Nixod321

Hi Well, I really love the mod, so I wrote a basic remotetech cfg for it. It only adds signal processors to the probe cores, for now. https://www.dropbox.com/s/ujuf9fqqnh4ra42/RemoteTech_KNES_Probes.cfg?dl=0 I'm still fairly new to working with KSP so I hope this works ok.

I wrote some Remotetech configs for this mod on 1.10. I can't guarantee they will work in newer versions, or that they are are in any way balanced; but they're fairly human readable, so they shouldn't be hard to balance to your own liking. Put in GameData>Remotetech. I hope Dropbox links are okay: https://www.dropbox.com/s/z6moic522mykscg/RemoteTech_Tantares_Antennas.cfg?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/uvcck2vzpa71uzk/RemoteTech_Tantares_Probes.cfg?dl=0 And of course, thank you Beale for making so much wonderful content! So many probes I had never even heard about growing up in the West.

Is it possible in some way to alter the NACA profile of the wings, or is it locked?

Never thought I'd see Dash 8 love here, haha

I was not aware of this, thank you for informing me. Sorry to @Drew Kerman for the incorrect info. While it is far more complicated I tried to keep it simple and stick with basic, general ideas that can be used to get desired results.

Hey Drew Kerman, It's never a good idea to have an aircraft with no dihedral/anhedral on the main wings. This is because changing the angle of the wings slightly will provide a lot of longitudinal stability. Imagine viewing the aircraft from the side, orthographically (without perspective). With a slight up or down tilt to the wings, you'll notice that the lifting area you can see from the side will increase dramatically. This is because as wing surfaces get more vertical, they act more like rudders/vertical stabilizers. In addition to controlling Yaw, the Rudder also passively helps control Roll. Thus, by increasing the dihedral/anhedral, you can also improve roll stability and yaw stability. Other possibilities: 1) you've accidentally loaded fuel in one wing but not the other 2) you've done something in the editor that caused the other wing's FAR properties to be messed up. 3) the wings are not connected to the fuselage rigidly enough 4) you have a controller plugged into your computer that is providing a constant input that you don't know about 5) I'm not familiar with KAX anymore, do the props generate torque? 6) the physics engine has glitched and a wing mesh is "colliding" with some other mesh on your vehicle, causing it to be slightly out of alignment 7) your wings may be slightly out of alignment with the rest of the craft You have to remember that in KSP, wings are perfectly symmetrical airfoils that produce no lift at 0o AoA. As a result, you get weird properties that in reality you wouldn't experience. It may be that your wings are aligned such that when they are both at 0o AoA, any small disturbance of the vehicle will cause each wing to gain opposite AoA. That's just a theory and I don't know how realistic that is.

You don't need to increase your wingspan, just the winglength; I should have been more clear. I should really of suggested long, highly swept wings, which should give you more lift without the extra drag. You'll also get lower stall speeds than with a delta. Drop tanks could be an idea. It won't be an SSTO, but it could be a better engineering solution. You may have to compromise on wether your design is better at high or low AoA, and wether it has a higher or lower top speed in regards to the position of the center of mass. Those categories are not mutually exclusive, but it can be very difficult to get the best of both worlds.

Shimmying: you could try giving your wings anhedral or dihedral, but that can sometimes get unstable at low AoA at high mach numbers. You could try moving the tail control surfaces back away from the center of mass. Increasing the height of the vertical stabilizer might help, too, as you need larger rudder surfaces at higher speeds. Alternatively, you could double your vertical stabilizer area by having twin tails on the fuselage (a la F-15) or putting them on the wingtips. Your aircraft seems extremely heavy: you must have a crazy high wingloading. Ditch all the weight you can afford; engines, RCS fuel, SAS wheels, etc, and then increase the winglength. If you dump enough mass you can probably use less engines, which will reduce your mass even further, and this give a far better TWR, which in turn will get you out of the atmosphere faster and give you more dV with your rockets. Canards are a crutch that a stable aerodynamic design shouldn't need at low speed. Increasing your winglength will also lower the stall speed. For good hands-off performance, you'll want the center of mass to be nearest the front, so it will fall like a lawndart. I can't say for sure any of that will help without testing it, but that's my two cents.

I just want to say that this mod is wonderful; after four years of KSP I'm very bored of American parts. I think of this very much as a Soviet-themed KW, for all that's worth.

My lovely little Antarctic base:

Gear in 1.1.3 is bugged. What is happening is the early wheels are so weak that even the lightest aircraft will cause them to build up "stress" and lose lateral traction. You can turn off auto friction control and turn it all the way up to max and it will solve the problem, but if you try to steer at all you will spin out wildly. The fixed landing gear do not work at all and cannot be used. The first retractable wheel only works for very small craft. The only way I found to fix it is to either modify the wheels' files and quadruple the stress tolerances, or cheat and get the later models. Both will solve the problem. If you are not running 1.1.3, here are some fixes that I know work from experience: 1) Go into the rotate function in the editor, turn on angle snapping, and drag the rotate wheel a little bit in both planes. The gear should still face the same way, though. This forces the gear to snap exactly into alignment (you should see a little movement when you first rotate the wheel), and may solve your swerving issue. 2) Attach a strut to the gear pieces from a central fuselage piece. 3) make sure your gear are attached as firmly as possible, preferably to a fuselage piece. If the gear flex and change orientation even a little bit it can throw the aircraft into a spin. Beyond that, I can't help. Some designs just do that with no indication as to why and can't be fixed. If you still can't get it to work, just make a new plane.

Generally the modern fast-mover designs like the su-27 and f-14 your aircraft resembles do not have good low speed handling due to the high wing loading (15t/m² is crazy high, even the biggest fighter jets have about 500kg/m2 with full fuel) and the drag inducing vortices formed at high AoA. The swept wings your design exhibits can also induce asymmetric stalls due to tip stalling. Like the user before me said, the wings are hitting the air at different speeds and different angles, causing different boundary layer behavior. Generally in aircraft without swept wings you will see the bases of the wings stall first, before the roots, causing the entire wing to quickly stall in succession.This is why too much AoA in planes like the fw190 (which has big square wings) will cause this sort of stalling problem. This problem can be mitigated by adding wing rakes, fences or vortex generators, to ensure the whole wing stalls evenly but those will limit your performance a bit. You might be able to eliminate this problem with a variable camber wing, as it is what most modern jet fighters use to reduce landing speeds. Play around with replacing both the leading and trailing edges with flaps/flaperons and experiment in using the %AoA function to activate them. You can probably also significantly improve the aircraft's performance in a turn by tapering the wings.

If you want middling speed in FAR you need a F-104 like design. It gives pretty good stability up until Mach 3 and quite good subsonic maneuverability. Alternatively if you like your aircraft less Western the MiG-21 is a very good super-cruising design, but it's fairly squirrely on landing and takeoff like a lot of delta winged designs. A decent third option is making the whole body of the aircraft out of wing and having engine tubes so it looks a lot like a F-15 or Su-27. This will give by far the best high and low speed performance, but it can be very fragile, expensive, and difficult to get right. Alternatively the tight body design of the MiG-31 can be very good but it suffers from the above problems as well as a high part count and stall speed. A final option to consider is using infernal robotics and quantum struts to make a variable geometry wing system. Due to limitations with the flyby-wire system in KSP I've yet to make a particularly FAR compliant design at all speeds that wasn't basically just an overpowered Cessna. Oh, and one more thing: Extensive testing has proved to me that FAR does not model compression lift. Any attempt at building a waverider is pointless. Here's some pics of my solutions: A big F-104 style system as an example: (Testing showed that due to the size of the design the T-tail was less stable than a normal tail)

Here are all of my best and most original aircraft designs so far. It seems that i'll have to give up on this save however, as it is an older version and wow is it laggy. There are about 128 separate aircraft saved in the SPH alone. It takes three minutes just to load the craft list.

Would it be feasible (and not too much of a hassle) to tweak the contracts such that no loading/unloading of Kerbals need take place? Putting lots of Kerbals on EVA/loading in lots of EVA Kerbals tends to crash my modded saves and kill my performance to unplayable levels. It is also a bit tedious on larger aircraft.

To save on weight you could also try adding a slight anhedral that will naturally flex up during high G-loading for better roll authority and droop down in level flight for better stability. It seems to work pretty well for fast-mover designs, it made my Mig-25 lookalike really nimble.

Here's a couple designs that make use of procedural wings: B-900C (Cargo variant of the Kercel K-900): Equipped with retrorockets because something about my install means there is practically no drag on aircraft. X-33b: A small scale flying wing test with airbrakes as yaw control (so it is a true flying wing). Surprisingly stable until it makes a major course change due to high yaw instability thanks to the way SAS works. It proved too difficult to fix, so the concept of building a true flying wing in KSP has been abandoned for now.

Is there something I can edit to make it separate from both sides?

It's not big, but I really liked the aesthetics of this starter station:

Sorry, it's late, I'm tired and I'm mistakenly offering advice where it's not needed. I'm glad to see you've hit upon a design that works well, I may have to try it out myself.

Nice! Short, straight wings are actually better for high supersonic ranges, as the X-15's stubby little things proved. Either that or model it after a doorstopper. Air gets weird when you go that fast.

I'll contribute some pics, all from various versions of the game and using various types of procedural parts because I like fine-tuning my aerodynamics: Mixed-propulsion Helicopter: Flies like a dream, speedy too. Hyperliner: The most finicky design I've ever made, the sideslip values refused to turn out nicely. But hey, at least it cruises at Mach 3.4 at 2,000m ASL. My cheerful little career starter biplane: A wonderful flyout for less than 30 parts. Another Career starter Biplane: Great for long range flights; it literally flies itself with a bit of pitch trimming. Pictured here transporting a passenger across the ocean to the desert. Simple Domestic Airliner: Bit ugly, but it gets the job done and is one of the more unique aircraft I've built. The engine at the back is tilted upwards about 20 degrees to prevent prop strike.

Strict area ruling.

Without Spike: With Spike:

So, after reading about real world aerospikes on Wikipedia, I decided to give it a go in FAR. Basically, they work like this: "A drag-reducing aerospike is a device used to reduce the forebody pressure aerodynamic drag of blunt bodies at supersonic speeds. The aerospike creates a detached shock ahead of the body. Between the shock and the forebody a zone of recirculating flow occurs which acts like a more streamlined forebody profile, reducing the drag." Which is a fancy way of saying that it spreads the shock wave cone out so the air hitting the rocket body is slower. ^Real world, on a Trident I missile. So, do they work with FAR? As far as I've tested, they seem to. I'm not sure whether it's some other effect created by FAR or it's the real deal, I'm not sure how well FAR models shock waves as this was part of my testing. The test involved two nearly identical craft, one with the aerospike, one without. I'm playing with some of the settings tweaked to be a bit harder (greater transonic drag, strict area ruling) so the default results might be different. The nosecones were built with the Procedural parts mod, but they are fully FAR compatible. They were both launched straight up at full throttle with SAS engaged until their fuel ran out to get them to experience as many mach numbers as possible. Once the engine cut, I hit F3 and recorded the maximum speed: Aerospike testbed: avg Max speed across 5 launches: 2,000m/s Non-aerospike testbed: avg Max speed across 5 launches: 1,800m/s This obviously isn't extensive testing, so I highly encourage other FAR users to give this a go themselves. Further notes: The Aerospike testbed also resisted shock heating far better than the Non-aerospike testbed, whose nose cone exploded several times from overheating. The Aerospike model suffered extreme heating only on the top plate of the Aerospike itself, with minor heating on the cone piece. This indicates to me that the airflow hitting the cone piece has been reduced in velocity. Additionally, the Aerospike testbed had marginally greater stability at high Mach numbers when compared to the Non-aerospike model. To me this indicates the effect of the SAS's over corrections is diminished by reducing the supersonic flow over the winglets; but I'm not entirely sure how valid that conclusion is.