TheHengeProphet

Wow, that's kind of a glaring issue there... Hmm, I wonder if whoever is providing upkeep on B9 Pwings has anything to say about it. I'm about to start work, so I'll have to ask later. Interceptors don't really have to turn that well, they just have to be faster than their target, so I guess it really does fit that role. I'll try messing with the control deflection to see if I can't get it to less willingly stall out. @winged That's a nice looking jet you have there. Reminds me of a jart. Still not sure if AJE is in, but I'll have to go check it out again. 6900kg of internal fuel mass is remarkable, especially considering the dry mass is so low, but I expect that might change when you start adding radar and such. I haven't tried messing around with Procedural parts, but I guess it might be worth looking into... even though they're not listed on the acceptable mods list. It is a good way to test max TO weight, though.

@Darren9 Yeah, you appear to have a severe lack of area value here... That's really bizarre. Also, fancy using a B9 Procedural Wing for an airframe core, that's really neat. I suggest stripping off the BDA and Adjustable Landing Gear parts and posting it on the FAR thread; however, the point may be moot, considering wings are getting an overhaul anyways. On the other other hand, however, ferram4 might want to see that, considering it may involve something more severe. Tried flying the plane, and it looks like it can only manage about a 12°-15° AoA before it stalls the main wings, which makes it hard to do much other than go in a straight line. Your nose-duct seems to be doing its job, but that mystery gap in your area is what's really screwing up your wave drag area. I suspect it may have something to do with the wing section being "sideways", but FAR shouldn't care about that...

Sweet, thanks! I'll mess with it this weekend to see if I can "rescue" it. Though, 0.5 is not awful. Most of the planes that come through here are a lot closer to .9, except for a couple. I'm actually more concerned about what's happened with structural integrity lately, considering planes like my Spectre and CrisK's Flanker variant of his newest plane seem to tear themselves apart when nearing mach 2 in the latest update. I might have to start using Kerbal Joint Reinforcement and see if that helps, considering they aren't listed as aerodynamic failures. I think it'd be interesting to have a fighter repository that is separate from the regular FAR repository, considering things could start getting lost in such a far-reaching topic hurr hurr; however, setting up criteria for fighters which can actually compete against each other almost cuts it into being a challenge once more... I'd set one up to my personal preferences, but I have magnificent powers of neglect (see my signature), and a fairly average computer where each of my eight cores are only 1.8GHz, preventing KSP from actually running at a reasonable speed where decent dogfights are concerned, due to Unity's lack of proper hyperthreading...

And I'm back. Unfortunately, Dwerto, I'm pretty sure that would fall under the legacy rules, of which I'm fairly certain Halsfury is no longer taking entries. Darren9, that thing is absolutely hideous. I love it. I'm impressed you managed to knock it down to 0.217 m2 wave drag area! That's a fair bit lower than my Spectre's 0.245... I notice you are still using Haack, so you might want to update to Hayes, which may unfortunately affect things, though it's mainly a bugfix set. Also, the mach 6g+ turn is supposed to be done over 10km, of which I'm pretty sure that plane could do. Any chance we can get a copy of that thing? I'd love to play around with it! I'm not even certain if Halsfury still intending on continuing upkeep here, but I figure it's being put off until 1.1, considering the models will change considerably, along with engines.

Those are looking good! Did you use KerbPaint for changing the colours?

Tetryds, I believe CrisK is posting those images to be referenced against the ones in his previous post. They could presented a little better with albums, though... I have yet to test out the dev build to see if the alterations worked, because labor day weekend. Woo.

Thanks for looking into it. I've been having a lot of fun with these parts.

Amusingly, only one plane has not been affected in my plane inventory: your flanker. I'm going to just proceed as normal, since it's all broken, and re-establish that link to the Spite. Oh, also, I did ask Quiznos323 if they'd make a cockpits only version of the pack, and it's being considered, but for now, the other parts ARE pretty cool. I'm going to install the Kerbinside air races and see how quickly I can do them in the various planes. Should be fun. I THINK I downloaded the Dev FAR, which would make sense, considering there was only one plane I could fly after I installed it that would not rip itself to shreds: the Spite... I thought that would have been the only one to actually do so, but it was fine with pulling 20g+ turns, while others would fly apart at under 15g, even with 2x mass strength on the wings. Considering whatever glitch is causing the odd behaviour in the graphs is part of the legacy wings, which is getting overhauled, I think I'm just going to go back to standard Haack, and hope for the best.

Okay, I've found an interesting issue, but I can't figure out how to reproduce the error properly. I created a plane (pictured below), and designed it to have remarkable AoA values. At some point, when I loaded the plane in the VAB after a flight (because I noticed it was not flying like it used to), its AoA values changed drastically (both values are pictured below). Edit: This may all be a calculation issue involved with initially building a craft or adjusting it. It's hard to tell, so I've tried making craft with very impressive AoA profiles, and sometimes they seem to have what was stated, sometimes they don't. I'm baffled here. Now, the biggest issue here is that if I load this plane, it causes the AoA values in every other plane I load afterwards to change in a similarly drastic way. It also appears that every craft loaded after that is forever tainted. So... test with caution? Craft file here: MRF-5 Spite The cockpit is from QuizTech Aerospace, and the wheels are BahamutoD's Adjustable Landing Gear. Edit: BD Armory is also on there. Forgot about that. Edit: Looks like something has completely broken, as it's affecting every craft, and I'm going to have to re-install KSP again. Not entirely sure if this craft is the culprit, but it seems to happen every time I load it. If it doesn't occur on initial load, raise the landing gear and run the sim again, then reload the craft and repeat. That's what does it for me. Edit: I may have reproduced something like it. It certainly seems similar. I built a small plane just to test out if reloading a craft would completely change it's AoA profile. Lo and behold, it did; however, I am unable to tell if this is a reproduction of what is going on, or caused by it. Interestingly, the stall points stay roughly the same if I simply remove the wings, which seems... odd.

I really like the new design. I find it much more enjoyable to fly than the previous iteration. I adjusted the controls a bit, and blunted that trailing edge on your wing (improved the AoA by almost 5°). I also disabled the torque in the probe and cockpit, and reduced the engine power to 50%. I felt no particular need to adjust anything else on this version, so kudos on that! Flanker HVar I've been messing around with my plane a bit, and I feel I've improved it substantially! Here's a version I deem worthy to post: MRF-4 Devil Ray Now, I took the suggestion that a fighter capable of meeting all requirements would weigh over 10t anyways as a challenge. I present the MRF-5 Spite! This puppy weighs 8.4t, and is capable of filling every requirement short of the required minimum mass. The required mass makes it nearly impossible to make a single-engine design that is at all usable. The cockpit is from QuizTech Aerospace. I have yet to arm it with a gun, but I'll enjoy seeing it dogfight once I do. Update on the spite: Something odd happened with FAR, and it's stated AoA values went crazy low, but the AoA values for everything else went up. I think it's time for a fresh install... Everything is wonky now. Looks like whatever happened messed up everything, so... here, have this. MRF-5 Spite Update: Added a couple more images to the Spite album to highlight the bizarre change in AoA behaviour. Interestingly, if I load the jet, it screws up all of my things, so I'm going to pull the file for now, so that link will currently take you nowhere. Also, I made a super slick jet that is capable of high maneuverability at high speeds. It has a wave drag area under 0.3. Let me know if you want a copy. Edit: Here is this one: MRF-6 Spectre Edit: Whatever this glitch is, it has tainted everything on my end. I've turned it into ferram4, but I'm struggling to figure out how to reproduce the glitch. If you folks have encountered anything similar, head over to the FAR thread and let's see if we can squash this. The gunned version of the Spite weighs 9t even and still meets all of the requirements, save weight. I still haven't figured out this odd bug, but the plane still handles ridiculously well, despite stalling out at a much shallower angle than before (or rather, being able to stall out, period). I think I still have some work ahead of me to try to get the wave drag area down a bit further. It's currently just below 0.4 m2, and I think I might be able to work it down closer to 0.3.

I acknowledged my willingness to do this in my post. The request was primarily to facilitate the ease of distributing my planes. Also, many of the assets in this pack (according to the warning on the readme) are interwoven, so I'll have to check through each part I want to keep to see what is used where.

Hey, is it possible to get the cockpits packaged on their own? These things are amazing (works great in FAR, by the by), but I have no real use for the rest of the parts and would like to have other people be able to use my planes without having to load everything else in the mod. If you don't want to go through the effort, I'd be happy to root through and pare it down. However, I'd like to ask for your permission to distribute the cockpits on their own so others can use my planes without part load (with credit to you, of course).

Knowing it's already bugged in a weird way, but I'll probe and see if I get an answer. I get drastically different wave drag values when I load something than I do if I lower the landing gear and raise them again. The latter number is generally lower (almost exactly a difference of 0.2 m2), and I was wondering which number I should trust more: The number immediately after load, or the number from the update after landing gear actuation. This difference is not just on that funky plane I sent you earlier, but it does seem to be involved with B9 Procedural wings.

Peculiar, the link takes me to the text in the file, where the link to the USAF allows me to download the file. Dropbox can be a pain sometimes... Interesting, I'll have to see if I can get around this bug somehow. Edit: Yup, moving to a single-piece wing fixed much of the problem. For some reason, FAR will only stall out wing sections, so having a mono-piece cuts out that stall area. I wonder if he's going to fix that in the wing overhaul. Tested out your Flanker style, and I must say I actually like it more than the USAF one. Cute how you hid that GAU-8 on the nose. The extra visibility out of the cockpit is really nice, even with that GAU in the way, haha. I noticed that you still have the trailing edges on those wings, which looks quite weird when rolling. I like to cut the trailing edge down to 0.08 and make it a rounded edge so I don't get that gap that forms when actuating surfaces. Not sure what's up with that drone core in the center, because it doesn't look like it provides much use other than its phantom torque. I further modified it and reverted the intakes to their upright positions (due to lack of real effect, and for aesthetic purposes), and increased its overall ease of control by altering your control surface settings. It'll still stall out around 40°, but you're going to basically hit stall speed before you hit stall angle. When I'm done adjusting it, I'll put it back up here for you, if you like. I'm going to go ask on the FAR thread which numbers to trust. Oh, also, thanks for zipping that for me! Alright, update: ferram4 says that the numbers you'll get after actuating landing gear open and closed again are more likely to be accurate than the ones given on load.

So, I tested out your USAF variant (had trouble downloading the other one), and that thing is ridiculous! Only weighs 10.5t to boot, which is pretty darn light, considering how much fuel it's carrying. I checked, and it looks like your stall angle is just around 30 degrees, which is pretty darn good. I noticed you had torque on and 70% thrust, so I turned off torque and replaced the engines with ones that I managed to finagle to 50% and save as a sub-assembly. Your wave-drag is under 1, which is nice, and the mass allocation helps it be quite stable (the AI still managed a flat spin...). The AI managed to repeatedly rip the thing apart, and I noticed that your mass value on the wings was at 1, so I bumped it up to 1.5, and it stopped disassembling. Once those adjustments were made, it was impressive to watch it outmaneuver and destroy everything else it could. On the other hand, I appear to have built one of the most confounding craft FAR has ever seen. I get drastically different numbers from when I adjust something, then save and reload, and then the numbers go back to what they were before if I lower and raise the landing gear. I'm not at all sure which is the real number, and I don't think ferram4 wants to do anything about it considering he's going to do a wing overhaul in the next version of FAR. When I get home, I'm going to try a simplified wing design, and see if that helps. Amusingly, if I adjust the wings to get the optimal lift/stall balance for their configuration, it shifts the center of lift so far forward that I can't get enough mass up there to cover it properly, making it hyper-maneuverable again, keeping the AI from handling it. This is one of the reasons I like this challenge so much! It continues to press me to make this thing better, and when I do, someone comes out with something that makes me have to continue to redesign!

I was wondering if there were any notes specifically on what Steer Factor and Steer Damping does in the AI. I've been trying to figure out all of the variables, but haven't found anything good explaining them.

Stable up to 70 degrees AoA? Wow, that's impressive. What's it's stall angle? I've been trying to figure out why my plane stalls asymmetrically at high AoA, but it's a bit of a mystery. I might have to build the wing as a single main piece and make my own leading edges to see if that fixes anything.

Yeah, the missiles are a bit ridiculous to try to build... And as for that 5th Gen stuff, I believe the best we can actually approximate is making the best 4.5 Gen we can, and attempt to make it "look" as stealthy as possible.

I have yet to figure out how to even launch these things, hah.

BDA updated again? OOH, I'll have to go check that out! Yeah, the only mod among those I do not use is IR, heh. For what do you use IR on them? Actually, having multiple categories would be interesting, and allow for being able to tell how good of a multirole fighter a given plane could be by how they place in each category. The main downside to this, is it means more work.

That is the trend, yes, but does that mean it has to be? I feel that so long as the plane has the given requirements to be 4.5gen or higher, it should be fine. For example, unless you're specifically banning day-fighters, a radar datalink or radome should be required. Hmm... now that I think about it, that's the only thing that really makes a difference here. There isn't a lot of Gen5 tech available, which means you're otherwise operating purely on the concept of aerobatic performance and lifting load. Managing to get a fighter that can compete which weighs under 10t would be an interesting challenge in itself... Sorry for constantly questioning your rules. I really need to get out of that habit. Nice planes, CrisK. Any chance we can manage copies of those things?

Speaking of the F-104, it weighed less than 10t fully loaded. Perhaps a weight restriction isn't specifically necessary here; especially if we consider that these are supposed to be Gen5 fighters, which could well be lighter than they were back in the 60s.

Not sure... Unfortunately, smaller engines aren't available without tweakscale, which would make the design you're wanting feasible. Okay, so... I discovered the braking issue. The light adjustable landing gear will begin to bounce when braking if the braking torque is anything over the default 55. I will upload an updated version shortly. --Update-- The last link provided will take you to the most recent version of the MRF-3. I've been working on it quite a bit, as it is now capable of landing, and has an additional airbrake mid-airframe. At this point, I wouldn't say it is the most capable fighter; however, it is capable of almost any role you'll need of it, hence the MRF designation (MutiRole Fighter). It is capable of a 9g turn in the transonic range, and exceeds at speeds of around 350m/s-400m/s. Current maximum payload is unknown. Maximum AoA is about 21° (above 20° is not suggested), yet the craft is still capable of control up to nearly 23°. It has yaw instability under mach speeds, but becomes fully stable after. It weighs 9.6t dry, and 12.5t carrrying 496.5L of fuel, and 1300 rounds of 20mm ammunition. Maximum LO weight to be determined. After testing, I would say it has a maximum operational altitude of ~17.5, capable of pulling 3g turns exceeding mach 3. Capable of reaching Mach 3.3 in level flight at an optimal cruising altitude of 16700m without use of afterburners. A safe operational range of 180km (Maximum range of 250km, or 500km round trip) without external fuel stores, and not using fuel stores in clipped parts. Top speed has not been determined, as it involves melting. This data is particularly important if we're thinking about looking at stealth craft, as not using afterburners becomes important for maintaining a low thermal signature. That entire run totaled 0:20:30 (man these engines are inefficient), and could have been done more efficiently if afterburners were used to get up to altitude and speed before cruising, but I really just wanted to see how fast and high I could go without using afterburners. I will likely continue to modify the plane, possibly to be lighter and more maneuverable. The optimal cruising altitude was determined by testing what altitude would allow the thrust and drag to be at the best balance. I'm sure the math could be done on it, but I'm too lazy to figure that out. Unfortunately, the outer wing sections are what stall, and if I made it a singular piece, I'm sure I could achieve better results... Also, the plane is likely to require a major redesign when 1.1 rolls out, as the profile of the Panther engine is much different, and will likely modify drag behaviour. Further testing, and repeated dogfights have shown the plane to be stupid maneuverable; particularly at speeds over 320m/s. The AI tends to try to stall it out, but once it gets up to speed, it's a bit ridiculous. Soon, I'll load it up with hardpoints, so it can be equipped for proper combat, but these initial tests were done as vulcans only dogfights against my old adversary: the FA-18J. At speeds of 400m/s and up, the MRF-3D won every time. At speeds of 350m/s and below, there was no point at which the FA-18J could get the MRF-3D in its sights long enough to shoot before the MRF-3D banked out of the way; however, they were both so unwilling to slow down that it just became this strange skydance until the MRF-3D ran out of fuel or they ran into eachother. I may need to change its reporting name to Stingray, because that's what it really looks like when flying about.

Figured out what the issue is. If the braking torque on the light landing gear is anything about the default 55, they will start to bounce. I discovered a different bug in all of this testing, though: landing gear, when placed "backwards", which have steering enabled will have their steering reversed when reverted to launch.

I noticed that on occasion, the in-hangar FAR readout provides false information, but it's fixed upon reloading the craft. So, if anybody is looking at their data and thinking it wasn't what it used to be, reload the craft, and then look at the data. It can also sometimes be fixed by raising and lowering your landing gear.