Goddess Bhavani

Awesome info on the control surfaces - I actually crashed and deleted my only bomber prototype with working ailerons. Lol!

Great! Thanks for posting a pic. For functional ailerons I have only seen that once on the rare instance I was able to use the symmetry function to place the control surfaces. Other than that for heavy bombers and such I use the rudder to control roll. For a small ship like yours you probably won\'t need 4 huge control surfaces - normal surfaces will suffice and if you want added maneuverability just use a pair of canards on the front (Eurofighter style). Right now for roll control probably you will want to lengthen the nose with 1 fuselage module, and add a bigger tail with moving rudder. Lengthening the aircraft;s nose will make the centre of gravity move forwards making it more stable (will not roll out of control suddenly), while the rudder will add better control authority. Remember, planes can\'t turn without rudders. (B-2 Spirit and other flying wings are exceptions, they have ways to get around the lack of a tail which we can\'t). If in doubt just add an ASAS module in the front and use that as a fly by wire system while you troubleshoot the aerodynamics. Finally, I am very sure you have a small plane with big wings. Too big for an engine of this size. Smaller wings would make troubleshooting easier, though I like the Mirage IV look

It took me the whole of yesterday evening to get a multi-engine aircraft flyable. Initially intended to be a 4-engine, T-tail cargo aircraft it was completely unusable due to the limitations of the experimental nacelle engines. And the tail kept breaking. I\'ll have to wait for C7 to release the improved hardpoints, before I can attempt a large T-tail again. So eventually it became a roughly Tu16 based tactical bomber with inspiration from a number of Earthly aircraft: - 1. General layout, side nacelles & turbojets from a Tu16 Badger (base template) 2. Wings from a C-17 Globemaster III, as the current C7 control surfaces do not act as ailerons; roll control is more easily managed by use of the rudders. 3. Tail from a fictional EB-52 Megafortress, with double the airfoils for KSP flyability. 4. B-47 Stratojet - because before I finalised the Tu16 I had 6 engines, 4 turbofans and 2 aerospikes in 6 nacelles. On hindsight I made a Tu16 replica without even looking at a real Tu16 (never looked at Cold War era aircraft in over two decades!). However I gained valuable technical expertise in designing a medium bomber type ship. I will re-do a proper Tu16 replica with mid-mounted wings attached directly to the fuselage nacelles on my next attempt tonight. I will have to use more than two engines most likely, as we don\'t have Russian style gigantic turbojets yet.

That and a Mig21 is so simple to make! No need to balance airfoils in strange angles ala F104.

Good that you did some forum necromancy This course is definitely worth keeping alive. All fighter type planes should be tested in this environment!

Rolling to either side is usually encountered due to issues with wing loading. One wing or the other stalls causing loss of control. Mind posting a picture of your aircraft? The good forum should be able to give you some tips. Also, try keeping your plane simple at first, use straight airfoils (no anhedral or dihedral), and with no payload. Gradually evolve to multi-engine designs and exotic airfoils.

For weapons just add a railgun to the centre and some missiles on the wings. Check out my F-104 replica to note the procedure for placing and firing weapons.

I correct myself, this is not the Empire State, it\'s the entire friggin Kremlin flying out to space. The similarities are obvious

I\'m going to try a Tu-16 or Tu-22M3 just to get some experience with bigger birds and internal payload bays. Then I can try a B-52 and see if it shares the same challenges with your C-5.

This just reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke awesomeness. The execution and layout is impeccable. Especially love the enclosed payload bay.

@Gaby, that thing is seriously awesome. Ginormous lol. @FLX - I like the WhiteKnightTwo reference of your twin-boom 7 engine design.

Awesome stuff there FLX, now for this challenge the \'pontoon\' just needs to be below the fighter.

ASAS is not only useful as an attitude hold autopilot, it also allows you to: 1. act as a \'fly by wire\' to control otherwise unstable fighter-like ships, especially those modelled after real aircraft. 2. control your aircraft at high alpha (high angles of attack) without risk of spinning out, stalling, etc. Especially great to setup a gliding attitude before the runway, engage ASAS and it glides in like flying an ILS approach With regards to centre of gravity (CG) and centre of lift (CL) discussions, my findings are more or less identical to the earlier-stated. My only advise is try and design something with a proven-in-reality airfoil profile so troubleshooting is logical and surgical. You could very well jump right to creating a monster spaceplane in the form of a tandem multiplane with 8 Ekranoplan style engines in the nose but... without a reference point for performance and flight characteristics, troubleshooting for a C7 beginner is almost impossible. I\'d rather gain some experience designing something small and functional first, then evolve said design into more advanced and capable variants, such as how the successful F-16 spurred an interesting and radical F-16XL delta wing prototype for longer range and higher payload capacity. My first \'sharable\' C7 release is an example of an ASAS-reliant ship with a based-on-reality planform, which is tricky to fly manually without a joystick, especially where missiles are carried. Consider it a Kerbalese rendition of the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=6097.0 It does have a tricky flight profile and requires 10 to 30 degree AoA to maintain level flight until enough fuel/ordnance is expended, but in terms of it being a point defence interceptor or light attack craft it\'s more or less true to life with the real F-104... which for a time did suffer a high accident rate as well. Not easy to fly. However, ASAS has its limitations 1. It uses \'full opposite lock\' for attitude correction. This is fine for a small, 1 to 3 engine aircraft. For a very long spaceplane with multiple stages, you will face problems with the hamfisted ASAS flight corrections shaking the ship to pieces. The solution here is to either review the thrust/mass/CoG balance of the vehicle and make it more stable, or reduce the number of flight control surfaces. This is where you use the SAS module instead, which acts more like a \'fly by wire\' system and keeps the craft flying straight. Although it does not actively intervene with flight controls, it does act like an \'inertial damper\' to reduce or eliminate local vibrations or oscillations in flight. During flight on an unstable vehicle like the below (see video link) 'X3' early low altitude Mach 1 sprint attempt, note that I use the ASAS only during Stage 1 of the flight, to stabilise the unstable and non-rigid solid rocket boosters positioned way out in the back with their own flight controls. During Stages 2 and 2.5 I use the cockpit-mounted SAS to assist with keeping a stable flight control, with manual stick input to control the direction of the craft (proper fly by wire workability!) To unload the wings for the final nosedive to break the sound barrier, I simply release the stick and the deliberately unstable airframe does the job diving down in a terminal dive. Lastly, this ship is so unstable that to deploy the recovery parachute in the correct attitude, just do a Pugachev\'s Cobra or Herbst maneuver with a short burst of your final 1% of rocket fuel To demonstrate deliberate instability, and use of ASAS for temporary stage stabilisation, and SAS for 'relaxed stability control', perhaps this video would be useful: I didn\'t break the \'land speed record\' in the contest, it being won by unrealistic designs with much greater thrust to mass ratio, but I had fun planning out the design of the 3 stage sprinter and designing a customised flight profile with certain procedures to make use of the design\'s flaw - namely, the seemingly random pitch changes, and the unconventional airfoil profile.

It\'s like the Empire State Building going to the Moon.

Sparta? nah. THIS IS KERBAL.

I think for the C5\'s case you could put a SAS module at the place where the vibrations are being created. It does tend to damp out the problem. The tail, or perhaps on each engine nacelle.

A pity you can\'t launch multiple aircraft off a single carrier. One boat one aircraft is just not cost effective! I have an idea to make the carrier launch drones instead of manned fighters, just so I can play 'Tora! Tora! Tora!' against the KSC erm.. Kerbalese version. More planes, more fun! Just make the drones glide reasonably well under their own power and viola, imaginary cruise missiles! This design calls for a Caspian Sea Monster (Lun Ekranoplan) style layout with enough tandem-mounted wings for a low speed water landing, aquatic navigation module with low thrust gimballed engines (waterjets lol), and once in position, the next stages trigger off the attack drones flying off the deck in sequence. To assist with the water landing sequence I may try a biplane or multi-plane layout for exceptionally low stall speed... hmm, which would end up like something like the flying fortress-like air-carrier in the anime Yukikaze.

All you need is a lifting body version of an Energia and viola, big fat rockets to orbit! Or take inspiration of the TX heavy transporter from Orbiter. That one was just an XB-70 style hypersonic craft with a hardpoint on the dorsal section for... just about anything you can think of. I\'ve carried large spaceplanes, rockets... ICBMs, on that thing.

It looks epic. I actually tried the 'X-Wing' engine arrangement before but since I mostly build small fighters, the ship was too light and small to handle such huge power. Nope we don\'t have laser weapons yet but you could easily mod a railgun shell to travel so fast that it just leaves a streak of smoke for a cheap shot at a \'laser\'

Sea landing - it might help to carry some pontoon light structure made out of durable crash resistant parts at the bottom of the ship, in case you can\'t glide in slow enough for the carrier\'s hull to withstand the initial water impact. I envision something like a hydrofoil or catamaran like thing. Whole boat has to be rebalanced in lift/thrust/centre of gravity for flight though!

Textures are what make models awesome and so, yes, bring on the hi res texture pack! On this note I wonder if there\'s a hi res texture pack for terrain...

LOL that\'s the C-5 replica you were talking about yesterday. What I do in similar situations where ASAS is overpoweringly effective and causing vibrations, decrease the number of control surfaces in the wing. Also it might be that a more stable Galaxy replica could be created by mounting the wings to a hardpoint on top of the fuselage creating a \'high wing\' design. This puts the thrust axis in-line with the aircraft\'s centreline preventing asymetrical thrust from upsetting the ASAS. As we know, the ASAS loves to overcompensate for little things. I hope for future aircraft fans\' sake that we have a proper trim function instead ASAS works well for small ships but its overcorrection rips apart big ones.

The real F104 wasn\'t exactly known for being a safe aircraft either. Spins and such were killers of inexperienced pilots. Just use the ASAS to stabilise it during the climbout. Once you release ordnance, you can fly back home normally. Works as a short range point defence interceptor where high climb rate mattered. Just imagine a 1960s scenario where radar guided weapons were still primitive and pilots relied on ground or AWACS controlled interception for aiming. I intend to release \'improved\' versions of this model later on, give it something like an F-16XL wing. That would create an interesting scenario where I\'m taking real-life aircraft and adapting them for improved performance in the Kerbalese atmosphere. RE: Not symmetrical - The 'downwards canted' wings give it stability and moves the centre of lift slightly downward, so the craft is able to carry a sizeable payload. I forgot what is the correct term for this sort of wing design - anhedral? dihedral? You can take one of the designs apart and try different wing angles. See how it affects flight performance with or without payload. Right now this \'realistic\' configuration is a bit lacking in lift and changes direction slowly.... and the real Starfighter isn\'t very maneuverable either, being a \'manned missile\' design. Note how the payload -has to- be more or less within the centre of lift or else loss of control will occur. If the centre of gravity is too far from the centre of lift, once again the ship will porpoise and fly with an upside down attitude. That\'s why the assymetrical design works.

Touted as a counterinsurgency \'flying battleship\' in the pattern of Dale Brown\'s EB-52 Megafortress, the EB-116C 'Sturmovik' is a specialist low altitude attack aircraft with no less than 3 railguns for anti-tank and anti-materiel strikes. WARBIRDS REPLICA NO. 2 EB-116 Badger Medium Bomber (A and B variants, similar to actual Tu-16 Badger) Sturmovik (EB-116C) And now we transition to multi-engine aircraft, and I thought a large twin engine design would be good room to play. Little did I know I would spend almost a week fixing the original design of the Tu-16 Badger bomber of Cold War fame, as the configuration was almost unflyable with a payload in KSP specifications. So, I sort of improved it. First gradually, to enable it to carry an antiship missile training round, then optimising its airfoils for the unique Kerbalese atmosphere. As demonstrated on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_IEWN-s-is Download Link http://www./?xzklvjh4v6xfa51 WARBIRDS REPLICA NO. 1 XF-204R STARFIGHTER II Atmospheric / Low Orbit interceptor I thought to test the viability of Kerbalese atmospheric physics by feeding it a proven real-world aircraft design, the (in)famous Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, with its manned-missile design and extremely high wing loading. How would it behave in KSP? Can I fit a couple of air to ground missiles... maybe a railgun and rocket boosters for a one-shot improvised ASAT (anti satellite) solution? Turns out it can. And the weaknesses of the F-104\'s design were faithfully reproduced in KSP much to my delight. But what matters is that it climbs like a rocket and packs a rapid punch! Download Link http://www./?71p3n4bb3byoo3e Note: The above packages requires the following mods: C7 Aviation Pack, Hardpoints, and Experimental parts Front-firing Railgun Wasp Missile KSP 0.13.1 You may view the readme below for links to the above mods, design info, package manifest (download the ship below) etc. Move / unzip the Ships files to the same folder in your KSP installation; same as all other mods, inspect the package before using it!

Forward swept fins look awesome! Now if I could have a plain white, longer and thinner one I could create an X-29.... or a Goa\'uld death glider