Flying with FAR

[Wheffle]

I looked through the forums a bit and couldn't find any discussions about this. But the FAR thread is huge, so I may have missed something.

Has anyone else experienced super wobbly-ness when flying small planes in FAR and using SAS and/or the FAR flight assistance? I've also had problems with planes slowly nose-diving and not holding level, even with SAS and assistance. Between the crazy wobbles and the diving, I'm having a hard time controlling these things or building a successful space plane.

Most likely I'm just bad at design and don't understand some core principles. Can anyone share a few tips or link a guide for building planes with FAR?

[ferram4]

Twitchiness using SAS is to be expected, since SAS is designed for somewhat low control authority vehicles and with FAR aerodynamic control surfaces can give you a lot of control authority (particularly in roll). If you're managing to get wobble with FAR's flight assistance, then you've got way too much in the way of control surfaces that can act on that control axis; you may want to use tweakables to reduce their maximum deflection or the axes they act on.

If your plane isn't capable of holding level, odds are that you just went from subsonic flight to supersonic flight. The aerodynamic center (CoL, using a more proper term) sits a further back in supersonic flow compared to subsonic flow, so that means that you'll either need to make the plane less stable or add a lot more control authority to keep it level in supersonic flight. Generally, trying to maintain level flight around Mach 0.95 - Mach 1.1 is not really a good idea, you should go a little bit slower or just go faster.

[Wheffle]

Hey, thanks for the tips! I've had a little more success lately.

[NWM]

and another advice, if you have a proper crat

Break the sound speed only at high atitude(over 12 000m)! Due to less drag your craft will accelerate better, and you chance to reach the stable Mach1.5 before stalling descends your craft to the dense athmosphere!