FAR help with flaps.

[Solar71]

Hi guys.

It seems that FAR turns your airplanes into near frictionless machines. So now I need help slowing down to land.

Someone was nice enough to suggest creating flaps out of control surfaces. Good idea I think. So I did it.

But I try to assign flaps to my alpha1 action group. It works fine. But in flight when I try to activate said flaps I hit the 1 key and nothing happens.

Yes I have right clicked the control surfaces and told them to be flaps.

I checked both and be flaps is enabled. What am I missing ?

Thanks

[Hodo]

Hi guys.

It seems that FAR turns your airplanes into near frictionless machines. So now I need help slowing down to land.

Someone was nice enough to suggest creating flaps out of control surfaces. Good idea I think. So I did it.

But I try to assign flaps to my alpha1 action group. It works fine. But in flight when I try to activate said flaps I hit the 1 key and nothing happens.

Yes I have right clicked the control surfaces and told them to be flaps.

I checked both and be flaps is enabled. What am I missing ?

Thanks

Its actually it does quite the opposite. And flaps wont help you slow down, flaps just help keep the wing from stalling at a low speed.

EDIT- As for your action group setting, you have to set them up to raise on one action group and to lower on another action group. They start in full deployment.

What you need are spoilers or air brakes.

In your FAR control surface editor in the SPH choose the option for spoiler and increase the deflection angle of those spoilers to around 60-80deg, this will cause them to act as big air brakes slowing the craft down.

You can see the airbrakes in this picture here.

Edited April 23, 2015 by Hodo

[Alshain]

What Hodo said, except they start at HALF deployment or position 2 if you right click in flight, which is ideal for takeoff. Position 0 for level flight. Position 1 is for climb. Position 3 is for landing. They do move slowly, so it doesn't appear right away like anything is happening.

Flaps will slow you a little, but not very much. Spoilers too will slow you down a little but they are really designed to dump lift. Air brakes apply resitance on equal sides of the plane, so they slow you down without altering lift.

It's hard to tell, but Hodo's picture seems to be using them as spoilers, which will dump lift. Many real-world air brakes are placed in symmetry on the vertical stabilizer or as part of the tail assembly to slow the plane without dumping lift. This includes NASA's space shuttle. You can use them on the wings too, but you have to apply equal drag to top and bottom, and that gets tricky. If you apply them only to the top, as it appears in Hodo's pic (I think, hard to tell) then you will be making a spoiler, not an air brake.

In FAR you can make air brakes using two spoilers placed out of symmetry and have one deflect positive with the other deflecting negative.

Here you can see air brakes on the vertical stabilizer made using FAR spoilers. Keep in mind, they probably should be closer to the Center of Mass than this. Up high like that may cause them to pull the nose up (which in this case was desired).

Edited April 23, 2015 by Alshain

[Hodo]

Thats right they do start in position 2, it has been awhile since I bothered looking.

But air brakes can be placed on any part of the aircraft. There are a few real world examples that come to mind.

F-16 Falcon

Dauntless SBD

F-86 Sabre

Just a few real life examples.

[Van Disaster]

To get any decent retardation out of FAR surfaces you really need to stall them. Doesn't actually matter what they're called, flaps deflect just the same as downwards airbrakes. If I'm bothering to use spoilers I'll just duplicate my flaps & reverse the deflection, so I can use flaps at full deflection to balance them.

For your original question: flaps have 4 states in FAR, off, 1-2-full. One key will advance between each state & one revert to a previous state, and they take time. If they're set up with 15 degrees maximum deflection you'll hardly notice them moving.

FAR is nowhere near frictionless, I'm not quite sure how you expect aircraft to stay in the air

[Alshain]

To get any decent retardation out of FAR surfaces you really need to stall them. Doesn't actually matter what they're called, flaps deflect just the same as downwards airbrakes. If I'm bothering to use spoilers I'll just duplicate my flaps & reverse the deflection, so I can use flaps at full deflection to balance them.

That certainly works. In FAR the only real difference between Flaps and Spoilers is that Flaps have incremental deployment and Spoilers are all or nothing. Because KSP is a building game, it relies on you to place them correctly (flaps are on the trailing edge of the wing, spoilers should be placed forward enough to remove the part of the wing from the airflow when deployed). For airbrakes, the main thing is you want to ensure they are balanced to not create lift or stall (or create both lift and stall at the same time negating each other).

[Wanderfound]

As everyone else has said before, but also...you don't actually need airbrakes.

Slowing down in FAR is not that hard; sure, you can glide halfway around the planet if you're at 20,000m, but if you drop down below 5,000m you'll start to bleed off speed quite rapidly. Throw in a couple of S-turns and it's not at all difficult to drop from Mach 2 to landing speed just in the time it takes to reach the runway from the mountains west of KSC.

If you have a look at this vid from the 35 minute mark to the end, you'll see some slowing techniques both with and without the use of airbrakes.

Edited April 24, 2015 by Wanderfound

[Vanamonde]

As this is specifically about how to use a particular mod, the thread has been moved to Add-on Affairs.