Stock aero flight envelope plotter

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

I love Kerbal Engineer for taking most of the guesswork out of rocket design. Unfortunately, designing airplanes still requires lots of guesswork on my part -- for waypoint missions, I basically have to wait until I'm cruising, and see if I'll run out of fuel before I get to my destination. Spaceplane design is even more constrained still.

Putting the CL and CM on an airplane is decent enough for designing a stable airplane, but I'd like a design tool that can show me how it will perform in terms of speed and range -- the flight envelope plotting speed versus altitude, bounded by stall (or L = W, if "stall" doesn't apply) on the left, thrust = drag on the right, and maybe air starvation at the top (or maybe the point where the left and right bounds cross, or the point where speed exceeds orbital velocity, or 70 km, or whatever).

(From Wikipedia.)

There should probably be sliders on the side for angle of attack and load factor, and it would be great if I could get a range as well (possibly using the max-speed flight condition for that particular AOA and load factor as the input to the range equation, or maybe have the user click a point in the envelope or select cruise speed and altitude on another set of sliders and compute the range from that).

EDIT: And of course there should be a planet selector.

Putting up the flight envelope in flight would probably be a bit much (especially as it will have to be recalculated each frame as flight conditions change), but some kind of guidance as to remaining range or where the optimum operating points are (for optimum efficiency or maximum speed) would be great.

I can envision putting together a Franken-Plugin using some simulation code from Kerbal Engineer and Trajectories and some graph-plotting code from FAR, but I want to put this out there for more expert plugin-makers to see. Maybe I'll get really lucky and cybutek will feel like adding this to KER.

Edited June 13, 2015 by Kerbas_ad_astra