Benefit of more AirIntake?

[Jestersage]

Okay, I know people will say "Well, you will have more air!", but hear me out:

According to KER, even at just 2 air intake, the usage is about 10% at most for a 6-engine design.

So I am wondering is there any benefit of having more intake? Intakes, afterall, does increase drag.

[bewing]

No. There are really none.

[Superfluous J]

Any advice you saw that said to spam 50 intakes on a plane is likely at from before 1.0 dropped, when they actually did help. I would not follow any advice from that source, as the game has significantly changed since then, especially everything relating to atmospheres.

Edited March 14, 2019 by 5thHorseman

[Aeroboi]

7 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

Any advice you saw that said to spam 50 intakes on a plane is likely at from before 1.0 dropped, when they actually did help. I would not follow any advice from that source, as the game has significantly changed since then, especially everything relating to atmospheres.

I lol at that.

I have found that 1 Shock cone intake can easily feed at least 3.5 Rapier's but possibly at least a little bit more.
More intakes generally are necessary when you are rolling slow when a plane is heavy and there's not enough intake speed to further feed the engines. Sometimes more intakes are necessary when creating VTOL air/spaceplanes. Sometimes you only have one attachment node and one stack and you need more intake then 1 i.e. shock cone then you'd want a precooler or nacelle on top of that but only then.

I'm not sure why people combine precoolers and shock cones these days, unless the precoolers themselves are attachment points and fuel tanks are to heavy.

I also just made a low tech juno SSTO that can reach 70-500km orbit which has 8 junos and only 2 circular intakes and can reach 600+ m/s.

Front.

back.

Edited March 14, 2019 by Aeroboi

[Fraktal]

The only suggestion I can make in this regard is that if your plane has multiple engines, you may want to consider adding a single Engine Nacelle in addition to whatever high-speed intakes you use to combat asymmetric flameouts before you reach sufficient cruising speed where the high-speed intakes fully kick in. Despite its low fuel capacity for its weight, this particular intake is really well-suited for the role of a secondary intake that gets you where you need to be for your primary intakes to do their job, kinda like the SRB to the high-speed intakes' nuke/ion.

In fact, I recently discovered that if you aren't trying to go hypersonic/suborbital and are simply trying to reduce drag, low-drag inline intakes (I only tested the Engine Nacelle but the Engine Pre-cooler should work too) with a nosecone are your best bet. You may not get as much high-speed mileage out of them as from a Shock Cone, true, but the major drag reduction from having a nosecone instead of a front intake more than offsets the added weight of having to include another intake to keep the engines fed.