree. Ascents and descents are just smoother, and when your descent is smooth, the footage you're collecting on the way down is actually worth keeping. For a lot of inspection workflows that means you're getting usable data in both directions on every pass, which is one less reason to go back and refly something you thought you already had.
