TheHengeProphet

The current version seems to work quite well, for me; however, I am very much wanting for the AI to handle engine mode switching on its own.

Awesome! That new cockpit looks pretty neat. I'm wondering how it'll fare in FAR.

I don't know if anybody mentioned this, but the CoM on the Eagle cockpit is unusually far back.

It's impressive how drastically different wave drag area can be between Moderate Area Ruling and Strict Area Ruling. A plane that was below 0.3m2 became .75m2. I'm still trying to get a handle on getting the AI to work reasonably with the panther without restricting the gimbal range significantly.

That stock-alike texture is amazing. I'm glad you decided to integrate the radar, which will help shave part count. Beautiful work!

Really, without the stealth capabilities, it's just a gen 4.5 fighter. And if someone did have a stealth cruise missile, do you really think they'd let that info get out? Apart from incidents like Putin's dirty nuke torpedo, I expect that stuff is pretty well under wraps if it does exist.

I would very much love to see this with stock textures as I'm not the biggest fan of B9's look, but I'm looking forward to this either way.

[quote name='Robet.G']The rules reads like this to me: "must look exactly like an F-16 or it doesn't count"[/QUOTE] To be fair, we can't even build what is technically a Gen 5 fighter, seeing as we have no way of determining stealth capability. More-over, most Gen 5 fighters can't compete with proper Gen 4 or 4.5 aerobatic/dogfighting capabilities, to my knowledge. The fighters really don't have to look like an F-16, but it is a good standard for capabilities. So far, my best fighter's basic design is based on an aerodynamics experiment to test a prior glitch in FAR, which was roughly based on the F-16. However, it only really looks like one in passing and is much more like an F-20, I guess. That makes it a poor example, really; however, my old MRF-4 is still capable of achieving the applicable goals for qualification and looks nothing like an F-16. I'm happy to say that the Devil Ray is still viable with the engine swap, albeit slightly less aerodynamic with a wave drag area of about .4 now. It appears to have slightly better control capabilities, which is to be expected (still not the best dogfighter), but it is able to supercruise at roughly mach 2.01 when full. I've been letting the plane fly on its own for the past half hour while I do other things, and it's range seems quite impressive. It seems to cap at about mach 2.88 with afterburners at high altitude, but have not tested its low altitude max speed. End of test result: Maximum ferry range is approximately 2000km.

I have been having trouble replicating it myself. Thanks for trying! This is clearly an odd glitch, so I'll have to figure out exact repro steps. Also, the latest FAR ("Helmholtz") seems to have resolved the CoL marker issue. I'm back to developing the Spite and its unnamed sister plane into worthy death machines. The thrust vectoring really adds a whole element I never really considered in the original design, so the previously "unstallable" planes will now do so... It's not hard to adjust their AoA values higher, but then they don't change vector as well.

I'm going to take rule 9 very literally: The aircraft must not weigh less than 10 tons at takeoff with a full combat load. So long as you load it up with enough munitions to weigh 10t and still be able to take off and fight with it, it should be fine. I still don't exactly approve of the rule, hence why I built the spite in the first place. [edit] I may well be running into glitches as far as the afterburner goes, but it's practically impossible to tell considering air is no longer a visible resource... Starting at low altitude and staying at low altitude, the afterburner works fine, but if I go to high altitude where the engine starts to lose power from lack of air, if I switch to afterburner I actually lose thrust, and this loss of thrust seems permanent, considering I dropped back down to near sea level and was not able to return proper functionality to the engine. Anybody else able to replicate this? I want to make sure this is actually not just happening to me before I try to report it.

This is precisely why I asked BahamutoD for a minimum speed setting. It would be wonderful if there was something which allowed specific control settings for gimbal, because I very much need to disable yaw in order to make the Spite even usable with gimbal enabled. On the bright side, the spite is much lighter now due to the lighter engine, weighing in at 8.6t! Its sister plane now weighs as much as the old Spite at 9.2t and can sustain much higher G loads. Still needing to determine which is actually better, because I'm not sure the AI even really understands at this point.

Seems to work just fine with 1.0.5+, at least the cockpits do anyways. Also seems to work fine with the latest FAR as well, so that's a plus.

@CrisK That's awesome! I thought about making a plane which largely uses the thrust vectoring for yaw stability, but looks like I was beaten to it! True that the CoL indicator is broken, but I've just been having a lot of problems where now my planes are no longer stable, so I'm going to wait a bit for any patchwork to happen. I know ferram4 does not like the CoL indicator, but trying to recalculate the stability derivatives after every minor adjustment is a nightmare. The indicator used to be great for getting a ballpark estimate allowing for further adjustment from there. There are more issues I have with 1.0.5, as well. The panther, for example, is a nightmare on single-engine designs, seeing as it forces full yaw on attempted roll maneuvers if the engine is even remotely out of line with the center of mass. Yes, I can disable gimbal, but that kind of defeats the point of the engine.

I'm actually having a lot of problems with FAR placing my center of lift ridiculously far forward, and I can't figure out why it's doing it, but I'm just sure I'm doing something wrong...

I have a single engine design which has a slightly below center CoM. For some reason, this gives cause for the panther to full yaw when trying to roll, which in turn makes it actually very difficult to roll at all. Short of making sure the CoM is directly in line with the CoT, is there any way I can get it to not do this? Other than turning off gimbal completely, that is.