[Who needs a level runway anyway?]

4 hours ago, Rybikson said:

[...] the nose up and touching rear wheels first, using the last drip of UPforce[...]

I wonder if you don't want to understand or if you simply can't.

Of course they land with the nose up. As I said the lift is not only determinated by wing shape and size, but also by wind speed and angle of attack.

Increasing the angle of attack (without stalling) means more lift with same speed. Or same lift by less speed. It also increases drag and help reducing speed.

But if your front wheel is further down ... that means your nose is up when all wheels are touching, means you have a higher angle of attack from the get go, means if you land that way your speed is also almost enough to lift you off the runway, but that is not want you want.

Once the back wheels are touching you want to decrease the angle of attack (aka bring the nose to level) to reduce lift drastically the increased weight now presses the wheels down enough that you are able to use breaks ... which you can't if you have a low front wheel. To get then the same effect you need to push your nose "down" after all wheels made contact.

It might be that you get away with this kind of construct in KSP, but you won't in RL.

Also you can see in your video that they all come down nose first, then close to the runway they pull the nose up reducing vertical speed almost to zero, and also reducing horizontal speed in process, then (after contact) lowering the nose to get full grip of the gear.

[Who needs a level runway anyway?]

7 hours ago, Rybikson said:

[...]

That is utter and total BS and Alshain done well to call you out on this.

The lift is determinated by the shape, size, angle of attack, and wind speed (aka. speed of the plane in KSP ... because there is no wind... in RL that would be the wind speed + speed of plane) over the wing.

If your lift is smaller than your mass (aka. total down force) you have a effective down force that makes your plane sink.
Having a down force doesn't mean that your plane has to smash into the ground with several times its own mass. (Where did you get your number from btw? Did you pull them out of a Klingon south end? The lower one I mean)

Only pointing your wings (and or engines) down creates additional down force since your lift the doesn't point upwards anymore.

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I design my planes with very level gears. If any only a few degrees (1-2) upwards (and an aileron at the nose to give additional control). The front gear as much forward as possible and the back gear just behind all CoM (CoM and dCoM) which gives me enough force to lift the nose or press it to the ground if I need to. (the latter if I am coming in hot)

But I am a really bad pilot ... and it has shown that a girder (they can take quite a punch) under the tail can be a real life saver in case I pull up too much (when launching) or my angle of attack is just a little too high when landing (you don't know how many engines / tails I lost with stock planes)... Though, on my last high speed plane I added a set of level 1 front wheel ... looks rather funny)

Since I also tend to fat finger keys in high stress situation ... I usually add a set of "training" wheels under the wingtips (also helps with bumpy terrain). Since my last plane needed the ability to go over 19km ... top height is ~22km (before my engines run out of air) I need to add in an extra pod to the wingtips ... which now carry my training wheels ... (I call them training wheel, cause in normal conditions they don't touch the ground ... only when things go south they prevent important parts to kiss the ground) but in this case they are lower than usual and almost touch the ground.

[Opt-in Prerelease for 1.1!]

I wanna be in. I wanna be part in the next step beta test. Can't wait for it...

I know I wasn't that active here lately but I lost my PW ... and I come here mostly for gathering information.

BTW: I already have some suggestions for improvements for 1.1.

1. Make sure pinned windows stay persistent even if switched to map view temporarily (pinned window goes away when going to map, but comes back when switching back).
2. Would be cool if I additionally could pin them in a way so that they stay on screen even when switching to map mode (e.g. for thrust limiting while in map mode)
3. Really cool would be if the pinned state would be saved, and next time I switch to that vessel it goes where I last placed it.