How do you make basic spaceplanes? I cant even get up into the air

[Kadadj]

I always end up skidding to the left or right. I just don\'t get it =(

[Excalibur]

Usually I find the cause of lateral skids on take-off being too much weight on your landing gear. This can force them into the ground slightly (often one side more than the other) creating an unequal drag force and causing loss of control. Try adding more landing gear to spread the weight.

Otherwise ensure your thrust forces are equal and any landing gear is placed symmetrically and nice and straight.

I wrote this guide to give beginners some pointers;

Kerbal Space Program: How do you build a Spaceplane?

[sal_vager]

I may have found the cause of this annoying skidding, in 0.15.1 anyway, some of my aircraft that were perfectly okay in 0.15 are now scooting around and are impossible to control.

It turned out it was the wings, I had them overlapping and the collision meshes must have been interfering with each other, I altered the heights of the wings so they were no longer clipping into each other and the problem vanished.

I actually had this same problem in 0.15 with one plane, I had used symmetry and angle snap together, and placed two pairs of wings so one clipped into the other, the plane suffered from a weird phantom force making it roll and steer left all the time, I fixed that plane the same way but it seems 0.15.1 is much more sensitive to wing placement than 0.15 was.

[Excalibur]

Perhaps it\'s a combination of both... I\'ve just been playing around with a design in 0.15.1 that had the same yaw issues. Fixed it by adding two more landing gears. Haven\'t noticed any issues with wing placement yet.

[RavingManiac]

Usually I find the cause of lateral skids on take-off being too much weight on your landing gear. This can force them into the ground slightly (often one side more than the other) creating an unequal drag force and causing loss of control. Try adding more landing gear to spread the weight.

Otherwise ensure your thrust forces are equal and any landing gear is placed symmetrically and nice and straight.

I wrote this guide to give beginners some pointers;

Kerbal Space Program: How do you build a Spaceplane?

The guide recommends that the center of mass be located behind the center of lift, instead of in front. Wouldn\'t this make the plane dynamically unstable? All of my flyable aircraft have their center of mass in front of the center of lift, and any design other than that has resulted in the craft going into an uncontrollable spin.

[Excalibur]

The guide recommends that the center of mass be located behind the center of lift, instead of in front. Wouldn\'t this make the plane dynamically unstable? All of my flyable aircraft have their center of mass in front of the center of lift, and any design other than that has resulted in the craft going into an uncontrollable spin.

I found placing CoG behing CoL to give best results for stability and control to be honest. I seems that at the moment KSP\'s aircraft differ slightly from their real-life cousins because of this. If you can prove me wrong I\'ll glady edit the guide, I did however have someone \'in the know\' take a look at the guide and okay it in terms of content.

After reading your post I had to confirm things again just to be sure. Tested two aircraft, one a delta with canards and another conventional design with a T-tail. I built two variants of each aircraft, one with a forward CoG, one with a rearward one. Both variants are perfectly flyable, however the ones with the rear CoG just seem to turn better. I would attribute this to not having to create as large a control moment as you would with a forward CoG.

Attached are all four aircraft, all stock except for MechJeb. They\'ll fly without it but much more enjoyable with KILLROT turned on.

Please let me know what you think.

[sal_vager]

I have a question guys, how do you determine the location of the CoG and CoL?

I have been caught short with some craft that, when when down to the last fuel tank, try to fly rear end first, so I\'d like to keep my CoG forwards.

[Excalibur]

I have a question guys, how do you determine the location of the CoG and CoL?

I have been caught short with some craft that, when when down to the last fuel tank, try to fly rear end first, so I\'d like to keep my CoG forwards.

I just take a guess as to CoG/CoL at the moment as there\'s not definitive way to tell. I try to mentally average out where the heaviest parts are and go from there. That said jhultgre\'s Engineer plugin is slated to have indicators in the SPH/VAB in the future.

My first attempt to fly a large aircraft to KSC 2 ended in disaster because of the shifting CoG due to fuel consumption that you mention. Got within ten kilometres before flat-spinning to the ground.

What I usually do to counteract this is to initially disable the more central tanks via the context menu and alternately drain forward/rear tanks in an attempt to keep the CoG shifting as little as possible.

[The_Russian_Concussion]

I\'ve just gotten hold of 15.2 and started to try my hand at crafting some regular jet aircraft. I have managed to get about 2 or 3 airborne and into a nerve wracking yet passibly stable flight (out of about 20 attempts, so far). I feel as if the powers that be at Jebwards AFB should be brough up on charges for wasting valuable materiels...and egregious loss of test pilots. Most interesting so far was a Me-163 Komet send-up (ugh!) consisting of 1 SRB and a cockpit and a few wing-ish doodads. Went straight up just like the genuine article and glided back down for about 6 minutes. Does anyone know of any good jets that fly well that I may download and put through some 'proficency runs'? Meantime, i\'m going to keep plugging away at this new addition \'till a get a handle on it.

Great fun the R&D thing!

I\'ll prove that I\'ve got the 'Right Stuff' no matter how many of our Brave Heros must be vaporized!