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Sea planes?


UH60guy

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Although I do not like canards in general - it usually suggests there is something wrong with a plane - here they might make sense and come in handy. I am surprised by the low tail though, a higher tail seems to be a common theme.

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Although I do not like canards in general - it usually suggests there is something wrong with a plane - here they might make sense and come in handy. I am surprised by the low tail though, a higher tail seems to be a common theme.

I know what you mean - I feel a little cheap when using them. However, I found with the majority of my previous attempts that the aircraft would always want to 'nose-dive' while on the surface of the water and that lead to rolling over forwards. The canards just help keep the nose above the surface.

This thing has no problems at all landing on the water despite the long and low tail - I've splashed down at around 45m/s before without any misfortune. I can post the craft file if anyone wants to give it a spin?

Edited by Scotto6UK
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I know what you mean - I feel a little cheap when using them. However, I found with the majority of my previous attempts that the aircraft would always want to 'nose-dive' while on the surface of the water and that lead to rolling over forwards. The canards just help keep the nose above the surface.

Yes, that was one of the things that took me a while to solve too. Like I said, I think the canards are actually a pretty decent solution here, whereas they are normally a bit too fiddly. My solution was to give the aircraft a healty nose up position with faily large floats/legs. Combined with the position of the engine the nose can stay above the water, so the plane gets enough speed to lift off.

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Special thanks to Scott60UK- I heavily borrowed from his YouTube video to *finally* get a working seaplane. It's not perfect, but I went the route of trying to keep it small (though with a crew of two) so it could be easily carried to Laythe. Got it in at just under 10 tons. I'm not usually a fan of canards, but in this case it helped me keep a flat profile to the plane so it can be more easily docked to another ship to carry it to Laythe.

It flies great as a land plane, and pretty well as a sea plane. It sits nicely above the water, and can make about 40 m/s on the surface. To take off again I have to be sure ASAS is off and pull up to get speed, drop the nose, and bounce once or twice to get some rotational velocity- but it's airborne at about 50 m/s. Landing isn't too bad, you just have to cut the engines and glide at a few meters altitude to bleed off speed. Landing at 45 m/s or so seems safe, as long as you don't flare too much and let the engine hit the surface.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I decided that my seaplane could be modified...and weaponised.

By attaching a small cruise missile onto the fuselage, I tried to see if it would make a viable launch platform while in the water. This video was the short mission that I ran and the clips are taken from my BoatPlane Project ep.8 video.

I hope you enjoy and your thoughts are welcomed!

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  • 1 year later...
  • 3 weeks later...
You know what I'd like to see? A Porco Rosso seaplane. That would be impressive.

Sorry for the necropost, but I just had to try this.

6jw5yYS.jpg

Lands on the water like a dream as long as I keep the vertical velocity as low as possible (horizontal velocity doesn't seem to matter that much).

Since there's no prop engines in stock I took one from the Karbonite mod. It's completely stock otherwise.

Had to put in an extra reaction wheel to compensate for the offset center of thrust, but it's actually pretty maneuverable. Takes off beautifully at about 35 m/s, land or water.

Got up to 58 m/s on the water before I ran into the shore. Always keep your eyes on the water in the front of you!

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Lol, you guys on the first page must be kidding. Seaplanes are exceptionally easy to build. Just give it a lot of lift and use air intakes as pontoons. They are highly buoyant and have a high crash tolerance. If you have enough of them and land under 80 M/S you can have a successful seaplane.

tdWwmJ1.jpg

To the left is a seaplane of mine. Capable of both landing and taking off from water horizontally. To the right is a stock sea helicopter that is also capable of landing on the open sea.

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Lol, you guys on the first page must be kidding. Seaplanes are exceptionally easy to build. Just give it a lot of lift and use air intakes as pontoons. They are highly buoyant and have a high crash tolerance. If you have enough of them and land under 80 M/S you can have a successful seaplane.

http://i.imgur.com/tdWwmJ1.jpg

To the left is a seaplane of mine. Capable of both landing and taking off from water horizontally. To the right is a stock sea helicopter that is also capable of landing on the open sea.

The first page was over a year ago. KSP was very different and there wasn't any knowledge of these possibilities back then.

For my waterplanes, i just got VTOL. Much safer.

EMvmCHS.jpg

Edited by zekes
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