Goddess Bhavani

Switchblade SSTO concept (Work in Progress) based on Northrop's patent for forward swept variable geometry wing design, prolifically featured in the movie Stealth as the fictional F/A-37 Talon. This huge monster of a spaceplane can also operate in Ekranoplan ocean-skimming mode and perform VTOL operations once rocket fuel is expended. The maximum takeoff weight of this craft is over 71 tons and the atmospheric ops configuration is about 42 tons. A small scale tech demonstrator is concurrently testing propulsive subsystems for the Switchblade, dubbed the Hyper V or GSLV (GhettoSpike Launch Vehicle) Mod 0.

After the modest success of my Ghettospike low cost annular aerospike engine, I decided to up the ante in the interest of moar powah, going zero to sub orbital in no time at all, accelerating so fast it nearly broke FAR.

I learned a few tricks today designing IR joints for variable geometry wings that retain their stiffness throughout the flight envelope. Really fun to engineer 3-axis stability of 'floating' joints at the ends of wings.

Completed qualifications for Northrop Switchblade forward swept variable geometry design, proving excellent stability and supersonic maneuverability albeit sensitive in roll axis due to the vastly diminished wingspan. Next up is optimizing the "Ghettospike" engines for faster boost to altitude and hopefully to infinity and beyond!

You are definitely correct! For the video production coming soon, I may add AviationLights to the mod list as part of the demo flight may take place partially at night. Hi, thanks for your kind compliments! I aim to finish flight testing programme over the next few days, life, school and job interviews allowing. I just qualified supersonic flight and full wing sweep. The supersonic handling is impressively good but there is reduced stability on the roll axis form having such a tiny wingspan! The ability to adjust wing geometry also serves as a sort of trim function over a range of speeds and altitudes, and the stability is significantly superior to my previous delta-winged spaceplane designs. When I do post the craft file I will need to provide extensive flight instructions as well. Operating this thing needs monitoring and understanding how to use a variety of normal and unconventional control methods, including flap actuation and adjusting wing sweep. What I noticed is that there are certain areas of the flight envelope where having the wrong (for instance) wing sweep setting can cause immediate loss of control, such as when decelerating from supersonic flight without swinging out the wings! Northrop did their homework well for the patented Switchblade design. I'm impressed it works as advertised in KSP, albeit without the sort of advanced flight computers needed to control the thing in reality! Here are a dozen or so screenshots taken at various phases of initial climbout and acceleration to supersonic speed up to an altitude of 75,000ft @ Mach 2.7+ As a side development I realize the huge spaceplane with its full load of 71 tons (excluding cargo!) will require a bit more oomph to get into space so I designed a linear ghettospike system which can fit nicely in the ventral engineering deck section of the ship. Here's screenshots from the qualification flight of a hypersonic vehicle powered by the GS-2 Linear Ghettospike, the new leader in low tech porkpulsion.

Today I did high altitude supersonic flight tests, after successfully remedying the 'aero elastic bending forces' issue common to all forward swept wing designs. With only 3 minutes of oxidizer carried aloft, she didn't build enough speed yet to sweep the wings fully forward but the wings are now qualified for supersonic flight. Also the GhettoSpike engines are really slow. It was hilarious, but they looked pretty firing on all 24 nozzles! Looks like I will have to fork out 3 million kash for the Level 3 research facility after all. Once the fuel was gone I then did a flat spin recovery test (Which was really really hair raising considering this plane has a nearly tail-less design!!), recovered at low altitude over the ocean and skimmed the water at 10 meters altitude like a Caspian Sea Monster. No issues with flight control, very stable, parts didn't fall off but TCA mod highly recommended otherwise future test pilots will be struggling to pan the camera all over the place individually adjusting thrust settings for all 12 lift jets! I actually landed a development prototype in the water. She can float...

Flight tests around the pattern to qualify vertical takeoff and landing. Flight control for higher speeds still in development. Good reminders about aeroelastic stress on forward swept wings from various knowledgeable fans/commenters :3

The GhettoSpike low cost aerospikes I built earlier were for a certain unique craft. She has 42 engines, forward swept variable geometry wings, short takeoff and vertical landing, goes anywhere in Kerbin SOI (soon) and all the theoretical specs look good. Just need to fly it and hope parts don't fall off at random. The Switchblade is part of a string of KSP@Facebook projects since last night. I've had fellow facebookers test small-scale versions of the Switchblade and they reported all OK with the aerodynamic concept.

Hi, yesterday I stumbled on a patent drawing online for the Northrop Switchblade fighter concept, which features a prolific forward swept variable geometry design used on the fictional F/A-37 Talon movie aircraft. Since last night the members of a KSP Facebook group has been building small scale Switchblade type aircraft with functional wing sweep mechanisms, proving the Northrop concept sound and remarkably stable in flight. Over the past 9 hours I assembled my heavy hitter, a vastly up-sized and upgraded Switchblade type craft meant to function as a go-anywhere spaceplane within Kerbal's SOI. She has two 'decks' giving very high internal fuel capacity, short takeoff and vertical landing ability from lift jets concealed in auxiliary payload bays in the mission pods, and space propulsion is provided by the comical GhettoSpike plug rockets at the back. I didn't want to spend 3 million in kash to unlock the Level 3 research facility, so I searched Jeb's junkyard for a cone shaped thing and stuck many, many little rockets on it using the Editor Extensions mod to provide 13x radial symmetry. While the craft is not yet test flown, all the important parameters check out in the SPH and I am using 'research data' provided by fellow KSP Facebookers to qualify the radical Switchblade wing system. This was done last night and no vices were reported. Infact the shift of CL forwards during supersonic flight could be a beneficial thing for beyond-Mach maneuverability in FAR. Without further ado, here's a little 4K wallpaper and some development shots of the new leader in low cost, low performance space porkpulsion - the El Cheapo GhettoSpike engine Trivia: This ship has 42 engines total!

I didn't want to spend 3 million kash to unlock the level 3 research facility so I designed the next word in low cost, low tech, low performance space and air propulsion systems. El Cheapo Aerospace proudly presents the GhettoSpike engine.

Oh my god. It seemed NASA had the same idea as I did to make a Triebflugel based UAV. The "Dancing Wing" (Tanzenflugel) concept could also lock its rotors in fixed wing configuration!

You mean I can hit one button and the thing spins forever? Propeller planes here I come!

I really enjoyed this season of Top Gear and it's a shame to have the last 3 episodes cancelled.

I used to play STO extensively back in 2012 until the advent of the 'lockbox spam' so I went away for a while. Recently reinstalled it to run some normal STFs with outdated Mk12 gear. Good game mechanics but it can be quite a lonely game without an active teamplay oriented group.

Indeed. I have just bookmarked your aircraft development thread for future reference and participation. It's the world's greatest repository of awesome

Whoaaaa! I'm a big fan of Gawker Media blogs like Jalopnik and io9! Thanks for the heads up I'll go take a look and kinja em! @Azimech - Heinkel Lerche sounds really fun to make. Even if using IR parts I think I will need to learn how to create bearing races using landing gear. I have a problem with rotor disk expansion under high RPM, partly my fault as I insist on using Procedural Wings which may be heavier or have weaker joints than the stock wing parts. But I'd rather have one long rotor blade flexing in flight than half a dozen small sections...

I recently made a controllable pitch setup for a large free-spinning rotor system using IR parts. It also allows the center section of a ship to rotate freely independent of the front and back halves of the ship. Regarding the flopping about like a wet noodle, I definitely encountered that when constructing a helicopter with two rotor assemblies. I solved the dynamic instability by many, many hours of testing counterweights and struts until it held together long enough for 'safe' test flights...

Thanks for all the kind compliments If I stuck to stock parts only I'd have to make the entire craft rotate about its axis. The fun thing is, I think it will still fly but Jeb will be reallllly dizzy. Source: By mistake I set one of the prototypes' rotor bearings to locked position and the entire back end of the ship rotated with the rotors. Still flew! If you removed the back fins it will look like a spin-stabilized rocket with centrifugal turbopump feeding the ring of engines.

B9 Aerospace parts include a series of custom struts, one of which connect two parts together with an invisible strut, useful for internal bracing or aesthetics. They connect the front and back halves of the ship together. The ship can fly without this connection but the back end will just spin freely based on aerodynamic forces and friction from the rotor bearings. The aft bearing is a double IR free moving docking washer so in effect it makes just the center bit (rotor assembly) twirl around its axis as the Triebflugel concept depicts.

I'm really looking forward to playing with these. The biodomes remind me of Silent Running.

I recently read about the totally insane and very ambitious Roton Rotary Rocket and decided I must have a rotary winged rocket in KSP. I also wanted to build a Focke-Wulf Triebflugel for some weeks now and everything fit together in just a couple of hours. Flight testing took about a day and everything seemed to work just fine, including the very tricky transition to horizontal flight and back again. Like the Roton, this craft has a few rather hair raising places in the flight envelope that guarantees loss of flight control, but so long as you're methodical and are patient with the rotor pitch controls, you'll be fine! A few Infernal Robotics and B9 strut tricks were utilized to rotate only the center section of the craft. KSP's SAS function helps a lot with the control and balance of this craft and it's not recommended to try turning it off. I've tried to engineer it to provide ample warning and graceful failure modes but if the main rotor gets damaged it's the emergency parachutes for you Craft file on KerbalX: http://kerbalx.com/crafts/1333

I read about the totally insane and very ambitious Roton Rotary Rocket and decided I must have a rotary winged rocket in KSP. I also wanted to build a Focke-Wulf Triebflugel for some weeks now and everything fit together in just a couple of hours. Flight testing took about a day and everything seemed to work just fine, including the very tricky transition to horizontal flight and back again. Like the Roton, this craft has a few rather hair raising places in the flight envelope that guarantees loss of flight control, but so long as you're methodical and are patient with the rotor pitch controls, you'll be fine! KSP's SAS function helps a lot with the control and balance of this craft and it's not recommended to try turning it off. I've tried to engineer it to provide ample warning and graceful failure modes but if the main rotor gets damaged it's the emergency parachutes for you Craft file on KerbalX: http://kerbalx.com/crafts/1333

Thanks for the compliment! It could be due to the simple nature of this craft. Not many Mark 1 ships get the limelight with this low a part count. That reminds me, I need to share the craft file on kerbalX!

The thumbnail doesn't seem to work, which is strange because they appear fine when I published it. The video at http://youtu.be/yrgLMPRzuGA seems to be viewable though. edit: fixed the thumbnail. Browser cache issue was causing it to disappear on the video editing page at youtube.

From Focke-Wulf Triebflugel to Mil V-12, I have been reading up on wacky/highly advanced rotary wing concepts from an earlier age of aeronautics and wanted to build a crazy rotorcraft of my own after seeing members of a KSP Facebook group have a go at creating models of turbo-shaft engines. To keep part count down, I decided to use the Fw Triebflugel's rotor-tip engine setup and try my hand at replicating the twin rotor configuration of intermeshing rotors used by the Kaman K-MAX. This would give me all the fun of trying to make a twin rotor setup work without the massive bulk of the V-12's huge wings and struts. I then added stub wings to my copter, again an idea borrowed from old Russian cargo helo designs with wings to off-load the rotor system during high speed cruise - this is crucial for KSP as the 62.5cm parts I used have a limited load capacity (about 6 tons for each 62.5cm docking washer, before it will shear off under load regardless of how many struts there were). Without further ado, here's what Airwolf on Kerbin could look like with B9 aerospace parts and a engineering philosophy of moar rotors The craft file can be obtained from KerbalX