Halsfury

@TheHengeProphet that's really funny, and the AI doesn't really get the picture I don't think. I've designed the F-18 to be an american fighter, what that means is that it is a pure energy fighter. The work I did on it with the V2 version was mainly just to improve low speed manoeuvrability with an eye to increasing a pilot's options but by no means does it change the reality of the design and how it's supposed to fight. Based on what you're saying the AI doesn't really know what it's supposed to be doing, and is seemingly stuck by it's own limited parameters and is unable to recognize a dogfight as more than flying in circles at a set altitude. Maybe you should overcome this by giving both planes the same altitude advantage in back to back fights, with both designs taking turns holding off a higher altitude aggressor. Also the HA-300 coming out on top would make sense if everyone turned in a circle together with no real tactical understanding

I hadn't realized that BD armoury got updated! I was running 0.8.7 lol Man If this gets any better then it's almost like KSP would become a copy of falcon 4, Here's my official updated BD armoury F/A-18J Note the underside has an ECM jammer, and the front has been taken off in favour of the new radar dome part (looks the same as it did, I don't compromise on looks) Also a couple of chaff holders near the back complete it in terms of defensive measures and I fit another missile under the wing, this time 2 maverick A to G missiles

Well it would really be a touch since it's only 64 parts without armament and tanks. How are you finding my second version? I think it's a winner, turn time has been greatly reduced and it's way more forgiving. It never used to be able to buzz the tower and VAB at less than 200m/s and slide through the air in high alpha turns close to the ground. It had a very nasty stall with something like a 5 second recovery time, now it's a lot nicer

It's a great design I agree, I don't want to download the mods to support it, but I'm thinking I might just install them just to fly it

Yes the hornet's engines are truly redundant as on the real thing. Were you facing off against the old version? my advice is that speeds should be kept up so give the AI a 270m/s maximum speed for low altitude (up to 5000m) and crank it up to 320m/s for high altitude dogfighting. It will break itself if you allow the AI to operate it in high dynamic pressure modes. _______________________ Also I have no way of doing much in terms of changing the endurance rules. And the drop tanks being partially empty by the time you reach altitude is ok, the primary reason for the test is to determine how tolerant the aircraft is of having that extra skin friction and wave drag associated with the drop tanks. The weight mainly impacts acceleration and climb rate which are considerations for a real aircraft. The rules are rather threadbare but altering them except to ask that you don't subtract any fuel from your aircraft would be difficult since there are so many submissions scattered across so many pages that I would have to go back and fix each one. It would be bloody nice if FAR calculated flight time based on actual fuel in the tank, maybe the solution is simply to ask for delta V readouts and calculate the flight time based on the mass flow rate of the engines at super cruise! _______________________________ EDIT: actually I think that from now on it's best if you do use the mass flow rate and the delta V or the reported amount of fuel to determine flight time That actually is quite sound and works just fine with the current rules According to the resources screen, with 1/3rd throttle (super cruise setting) the 2 turbojets on the hornet eat through 0.19 litres per second. Not including ballast fuel (160 litres) there is 1,016 litres of liquid fuel on board at takeoff 1,016 divided by 0.19 = 5,347.4 seconds 5,347.4 divided by 60 divided once ageing by 60 equals 1.4854 hours or 89 minutes at cruise

I know it's an addiction, late in the evening has the connotation of 1 in the morning for me when it comes to KSP In other news I've been updating the Hornet design to be more forgiving and generally widen the flight envelope. I extended the wing length by half a foot or so on each side with a D type wing connector in a very clever way, instead of attaching the wing to the connector I used the translation tool to move the wing out as far as I could, then I stuck the D type wing panel to the inside of the wing to close the gap. I moved the wing lower by a few inches and raised the elevons up, the reason for this is to keep the elevons out of the wing's wind shadow (which I theorized was the reason for the high alpha stall which occurred frequently at low speeds), And I swapped in a bigger elevon instead of the stander canard which changes the look a bit but it has been more stable at those low speeds. Also I had a big design fail trying to attach super manoeuvre canards to the front of the hornet. So the design went from this: To this: Nearly imperceptible but Ferram "Goldstein" knows... Here it is so you can compare the two http://www./download/3k7c5f0e5647nbq/FAR_BD_FA-18J_Super_Hornet_V2.craft

Actually Darth I take that back about the F-18 being done, I figured out how to increase the wing length and I am still working on reducing wing loading. On the bright side I stopped the aeroelastic wobble of death which could occur before. performance is going up, and I think that I could make this the BD armoury craft to beat with more tweaking

It's all about catering to KSP. The rules are supposed to encourage certain choices to limit the weight and flight envelope. A 100% throttle turbojet is too much, it often ruins airframes when the throttle is held open and produces speeds which are too fast to even compare with real world jets. In KSP it's just excessive unless you're going to build an SR-71. As for drop tanks, they do extend the range of a fighter so having the capability is important, they tend to take a backseat with the BD armoury version of the challenge, when not using BD armoury they are a means of determining how much armament is possible for a design, even though weapons systems themselves have other constraints like where to put them all. Also the operational time rule is just based on the FAR data screen so it's not that accurate but gives an indication of how viable a fighter it is. 5th gen fighters are multirole so time in the air is a great indicator of operational effectiveness. EDIT: I'll add you're plane to the leaderboard - - - Updated - - - Nice it's not easy to hit mach 2 with the basic jet, what's the score on it?

I think the only issue with the F-18 now is how the rear fuselage is attached to the forward fuselage, it's a little scary to see all that flex even though it has never caused a crash in combat. Also at high speeds and altitudes making aggressive turns induces huge shear loads which when coupled with the inherent size and number of parts of the aircraft make things want to fall apart. If there were any way to tighten up all those joints it would be a much better fighter than the F-32 all the way to 20km

As promised, here's my final revision of the F/A-18 with drop tanks. I can't really decide whether I like this or the F-32 Hurricane more http://www./download/5n9sl3tatxph3ni/FAR_BD_FA-18_Super_Hornet.craft The only difference from the pic is the nose is tilted downwards like the real thing and there's a probe core in the hump behind the cockpit mods: BD armoury, adjustable landing gear

So I finally finished the F/A-18 build on my end darth, I'll post the craft file friday Here's the synopsis of it's performance against my F-32 Hurricane which is itself modelled after the latest sukhoi's versus They are actually similar in a high speed turn but the Hornet is very weak below 200m/s, the best moves for the Hornet are displacement maneuvers which trade speed for altitude and help widen the gap between the Hornet and the faster turning plane, this makes pulling lead easier. If this fails and you fear that your opponent is beating you in the turn, you can just pull up and use your superior climb, this is risky however because it's easy for your opponent to shoot at you as you flee in an upwards direction. From a position of higher altitude the Hornet is a deadly foe since it has such a great power to weight ratio that it will always recover quickly to altitude. It's not recommended that a Hornet pilot aim for the sky at low speed because even if the power to weight ratio exceeds 1:1 it won't be by enough to make a speedy escape. Even so it's possible and recommended if you get in a jam. The bad news about the hornet is that it suffers from aeroelasticity at moderately high dynamic pressures. This means that if you are in a dive, at a certain amount of dynamic pressure equivalent to mach 1.7 at 2000m most control inputs will do absolutely nothing, even the elevator controls will just make the airframe bop up and down and maybe move a little the way you want to go. in this phase of flight using the air brakes is really not recommended since they are very large and when exposed to more pressure than they can handle, will part company with the airframe and take large and important things with them.

Oh it's like a nato reporting name? some of those are quite offbeat I'll add both names

You should have chosen the battle of Britain theme song! Also tetryds, did I invent a new KSP pastime of building warbirds? awesome I like your addition of air battles

I just can't remember all the pages and the stuff in them, or I haven't even checked, I like the tiny one, it looks like suicide to fly it but did it really land? I'll add the scores no problem

Hello! I'll be back soon when my vacation begins, I've still been flying and tweaking Darth's F/A-18 hornet and have found that it starts to become aeroelastic at 900mph EAS, so I will be tweaking it so it can make use of more speed at low altitude. Already I think this challenge has produced fighters equal to some of the best real world aircraft, and Crisk that's amazing Gnullbegg, I'll add your score is the plane really called the goatsucker?

Since we're on the topic of energy fighter versus manoeuvrability versus boom and zoom/spray and pray I want to weigh in to say that at most times combat victories happen without the victim even registering a threat, therefore one should think of a fighter as a hunter with merely the difference being that the prey can fight back. A very successful fighter therefore needs speed and manoeuvrability (the former for hunting and the latter to avoid becoming the hunted) and in terms of manoeuvrability there is a choice; either maximize low energy manoeuvre, or maximize high energy manoeuvre. maximizing high energy manoeuvre at the expense of low energy ability is often chosen since high energy manoeuvre can be integrated into an offensive strategy more easily, however low speed manoeuvre can be used to "energy trap" fighters in an attacking position by goading the faster fighter into tight turns by presenting false opportunities. Basically there's no right answer to how to build a fighter, only a right answer to how to use one to advantage.

I'm back, still have a lot of work so I'll be in and out over the next little while updating the main page as I go.

That's awesome crisk, that has to be the most convincing KSP creation ever.

I know it could get to mach 5 if I just turned the thrust limiter off! Nope... Look at Jeb, only time he's ever been caught looking concerned...

Cool! EDIT: This makes basic jet entries much easier. Also Darth, I shortened the rear fuselage of the hornet myself and it handles even better, I think before the length of the fuselage was too effective as a lever and was constantly causing stalls, now it tracks like an arrow

Yeah when I said V tail I was talking about something like scoundrel's pic It really becomes a problem because having only 2 control surfaces like that does give lower drag but they each have more strain placed on them since they have to deflect more to achieve the same result as a traditional elevator. As you approach the speed of sound and pressure drag starts to be an issue, and aerodynamic pressure scales up, the more likely that inputs will cause flex in the structure. This might lead to a stiffening of controls (which can be fatal) or the total catastrophic failure of the elevator and stabilizer assembly (which is invariably fatal) the YF-22 doesn't have a V tail it just has 2 vertical stabilizers, this distributes the load adequately for a mach 2 capable jet. Also @ Scoundrel, I'll consider that but I wouldn't discount super manoeuvre as unimportant, in fact for all that stuff about thrust vectoring sidewinders, there is no doubt always going to be a good counter measure. A fighter can't live by it's machine guns in a modern world but unlike a missile the guidance for a bullet can be done internally and can't be tampered with. This plus the fact that there is a long history of people going back to 1918 saying "dogfighting would be a thing of the past if aircraft reach speeds of just X mph" or "long range missiles will end dogfighting" or missiles with thrust vectoring. Basically nobody knows what 5th generation combat really looks like so many approaches should be rewarded so long as they fall within certain speed requirements. Also I don't want to limit participants

Well maybe if they played KSP they wouldn't have made such a mistake with building the avrocar. Even though disk shaped craft are cool it's sufficient to know that at this time humans haven't figured out how to control enough energy to make them worthwhile, except when re-entering the atmosphere. The avrocar was an oddity because it was thought up by people during the cold war who thought that the spate of UFO incidents at the time might be Russian The avrocar was the predecessor to modern hovercrafts so it was sort of a disguised breakthrough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar#Design_and_development Also V tails are bad for aircraft which have to travel above something like mach 0.7 due to the increased aerodynamic pressure. They have only one failure mode, and that's where it all comes unglued and the remainder of the airframe enters an unrecoverable flat spin. 2 vertical stabilizers are optional, they are mainly used because the centre of pressure at high mach speeds starts to shift forwards until the aircraft swaps ends (and then likely explodes). To counteract this 2 stabilizers might be prudent

Yeah basically I took a lot of fuel out and redistributed it as part of the wing change

I rarely use that feature but what you want to see is a nice smooth sine wave on those graphs with slowly decreasing amplitude (decreasing height of wave) This indicates that the airplane will eventually return to level flight after a control input, wind gust, or stall, the yellow line I believe in those graphs represents the angle of attack of the aircraft at various points in time after the disturbance (whatever values you set), and it's absolutely vital that whichever graph line which says AoA has this sine wave look to it Other than that it's math spaghetti as far as I'm concerned and you can often intuit a good subsonic design, As I've said before the aircraft must have a solid subsonic foundation before you start to mess around This is what happens if you try to build a hypersonic/high supersonic airframe and then try and find a way to control it in subsonic flight. Nature it seems always frowns on the idea of taking the last step in a journey first

Well, are you talking about the wave drag graphs or the lateral/longitudinal simulator functions? I never build by looking at the simulators other than to check that the parameters are green or white, most of the numbers it gives you about pitch, roll and yaw rates etc should be negative, when they are, they'll show up green which means that the aircraft will return to level flight after any control inputs. This means it's stable and that you're good to go, also try testing it at different altitudes and speeds to see if you have a winner or not. If you're talking about how to read the wave drag, cross sectional area, and pressure graphs however it's very simple. A rocket should generally have a green graph which diverges and then stays as constant as possible all the way to the bottom of the rocket, this kind of profile is consistent with serial staged rockets and is very efficient more or less. Aircraft are a little harder since they have plenty of protrusions. Basically there's not really a perfect answer but it's more a compromise, ideally the green curve should ascend to a point somewhere in the middle of the airplane and then taper off towards the rear, the yellow line (measuring change in cross section) should be wavy but pretty flat, and the blue pressure curve should spike at the nose and as little as possible everywhere else.