Littlerift

I haven't noticed this problem particularly. Occasionally the AI will do this, but with the current arrangement on my jet it tends to hit the target if it gets a 1k gap open while facing them. I assume the AI simple overcompensates for turning and speed, as I have noticed that when a slow jet fights a fast jet the slow jet will almost always shoot in front of the faster one. You're probably right, but I think the main issue is that with the new BDA is that guns are a complete waste of time.

Are you using legacy targeting? From what I've gathered the AI in BD used to cheat to some degree when using guns; the bullets would lock onto a target if the nose of the aircraft was within a degree or so of the other vehicle. The new BDA doesn't do this - hence why gun battles are a complete waste of time. It's something I really dislike about the new BD armoury actually, because missile fights have always been dull.

To my knowledge, tetryds is finishing up on the 'first wave', and as such entries from now on will have to wait until the next wave of battles - which will likely come, time allowing, when FAR and the weapons mod pack updates come.

Good to hear about those FAR updates, tetryds. Should make my monoplane a little more competitive. I hope you don't mind, but I did a little testing using this aircraft (against one of my older designs, I haven't used the design I'll be entering for fairness' sake). Just a few things I noticed: I don't think pre-coolers are actually allowed, you'll have to check with tetryds but I think they were classed under rocket-grade parts. Should be a simple fix though. By default your cockpit torque is on and the Scan Interval for Bd Armory's Weapon Manager is set to 60. Also, your Steer Factor is set to 14, despite the fact that the pilot can easily handle 20. Quite a few of your control surface (predominantly in the tail) are not actually connected to the wing, they're connected to the wing's trailing edge. This can cause big problems with regards to airflow. Also, the trailing edge of your main wing is very jagged. With B9 wings I would suggest removing the trailing edge on any wing you intend to have control surfaces on, and then using control surface parts (even if they aren't active) to completely conceal the trailing edge. This leads to a cleaner air flow, and a sleeker look. Your CoM and CoL are in roughly the right place at the moment, and the AoA graph is pretty good. However... In my opinion, you have far too much wing - currently you have a wing area of 57.7m/sq. When you consider that the Ta 152, which was specifically designed with a big wing due to the altitude it was expected to perform at, you have almost 3x as much wing surface. Having very low wing loading can be useful, as it generally gives better climb performance and can increase turn-rate. However you have to strike a balance, currently the size of your wing is heavily restricting the roll rate of the aircraft, and if the aircraft were able to pull a higher AoA in flight it would also induce more drag. I would suggest trimming the wing surface area down a little, especially the tailplane, which is far too large. However, wing size is all a personal preference, and it also depends on what your intended role for the aircraft is. Having such a large wing surface can be good if you want to climb at the start of the battle - you aren't set up for that currently, but maybe run some tests? Generally BD AI favours highly mobile aircraft, but I have had some success wing aircraft designed to climb at then kill the enemy before the opponent can manoeuvre enough to offset the energy advantage. Your control surfaces are very small and have little motion in them. These two factors are the main cause of the relatively low agility. In a simple test, I doubled the length of the control surfaces and doubled their degrees of movement, and even under such large changes the aircraft still would only stall when BD AI did something ridiculous, and doing so meant that in a banked turn the aircraft could reach an AoA of around 10 degrees, instead of the 4 that the design pulls as standard. Now, you don't actually want the control surfaces as big or as moveable as I had made them, as it means that you end up with a lot of drag when turning, but if the wing size was reduced a little then you could set the size and movement of the control surfaces to only a little higher and still get much higher manoeuvrability. Sorry for the wall of text - trying to tweak designs gets me a little excited about all of the options. Hope some of this helps, but feel free to ignore me - I'm no aeronautical engineer. Just a few pictures of my new monoplane design. I'm holding off on entering it just yet, because I want to wait for the new weapon pack and may as well wait until the contest is re-run, but I'm so proud of her sleek lines and she's so much fun to fly that I figured I'd show her off.

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about the 59-16 - I think after having ground through it in WoT I've repressed all knowledge of that thing's existence. And that's awesome, stock bearings have always amazed me, and to fit one in such a little tank and have it all work well is brilliant.

Type 62? She looks great. Given the quality of your Maus and now this, I'd definitely say you should carry on making tanks. Although, of course, it's all about what you enjoy making. Does the turret work? Because that would be amazing.

It'll be much easier for us to help if you give us a craft file. However, just looking at it I would say that the wallowing could be a result of your ailerons being so far above your centre of mass that rolling induces some sideslip. The lack of control is likely to be due to the placement of the control surfaces and the mass. The further your control surfaces are from your centre of mass the more authority they have - yours seem fairly close. Lengthen the plane with a fuselage section and see if it helps. Also, consider where the mass of your aircraft is - the centre of mass does not actually give much indication of where the mass is in the plane, but you can guess by looking at the part weight. The closer to the centre of mass the mass of your aircraft is, the easier it is for your aircraft to turn. As for take-off, I guarantee it'll either be that the wheels are not properly aligned, or that the craft is too heavy, from the look of your plane I'd guess it was the first. Edit: Also, is there any particular reason why your ailerons and, I presume, flaps are such a strange shape? I can't imagine they help aerodynamically.

So like the F9F? That craft was actually the main one I was focussing on, with straight wing and a swept wing variants tested. Needless to say, the straight wing variant would shred the swept wing one almost every time. As for its inspiration, it was really just an amalgamation of a lot of forties and fifties ideas.

I think it's a good idea to clean up and re-run the contest. BD Armoury's update will make the jets much more interesting thanks to the take-off speed options (I'm slightly tired of putting the gear miles back just so the jet doesn't stall while climbing) and having some new models for the guns will really make this competition special. I'm a little sad not to take part in this phase, but oh well. I may as well show off a few of my designs.

Yeah, I've found half of the challenge so far, especially with the jets, is designing the aircraft in a way that forces the AI pilot to not bleed all its energy off. Just a query, for the jet category there is a set minimum weight - are we going by the weight in the Engineer's Report or can we go by KerbEngineer or something else? Because from what I can tell the in-built Engineer's Report doesn't respect altering the mass of a procedural wing. Only according to the in-game report my jet is 3.7t (without armament because the new BD armoury has broken the weapon pack ) but KerbEngineer says that it's 5.1t.

Well I've been tinkering around with a few designs with some success. However, I can't help but notice that in the monoplane category using the D-25 is universally superior to using the PT100. Switching from the PT100 to the D-25 results in a massive increase in thrust to weight that outweighs any disadvantage using the D-25 might have. Edit: I did a little more thorough testing and in 5 battles with two planes that were identical - but for the engine and a few control tweaks to prevent the D-25 equipped plane from snapping its wings - the D-25 comfortably one every single one. In all but one, where it strangely drove off of the runway and slowed down, it reached altitude, turned around, and destroyed the other aircraft before the PT-100 equipped plane had even reached combat altitude.

Now this looks like a competition I can get behind, although I don't know which category to go for... Time to do some experimentation. And just to check, I'm guessing tweakscale is illegal?

Well I may as well make use of a necro to show off a little.

I don't know the exact speeds for modern light commercial jets, but I do know that the pilot's manual for the Spitfire Mk IX recommended an approach speed (on a plane with full fuel but no ammunition) of around 100mph with flaps down. If you assume that the pilot flares the plane lightly before landing, you could maybe say that the touchdown speed would be around 90mph. I would be surprised if modern light jets are landing at the same speed as a low wing-loading propeller aircraft which lacks airbrakes. However, within the realms of KSP, SAS enables you to lower the workable landing speed, so long as you have low enough wing-loading and effective control surfaces. I don't really understand how anybody could have difficulty landing in FAR even at 100m/s, unless you're designing a very unstable craft. Perhaps you should post some pictures of the craft you're trying to land (although I would suggest doing so in the FAR craft repository and not clogging up this thread even more with craft issues). Edit: although given the image you posted up above, I think the best bet for you is to wipe FAR from your game data and reinstall it. I have no idea what you've done, but you've clearly wrecked the viability of the .cfg you're using.

90-100mph is really rather slow when compared to the landing speed of modern, single-engined, jet aircraft.

This isn't even remotely true. If you bring the throttle down then a craft built for FAR can easily drop to, and maintain, below 200 MPH. Edit: Wait, this is for landing? Okay, I'm going to go ahead and say that you aren't giving yourself enough space to land. With a real jet aircraft a short final approach could easily still be 4 or 5 nautical miles, and that's starting from a speed of only around 250MPH. If you consider how tiny Kerbin is, a similar approach on Kerbin is a long way off from the runway.

With swept wing, tailless design where the CoL was directly over the CoM I would imagine it would be stable to some degree, although assuming the elevators were on that wing you would have issues with control. In such a case, the plane would pivot around the combined CoM/L, and with the elevators so close this position the authority of the elevators would be minimal. It is this pivot effect that leads to the typical design of either tail/canard mounted elevators and ailerons mounted toward the tip of the wings; the further the control surfaces are from the CoM/L the more output you gain from your input. With the CoL directly over the CoM, however, you would likely be better off having the control surfaces closer to the CoM/L, as the plane will be very twitchy if the elevators are too far away. I've found with FAR that more than ever you have to consider that lower control can be more beneficial. Most of my planes have only around 8 degrees maximum of elevator deflection, because with more deflection they exceed controllable AoA. Subsonic, however, the issue could easily be the swept wings, as they simply don't offer many bonuses at subsonic speeds over a straight wing.

A very sleek aircraft. I love how unconventional it looks while still looking functional. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/97525-1-0-2-WIP-OPT-Space-Plane-v1-6-9

She looks gorgeous, just like the real thing. I imagine with the wing area she's fairly responsive too, although I'm guessing that taking off is a gentle process.

Pretty much yeah, it started off as a completely original design, but I noticed about half way though that she looked very similar to the Swift. I expect subconsciously I had the Swift in mind all along. She's even as much of a handful as the Swift was said to be at high altitude! I did notice while building it that having wings composed of multiple parts seems to be much less effective, and more prone to stalling, than having a single-part wing. While it does mean that the wing stalls spanwise instead of all in one go, which is more realistic, it also means that devices like dogtooths and wing fences are ineffective. For example, the wing fences on the Snowsquall don't do very much to prevent the inside wing part from stalling, when in reality they would aid the entire surface from the fence to the root. Can anybody else confirm this effect?

Welp, I hadn't thought of that. Thank you very much, it helped out greatly - turns out deep stalling is kind of hard to induce in KSP, and that the wing was stalling. Thanks to that tip, I have managed to make the plane much more flyable. Presenting, the Littlerift System Snowsquall She flies quite well, although sub-200m/s she stalls unless you're using analogue control and not quite pulling all the way back. She's not supersonic, but in some BDarmory dogfights she's been able to hold her own, although the AI's insistence in infinitely looping did lead to an embarrassing defeat at the hands of a little prop-driven monoplane with .50 cals. Most importantly, though, I think she looks beautiful.

Has anybody got any tricks for working out which surfaces are stalling? In oldFAR the colour shading system meant that it was easy to identify where a problem was, but I don't see those options any more. I'm trying to work out whether my main wing is stalling or whether the tailplane is being stalled by the wing. The drag lines in the aerodynamic display do pass into the tail, but I just want to be sure that the tail is stalling before I start messing with a design I really like aesthetically (and given that the tail design is fairly conventional when compared to early Cold War jets I don't see why I can't get it to work).

Hello all. I had an account on this forum a long time ago, but as I've lost that email address and can't access the account (and because KSP is finally released ) I decided that a fresh start might be good. This is what I've been working on for a few days. It's inspired really by attempts I had in 0.90 to use B9 Procedural Wings to create a weapon's bay for fighters. However, due to the way oldFAR worked this was fairly impractical. However, with the new voxel method you don't get wings stalling just because another wing leads onto them in a panel-like way. Anyway... She performs surprisingly well, given that before embarking on this project my more conventional aircraft were rather uninspiring. At transonic speeds at sea level she'll turn while quite tightly, topping out the Gs and maintaining speed. At altitude she'll reach Mach 4 with only little nose dipping. So I suppose she's a kind of interceptor?... I wanted to go with a sealed canopy design, partly because happing a bubble canopy sticking out of the top would ruin the appearance, and also because sealed canopies are cool. This led to a few issues with the earlier designs, where I made the roof of the canopy out of flaps whose spoilers would be activated to open it up. This design, though, made it incredibly difficult to get the Kerbal out of the cockpit, and meant that I had to have a series of ladders, which, again, ruining the aesthetics. So instead, I decided to have the seat descend out of the bottom of the frontal fuselage, which led to a rather sci-fi design that's sure to wow the public at airshows. Her cross-section curves are a little wavy, but I can't think of any ways to improve it particularly without disrupting how she looks. Overall I'm very happy with the initial prototype, and now I'm just working on tweaking things to maximise its potential. I really need to say that FAR is the main thing that keeps me coming back for more KSP. I was more excited for the release of nuFAR than I was for KSP 1.0. The new voxel method is fantastic and very intuitive, and it's certainly opened up whole new possibilities. Now that I know that this construction method works I've got loads of ideas that I want to test out, and I just wanted to float the method with you guys and girls to see if any of you have done anything similar. Thanks.