Kniben

Been fiddling with the new awesomely improved TCA mod, which finally made me able to create this craft. It's a VTOL aircraft that can go just about anywhere! The engines it's using from the Interstellar mod allows it to fly efficiently in atmospheres, reach orbit, and cruise efficiently around in space using the non-oxidizer fuel mode. One important feature is the atmospheric scoop on its belly. The craft is loaded with very little oxidizer, and if you intend leaving the atmosphere of Kerbin, you should be scooping oxygen and using the LFO-mode for extra thrust. Carrying little oxidizer enables it to carry tons of liquid fuel! Just to clarify, it won't take off vertically fully loaded from Kerbin. But you could dump some fuel if you just want to try it out. To easily switch fuel modes while in flight, I've bound it to action group 3. Required mods Adjustable Landing Gear Infernal Robotics, you would need the robotics pack from the part rework (I never bothered with tweakscale). KSP Interstellar Throttle Controlled Avionics - If you intend maintaining control Ferram Aerospace Research - Never tried flying it without FAR. Download https://www.dropbox.com/s/0xivap9d6qubb1o/Omnibird.craft?dl=0

You are a fighter pilot aren't you? =P I did check up on the mass of the FAR Thunderbird, and it reads 12.5 tons with all the fuel. Maybe it has more wing area, but I would expect it not to glide like it does (or any of the other planes do). Did try out the FAR Darkhammer aswell, which is very heavy. I was able to maintain a velocity of 168 at a glideslope of about 4%. Again, no thrust here.

Interesting! I did some more testing using the FAR thunderbird. I was able to glide at 200 m/s at a pitch of -10% and AoA at 1.1%. Which seems to be very similar to the clip. But it was possible to maintain 92 m/s at a glideslope of 2-3%. Which means: pretty much any added thrust would bounce it up. Very rough comparsion yes, but I doubt the F-16 (or any plane except a very light glider) could glide at such flat slope. And after all, the pilot did dump all his fuel in which i did not.

I'm not talking about stall speed, I'm talking about drag. The speed at which the plane stalls has nothing to do with it. Sure, it would travel a bit further with a lower stall speed... With no drag, the plane would glide forever. With high drag the plane would slow down fast (and eventually stall).

I just want to share with you some images of a plane i built using stock parts (yea the big tank is actually from KW rocketry) + the mechjeb case. I'm running the latest FAR 14.1.1 having the plane glide 28k kilometers horizontally from 260 m/s to 58 m/s. The reason I show you this is because i feel the drag using FAR is being unrealistically low at low speeds it may not seem that much of a big deal looking at the images, but flying it in game feels very awkward. If you ever lately have attempted to land a plane using the newer versions of FAR, you would know what I'm talking about. Throttle has to be cut completely and you would need to give your plane alot of time to just slow down. Drag seems to drop out too much at about below 250 m/s, from what I've been experiencing. And since the plane is gliding, this has nothing to do with thrust from the engine. I hope you take this as constructive critizism from a game-play point of view. I mean not to claim I am right about how the drag in FAR behaves, I just feel that the planes I build do not behave like I would expect them to. I'm basing this "feel" of the little I have played flight sims and also the fact that airliners do not completely cut their throttle when landing. Thank you for all the hard work that has been put into this mod! It makes KSP so much better, and I wish only to help you improve it!

Yes, but I like the smaller scale of everything. it makes the game faster. At least an option for stock-like drag would be fantastic for those who want to launch rockets using FAR aswell!

The drag when using FAR is indeed extremely low compared to fully stock or previous releases of FAR. It would be awesome if the amount of drag would be balanced around stock KSP drag! As it stands now, it breaks gameplay by making it too easy to leave the atmosphere (atleast the one on Kerbin). Maybe the reason it is like this is that it is based on reality, but it makes little sense to use real world values for a scaled down world!

After wanting to have a fix for the ascent guidance in MechJeb when using FAR, I decided make a quickfix myself and I though I would share it with you! This will only work with FAR 0.14.0.2!!! Link removed Replace your GameData/MechJeb2/Plugins/MechJeb2.dll with the one provided. Cheers!