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Showing results for tags 'airplane design'.
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I learned a lot from my recent forum post of Guidelines for Space Stations and thought I might transition into another area. Since airplanes have long been one of the more difficult designs in KSP, it seemed a natural choice. So let's develop some guidelines for building an airplane. But let me make clear the purpose of this discussion. This is not meant to be a tutorial on plane design. There are plenty of YouTube videos out there that do a wonderful job explaining how build a plane (especially those by Scott Manley). The purpose is to develop guidelines to optimize an airplane design. op·ti·mize verb make the best or most effective use of (a situation, opportunity, or resource). So what do you do to make your plane the best it can be? Because airplanes may be designed to do different things, I would ask posters to state what they intend their guideline to help a plane do. For example, a plane designed for speed would look very different from an airplane designed for high altitude. If you share an example of your design, please include the usual info: mods, part count, speed, altitude, endurance, etc... While I am not exactly a noob when it comes to plane design in KSP, I must admit I spend most of my time with rockets and probes, so it is not a personal strength. But I'll try to get things started with a few guidelines of my own. For high speed: 1) Keep your thrust-to-weight ratio high. 2) Your aircraft will generate a lot of heat from friction, so you will need to include parts that radiate large amounts of heat (engines, wings, pre-coolers, and radiator panels). If you want to know how well a part cools, look in the .cfg file for " emissiveConstant = 0.95" 3) Small wings = less drag. 4) Make sure your parts have a high temperature tolerance (internal & external)
