Help with landing a MK3 Shuttle

[Parkaboy]

Hi, I'm just having trouble landing an unpowered (that means, without fuel, not without electricity) MK3 Shuttle. The design is a pretty standard shuttle: looks very much like the one in the countdown video, but with a Skipper engine at the end.

It flies beautifully in testing, but when I try to glide and approach the landing strip to land, drag turns it into a brick. Its horizontal speed drops too much, and then the ship itself drops and crashes. If I save some fuel, I can speed up a bit and manage to land, but I was aiming for a design that could land without engines. Does anyone have an idea how I can fix this?

Adding more wings to increase lift will probably only add more drag, right?

Edited May 4, 2015 by Parkaboy

[Gaarst]

What exactly is your descent profile ?

For landing shuttles, I usually keep diving at ~15° until 1000 m high and gradually get to 5°. I lift the shuttle nose above the horizon only when really close to the ground to kill vertical velocity. This usually yields a landing speed of 50 to 60 m/s, enough for my shuttle to have sufficient lift.

Try changing your descent profile and if it doesn't work, add more lift to your shuttle.

Edited May 4, 2015 by Gaarst

[Chaos_Klaus]

With the new aero, shuttles land incredibly slow. I put mine down at like 30m/s.

If you find you are going too slow on approach, the solution is to go for a steeper approach angle. The real shuttle had quite the steep approach aswell.

[Wesreidau]

What's your angle of attack like? The more your nose comes off the prograde the higher your angle of attack is, which throws your wings into the airflow and trades drag for lift. If you come in low you might pull the nose up to gain more altitude, increasing your angle of attack, but this increases your drag, reducing your speed, reducing your lift, and causing a general feedback loop that leaves you shorter and slower the longer you stay in it. I'm going to disagree with the slow landing crowd; speed is energy and energy is options. Be closer and higher when you hit the thick atmosphere, keeping your nose prograde and aiming well down the runway. Use a drogue chute or airbrakes to bleed off excess speed at the last minute, and practice braking with AOA increases for the classic 'pancake' landing, which is basically a low altitude and airspeed near-stall over the runway. Also determine your take-off speed when empty; this is your desired landing speed.

And of course, going in too fast has the advantage of being able to overshoot to the water in case of emergency and ditch with the help of some radial chutes. Mk3's hold up fairly well to water contact anymore.

[Parkaboy]

Thanks everyone for the responses. I think I managed to find a solution. Turns out all I needed was to get my CoL a bit closer to the empty CoM. It made the shuttle a bit less stable with the full tanks, but since I plan to reenter with the tanks mostly empty, I should worry more about stability when dry.

With this really tiny shift I managed to lift my nose enough to control the angle of descent while landin. It's still a hard bump, but the shuttle lands in one piece.