Mignear

I had reinstalled KSP and lost pretty much all my old screenshots, but digging into my imgur account(which does have some old screenshots) I present to you this. Flight test of one of my aircraft.

Well, I reinstalled KSP after a long time, and its a good thing Steam Cloud has my old save. Made a deployable refueling port on one of my aircraft as a refresher.

Did some tests to find the sweet spot for the RPM and the means to control the RPM. Main throttle works well. Next a simple hinge system, I chose a simple hinge system as it would be easier to troubleshoot any issues with the VTOL engine. Has the added bonus of being a half decent bomb bay if the VTOL system is removed. Slight adjustment to CoL via hiding some control surfaces inside the plane, and its kind of done.

Its about 8 tons right now, takes off vertically decently quick so I think I should have a bit of leeway in adding weight to it. Its really just the wing design and the cover for the VTOL system that I'm missing on it right now.

A working VTOL unit on a temporary mockup of a F-35 replica of sorts. Will have to decide if I want to go for a simple hinge system for the lifting fan or follow the F-35 closely, but the VTOL aspects needs more work, namely, being able to land the damn thing entirely with VTOL.

Slight tweak to the wings. Still feels off though.

Well, proof of concept with the testcraft works.

Something came to my mind recently, will have to experiment more on my test craft, but its pretty promising for an idea I have. It actually works pretty well to control the aircraft, but unfortunately linking the rotors to the roll axis doesn't let SAS use them to stabilise the aircraft so some control surfaces tied to roll will be needed.

I turned on autostrut on the hinges for my F-14 replica and it works pretty well, though it has a tendency to spawn with the wings stuck due to the autostrutting, restarting the launch fixes this.

From what I remember, the only difference was that the rear rotor was facing backwards with a clockwise rotation(functionally the same as a forward facing rotor set to anti-clockwise). The blades were the default angles(100 authority) except I used the anti-clockwise variant of the blades. Both rotors were set to max RPM and torque. Its unfortunate that the plane in the pictures were an early build that got overwritten with other changes to the rotor blades as I figured things out so we couldn't find out what was going on. I'm quite certain the default angle of the anti-clockwise variant of the blades is different from the default angle of the clockwise variant of the blades, resulting in different top speeds when independently testing the each rotor. When we exceeded the rear rotor's top speed(due to the front rotor having a higher top speed), it started producing negative thrust which is what we see in the pictures. That is the same conclusion I came to during my testing, though I was doing it for another reason, having 1 rotor performing well at low speed and the other rotor performing well at high speed so that acceleration and top speed can be somewhat tuned on a fixed pitch contra-rotating prop setup.

Pretty good. Something I'd add is colored buttons, for things that are toggled on/off, you could have green and red for the button.

The ability for turboshafts to generate electric charge. After all, its an engine that spins a shaft by using fuel, why would it not have an alternator?

A hybrid design seems pretty promising for heavier designs that might want to use turboshafts, so long as you don't intend to balance the rotational torque using another different rotor. Its a shame the turboshaft doesn't generate power.

The turboshaft version, with its full load of fuel, ended up being twice the weight of the electric variant. This introduced the problem of the plane exploding instantly when it touches the runway a little hard on the landing approach. I also went with 4 turboshafts as opposed to the 8 electric rotors on the electric variant, but compensated by giving them 8 propeller blades per rotor instead of 4. Maybe a hybrid might work better.

The joints do work in flight, though putting wings onto the joints means the aero effects on the wings will cause the joints to flex during flight, especially when turning.

More or less completed this, could make the effort to mess with the propeller blade angles for better speed but eh, its in satisfactory range for now. Will work on a turboshaft version for this.

Now that I kind of figured out how to make functional props with my 6 ton Stuka, time for a heavier design.

Can anyone explain what is happening as the speed of the aircraft changes? I have a contra-rotating prop plane and its behaving weirdly. During takeoff, both propellers produce forward thrust. However, at the top speed of around 117 m/s the rear propeller produces backwards thrust On independent testing of the rear propeller, a similar effect happens. It produces forward thrust(and maxes out at the lower top speed of around 104 m/s as opposed to the 117m/s of the whole setup), when I force it to go beyond 104 m/s by diving the rear propeller loses all thrust. On the same test on the front propeller, the same thing happens but at a different max speed. Am I right to presume that the thrust vector flips when you exceed the "top speed" of the propeller? Is there any way to counteract this effect?

Stuka!

Looks great. The wings is the part of the F-4 that I encounter problems with getting it right proportionately, and it looks like you got the wings right.

Guntank?

Adding some drop tanks on it, and slight fix to the airbrakes so it doesn't send the plane flying upwards when you deploy them. Its interesting how the hinges just bug out at times though, I have the hinges autostrutted to heaviest part to keep the wings from flexing too much when flying, but sometimes only one wing will move and the other will be stuck, or both would be stuck. Reverting to launch fixes it though.

Well, my attempt to figure out propellers on my own finally got some results. Still very wobbly though. Plane itself could be better designed but for now it works.

Something that is simpler and incorporates only a single part from the DLC. https://kerbalx.com/Mignear/F-14-Replica-GA-14VSW

Wanted to see if the rotors would make for an effective way to get something rolling on the ground with a decent speed. Currently tops out at about 30m/s. Perhaps the small cubic struts would work better as the "tires", and maybe additional rotor-wheels. The bouncing of the vehicle from the rotor-wheel interaction with the ground affects the performance as well, I had to hold down the W key to keep the nose down.