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Showing results for tags 'tailstrike'.
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I have a plane with the following main body, from nose to aft: Mk1 cockpit Mk1 LF tank Three material bays 1.25m service bay Radially attached to this are two Mk0 tanks with an intake and a Juno each. Rounded nosecone The problem with this setup is that if the Mk1 fuel tank is at the rear, the CoM moves forward a lot as the fuel is used up, which makes parachute positioning tricky (aside from the fact that I never build a single plane without enough chutes to come back down safely, the plane has the starting landing gears and is already overweight as it is, so the gears explode instantly if I try to land normally). So I put the tank in the front which stabilized the CoM, but now I have a different problem: the CoM is so far ahead in the front that if I put the rear landing gear near enough to it for the plane to even take off (if so, it takes off at ~87 m/s), the plane becomes impossible to land with parachutes when the tanks are full because even though it noses down while hanging from the chutes, the moment the front wheel touches ground, the plane's rear whips down and tailstrikes hard enough to destroy the rearmost material bay. So then. Depending on where I put the wheels, either I can't even take off or I can take off but need to fly for at least an hour before I can parachute down without breaking anything. For visual reference, this is the plane in question: The CoM is in the Mk1 fuel tank just behind the cockpit, both when full and when empty; the rear landing gear is attached to the material bay immediately behind the fuel tank because, again, putting it any more backwards makes the plane unable to take off. Fuel transfers from the Mk0 tanks at the rear cause negligible CoM movement.
