woot

Anyone want to do a brief rundown of vertical stabilizer function? When is two better than one? If using two, how does their lateral distance from each other and relative angle affect their performance?

Always. It's been giving me a bit of oscillation but nothing too bad.

I'm aware that any real-life pilot would be dead, but that doesn't seem relevant. As mentioned above, the horizontal stabilizers have 12degree RoM.

Well it seems a lot worse. I get stall oscillations in pitch, it seems generally sluggish, and I haven't been able to pull even 20Gs. And since I removed most of the armaments, it's actually lighter than it was before, so it seems that the extra fuselage length is likely to blame. Any other ideas?

I figured out that the proximal set of AMRAAMs were causing the simulation issues. I also added 1m to the fuselage length: Is that long enough? I'm trying to find the length that maximizes stability but doesn't sacrifice any maneuverability.

The cockpit is quiztech aero, the wings are b9 procedural, the missiles and whatnot are obviously BDArmory. It also uses adjustable landing gear and has an ejection module from Vanguard Tech. I've used this cockpit before and it seems to voxelize properly: Here are the stability derivative simulations (let me know if I did these wrong; I don't know how to interpret these ones)

So I have a little jet fighter that I really enjoy flying -- it pulls 30+ Gs regularly without issue (although it flies apart on demand if I roll during one of those turns). The problem is that it doesn't handle as precisely as I'd like. It suffers from a bit of roll instability, particularly when combined with pitch, and just in general isn't quite as responsive as I'd like FYI, the horizontal stabilizers pitch at 12, the elevons are non-functional, the ailerons roll at 20, and the vertical stabilizers yaw at 9. Anybody have any advice? If this were your craft how would you fix it up? I tend to keep it subsonic and between 0 and 3km altitude, mostly looping around KSC and shooting missiles (inaccurately) at some tanks. As a secondary issue, if anyone knows why the transonic area ruling analysis in FAR isn't oriented correctly it'd be nice to get that fixed. I can post the craft file on request, although it requires several mods.

What was the reference on the Cobra cockpit?

I activated some control surfaces as flaps for the first time last night and ran into similar problems. As I understand it, the point of flaps is to increase the camber of the wings and increase lift more than drag, making take-off possible at lower speeds. All that happened for me was reducing runway speed to a level making take-off impossible, suggesting that they increased drag far more than lift, which isn't supposed to be true of flaps (i.e., they were acting more like spoilers in their L/D ratio). So I'm probably done trying to use flaps as my jets don't require a shorter runway anyway. Their ability to make slower landings possible is more intriguing, but I'm guessing that wouldn't go well either. What's the recommended angle? I tried everything from 20 to 50 and nothing made it easier to take off. I'm also not clear on how to setup different flap settings. Are action groups the only way to do it? There seems to be some automation included in FAR, as my flaps seem to be start deployed on the runway, but I haven't found any documentation to confirm.

This shield is a nice fit for a proposed Mars architecture published last month. The publication includes this figure: The only problem is that the proposed heatshield is 12m, putting a kerbalized version somewhere around 7.5m. I gave the 3.75m one a shot though, and while it's minimalist (9.3tons vs 73tons) it's vaguely similar: Any plans for larger sizes?

That's... not what happened.

Any chance of adding the same functionality to RealChutes as contained in the stockbugfixes? It'd be great to get some separation between deployed radial parachutes instead of having them clipping through each other.

You know that Orion exists IRL right? Its first test mission happened last year. Check the pics from EFT-1

I very frequently experience that as well. The thrust adapter plate does it most every time (possibly 100%) for me, and the fairing base and fairing ring maybe half the time.

I've got the same thing going. Not sure if it's causing my issue, since I'm also getting a bunch of "input is null" errors, but it probably doesn't help.