Forward-swept wings

[occ]

I have been experimenting with the concept of forward-swept wings on space planes in combination with FAR. The idea is that this would cause the airflow to spill off toward the center of the craft instead of off of the wingtips, like with most aircraft. Does anyone have any thoughts?

[Kozak]

I've used this technique in stock, it works well.

As for FAR, no idea how it'd work

[occ]

My current problem is that my spaceplane's pitch keeps fluctuating wildly. I can barely get it off the runway before it crashes.

[Van Disaster]

I'm fairly sure FAR doesn't model spanwise flow at the moment - a lot of the other forward sweep advantages are there though, and given how strong KSP materials are & how it doesn't do aeroelastic divergence, it's worth the attempt. Especially if you hang engines on the end...

[Hodo]

It does work in FAR.

This is one I built last year.

It worked fine actually.

The trick was trying to balance the CoL where it should be in relation to the CoM, and maintain control of the craft at supersonic speeds.

[Goddess Bhavani]

For superior supersonic stability and to shift CoL forwards against Mach effects I created a variable geometry forward swept wing design here:

[eddiew]

FAR has no problems with forward swept wings, as long as you can keep the CoM vs CoL in balance Generally requires a long fuselage; short and stubby tends to require a rearwards sweep.

[Hodo]

I was messing around today and made this... it isnt your typical canard using forward sweep wing design.

Different version there.

And showing its low take off speed.

And just before the turbojet shutdown.

It is an SSTO.

[daltonater]

On 4/7/2015 at 5:35 PM, occ said:

My current problem is that my spaceplane's pitch keeps fluctuating wildly. I can barely get it off the runway before it crashes.

I also had this issue in stock. My solution was to have both canards and tail controls, but to inverse one of them. Which ever one is inverse also needs to have the pitch limit set lower then the non inverse one (I had the canards at 100% standard, and the tail at 50% inverse). This helped smooth out the pitch issues for me.