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Robotic parts feel very flimsy with wings...


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Just another little thing I noticed with the robotic pieces. Whenever I try to make wings that move in any manner, they flop all over the place when making tight turns in flight. I've tried struts; they don't work.

How does one avoid having their aircraft turn into an epileptic moth?

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3 hours ago, JMBuilder said:

How does one avoid having their aircraft turn into an epileptic moth?

For starters one might recognize that transformers exist only in the movies. :D

I'm just joking around with you. To my knowledge breaking ground hinges were never designed to move wings in-flight. You may need to try a different approach.

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10 minutes ago, The Dunatian said:

For starters one might recognize that transformers exist only in the movies. :D

I'm just joking around with you. To my knowledge breaking ground hinges were never designed to move wings in-flight. You may need to try a different approach.

F-14 Tomcat could do it. either way generally KSP needs a way to make parts rigid

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Yeah I found out very quickly even a lightweight swing-wing with the strongest servos is basically infeasible and stopped trying. I don't know how you'd fix that one exactly, maybe have the phys engine disable flexible joints on parts connected to rotor nodes.

I also had this problem trying to make a quadcopter with folding ducted propeller arms to fit inside a small diameter fairing. Any uneven forces, like the kind you'd get on approximately anything, applied across an assembly bridged by a robotic part turns the whole thing into wet noodles, worsening the more movable parts are involved. Powered or locked nothing seems to make much difference.

Second problem: This feature is actually beneficial when making tough but simple rover suspension.

Edited by Loskene
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Well, in some circumstances it can work. The things that can help you are that autostruts now traverse locked robotic parts (I.e. an autostrut will end at a robotic part if the part is not locked, but will go to the other side of said part if it is locked.) and that hinges etc. are more stable when they are pushed against their stops. Unfortunately locking a hinge while it tries to keep a certain position against an outside force is pretty hard, unless that force pushes it into its stop.

I made a Eve planes that can fold their wings to be protected by a heat-shield, but can unfold their wings once the high-speed re-entry is done. In the unfolded state the hinges are at their 180deg stops, with the lift forces pushing them into the stops. That way I can lock the hinges even when there is some load on them. Once the hinges are locked the autostruts keep the wings reasonably stable.

I think something like the folding wings like on many carrier-based airplanes (e.g. F/A-18 Hornet) that can unfold and lock their wings while on the ground should be possible with the right use of autostruts. Sweeping wings like on the F-14 Tomcat - that are expected to move their wings while under load - will be a lot harder. Maybe unlocking, moving, and locking again is possible in level flight with the lifting force being perpendicular to the movement direction of the hinges. But I haven't tested that.

Well, the way that KSP implements the physics means that the real-life reason for swept wings just doesn't exist in KSP. So everything else being the same, your plane will fly as well at all speeds with straight wings than with swept wings. But I believe that isn't much consolation for you.

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