so, I was sitting through a boring 3-hour art class and designed a "tip driven helicopter" as BMatthews put it. I got all the bugs worked out on it (on paper) except two things. First, although there is no torque on the rotor, wouldn't there be enough friction on the rotor bearing to cause the body to tend to follow the rotation of the rotor? Second, I plan to have the rotor blade fixed pitched, and control would be achieved by tilting the whole disc like a gyrocopter. The problem is that I would have to be able to control the speed of the motors on the tips of the blade. How would I route wires from the nonspinning body to the spinning blade? I considered using a telephone cord detangler. It's a thing that you plug inline with your phone cord that allows the wires to spin, but I don't know if A. the wires are large enough to take the power and B. if the device would hold up to constant high speed spinning.
Has anyone heard of a working tip powered radio controlled helicopter?