Official FAR Craft Repository

[Sparker]

I've been experimenting with the amazing B9 procedural wings mod and made this little spaceplane having something in common with other lifting body designs.

The body is made of these procedural wings. The middle sections have 1m thickness.

Here it is a second after separating from the first stage booster:

 

Approaching to KSC after making a few orbits:

 

 

I wish we could offset the tips of the wings to make a completely flat bottom for such spaceplanes.

[Van Disaster]

Offsetting in multiple dimensions is a considerably bigger problem which would need something of a different approach. Doable, but probably not with the B9 version.

Make sure you've picked up the latest (last month sometime ) shader.

[Gman_builder]

My attempt at a highly swept wing hypersonic aircraft wasn't as fast as I had originally anticipated.

http://imgur.com/a/W1RrD

However this underperforming test bed led to the development of my highly advanced unmanned "Aurora" aircraft

http://imgur.com/a/Lr8Fi

She is capable of Mach 4.7 at 24,000 meters and is extremely stable in FAR as well as stock aero. It is a high altitude, (almost) hypersonic research and spy plane that comes equipped with a full science package and laser targeting thing from BDA so you can see the ground below you in great detail. I don't want to give away to much information as to the nature of my top secret aircraft  but you can have a few screenshots. I wish kerbpaint was updated so I could paint this thing jet black.

Edited June 28, 2016 by Gman_builder

[Nixod321]

1 hour ago, Gman_builder said:

My attempt at a highly swept wing hypersonic aircraft wasn't as fast as I had originally anticipated.

http://imgur.com/a/W1RrD

However this underperforming test bed led to the development of my highly advanced unmanned "Aurora" aircraft.

http://imgur.com/a/nrb7k

She is capable of Mach 4.7 at 24,000 meters and is extremely stable in FAR as well as stock aero. It is a high altitude, (almost) hypersonic research and spy plane that comes equipped with a full science package and laser targeting thing from BDA so you can see the ground below you in great detail. I don't want to give away to much information as to the nature of my top secret aircraft  but you can have one screenshot. I wish kerbpaint was updated so I could paint this thing jet black.

Nice!

Short, straight wings are actually better for high supersonic ranges, as the X-15's stubby little things proved. Either that or model it after a doorstopper. Air gets weird when you go that fast.

[Gman_builder]

2 minutes ago, Nixod321 said:

Nice!

Short, straight wings are actually better for high supersonic ranges, as the X-15's stubby little things proved. Either that or model it after a doorstopper. Air gets weird when you go that fast.

Well, the X-15 was designed to fly at near orbital altitudes and only had the fuel for one short flight, It did not have to be sustained. Highly swept wings reduce the dynamic shock of air at near hypersonic speed for sustained low altitude flight. Plus the stealth factor. The X-15 was also rocket powered so had a much higher TWR than your standard aircraft so the wings were more to hold control surfaces and provide just enough lift to glide back to earth once the fuel was exhausted. My engine-wing-fuselage configuration I have is also extremely stable at high speed and low altitude. I agree with the door stop thing but this wing does in fact produce less drag than other designs. The only parts on the plane that DO produce drag are the radiators I have hidden in the nose to reduce shock heating.

[Nixod321]

4 minutes ago, Gman_builder said:

Well, the X-15 was designed to fly at near orbital altitudes and only had the fuel for one short flight, It did not have to be sustained. Highly swept wings reduce the dynamic shock of air at near hypersonic speed for sustained low altitude flight. Plus the stealth factor. The X-15 was also rocket powered so had a much higher TWR than your standard aircraft so the wings were more to hold control surfaces and provide just enough lift to glide back to earth once the fuel was exhausted. My engine-wing-fuselage configuration I have is also extremely stable at high speed and low altitude. I agree with the door stop thing but this wing does in fact produce less drag than other designs. The only parts on the plane that DO produce drag are the radiators I have hidden in the nose to reduce shock heating.

Sorry, it's late, I'm tired and I'm mistakenly offering advice where it's not needed. I'm glad to see you've hit upon a design that works well, I may have to try it out myself.

[Gman_builder]

3 minutes ago, Nixod321 said:

Sorry, it's late, I'm tired and I'm mistakenly offering advice where it's not needed. I'm glad to see you've hit upon a design that works well, I may have to try it out myself.

Sorry I might have sounded like a jerk. I'm tired too!

[Hodo]

11 hours ago, Nixod321 said:

Nice!

Short, straight wings are actually better for high supersonic ranges, as the X-15's stubby little things proved. Either that or model it after a doorstopper. Air gets weird when you go that fast.

 

Ultimately it depends on the application.   The X-15 as he said was a rocket plane and used rcs thrusters for control, making it more of a manned missile than a true plane.   The SR-71 is a good example of a true high supersonic aircraft design.   The thing is your lift moves back on the wing the faster you go, until a certain point then it will no longer provide the same lift as previous speeds.   I found some of my most successful high speed aircraft have been cranked delta wing designs.   

 

I have lately been experimenting with a delta wing design with a variable geometry cranked wing end section.  That lets me set the wing to a more conventional cranked arrow design for lower speeds and for high speeds closer to a true delta.   This is based off of an old Russian design for the Su-17.   I have high hopes for this design and expectations.  I imagine it will do everything I need it to do, and still meet all of my mission requirements for new military aircraft designs.  

[UnusualAttitude]

Hi guys.

Just dropping by to present a concept I've been working on for a while: a RSS/RO hypersonic passenger aircraft with transatlantic range.

A proof-of-concept vehicle to demonstrate the ability to connect all the different launch sites in RSS, I tested Livernon on the Hammaguir - Kourou route.

Livernon is a 16-seat super/hyper-sonic craft using the MK3 hypersonic cockpit with a take-off mass just shy of 100 tonnes, with 60 tonnes of liquid methane to fuel the three RAPIER engines.

 

Most of the liquid methane fuel is stored inside a cryogenic tank which itself is stored inside a cargo bay to limit boil-off during the flight.

Take-off is a challenge, as always limited by the length of the stock runway.

Hammaguir is situated in a dip in the terrain, and low-level performance and climb-out are sluggish...

...but Livernon climbs to 15,000m, goes supersonic and reaches Mach 3.5 by the time she reaches the western coast of Africa. About a third of her fuel has been used at this point.

Cruising over the Atlantic, Livernon eventually reaches Mach 4.5 at a cruising altitude of 25km.

More than an hour into the flight, throttle to idle and descent towards the South American coast...

...landing with fuel to spare. Hammaguir to Kourou in 1h34!

Don't know what the precise distance is in-game, but Google maps says just under 6,000km. With the fuel margin I had on landing, I reckon legs of 7,000 or even 8,000km might be possible.

Edited June 30, 2016 by UnusualAttitude

[MajaeV]

I'm designing and building an almost full size B-29 using the FAR and KAX mods. However, I'm running into a problem when designing the wings. I want the wings to look thick, my solution is to layer several wings, or make a biplane kind of wing setup with filling between. The layering and biplane-wing technique doesn't provide any lift at all. I'm thinking that FAR calculates a lift from the shape of the whole thing, so that makes me wonder why it doesn't work.

Here's a few pictures comparing the wing designs.

 

Why does it not work? Do I have to make one B-29 exhibition version that doesn't fly, and one ugly but flyable version? Do you have any ideas? Thanks in advance

[p1t1o]

If you're amenable to mods, B9 includes (or is it a seperate download Im not sure) some procedural wings and you can define the thickness, I have used them successfully with FAR.

You're probably better off asking about FAR specifics in the FAR thread however.

[DuoDex]

Thread merged into FAR discussion.

[FourGreenFields]

1 hour ago, MajaeV said:

I'm designing and building an almost full size B-29 using the FAR and KAX mods. However, I'm running into a problem when designing the wings. I want the wings to look thick, my solution is to layer several wings, or make a biplane kind of wing setup with filling between. The layering and biplane-wing technique doesn't provide any lift at all. I'm thinking that FAR calculates a lift from the shape of the whole thing, so that makes me wonder why it doesn't work.

Here's a few pictures comparing the wing designs.

Why does it not work? Do I have to make one B-29 exhibition version that doesn't fly, and one ugly but flyable version? Do you have any ideas? Thanks in advance

For all I know, lift from wings (and probably some drag stuff regarding the wings) isn't strictly shape-based. It takes the relative position of the wing parts into calculation, but, as you already found out, clipping can lead to issues.

B9 Procedural Wings (or some variant of it) is probably the way to go (unless you find a mod with non-procedural wings which suit your needs).

[Van Disaster]

FAR has biplane effects, so stacking wings is *bad*. Clipping wings is also frowned on although you can get away with a little overlap... and FAR's wing code still works on individual panels, it's not as sophisticated as the body shape stuff.

[Cinocal]

I stack wings on my designs all the time and overlap them and they work as desired in FAR.

Example

[CanOmer]

This is electric triplane. Its mass is 2557kg. The engine creates 8kN. How can it fly that fast?

Sopwith Triplane hs 700kg mass and 97kW engine. But its top speed is 52m/s. Without FAR this plane would have a lot more friction which reduces top speed dramatically.

So, hasn't FAR got realistic friction on the air?

Edited July 20, 2016 by CanOmer

[kcs123]

3 hours ago, CanOmer said:

This is electric triplane. Its mass is 2557kg. The engine creates 8kN. How can it fly that fast?

Sopwith Triplane hs 700kg mass and 97kW engine. But its top speed is 52m/s. Without FAR this plane would have a lot more friction which reduces top speed dramatically.

So, hasn't FAR got realistic friction on the air?

That is not data that can be compared. 97 kW is not measured in same way as thrust info provided by game. By definition, kilowatt or watt is calculated as:

In other words, not all that engine power is converted to usefull thrust. It can be tricky to calculate actual thrust provided by that engine without proper info.
Engine rotate propeller that "grab" some amount of air and push it into lateral motion. Only that fraction of "grabed" air in lateral motion actualy provide thrust.
Amount of air pushed in lateral motion depends on RPM, length of propeller blades, amount of blades, angle of attack of blades, propeller weight, atmospheric data (temperature/pressure/moisture)

While we don't know actual thrust data for that aircraft, we know that overall craft TWR from that period was pretty bad. I couldn't find accurate data for that aircraft, but more modern aircraft(jet fighters) have TWR between 0.2 and 0.3

With that in mind, we can only come to conclusion that actual thrust for Sopwith Triplane is 7 * 0.2 = 1.4 kN or in best case with TWR of 0.3 thrust is 2.1 kN (rounded g to 10)

Your craft in game have much, much better TWR than real life aircraft. Regarding FAR being realistic or not, you have always need to keep in mind that is mathematical fluid model, not actual real life scenario where other variables kicks in. Regardless, it put in consideration much more data for mathematical model than stock game does.

[tetryds]

@CanOmer the vast majority of air breathing KSP engines are ridiculously overpowered, use AJE or engines balanced especially for FAR and everything will work a lot better.

[Van Disaster]

Your triplane also doesn't have any drag-inducing rigging, has rigid wings of a profile at least half a century newer, from eyeballing it has considerably more wing area, doesn't have a rotary engine causing mayhem with airflow and I can't see what cockpit it's got. 8kN thrust is something around what you'd get from one of the first jet engines.

[CanOmer]

It is electric powered engine with propeller from KAX mod. I put it in front of the plane. There is no cockpit.

Edited July 21, 2016 by CanOmer

[kcs123]

13 hours ago, CanOmer said:

It is electric powered engine with propeller from KAX mod. I put it in front of the plane. There is no cockpit.

Regardless, there is no good reliable data that can be compared and give you conclusion if FAR drag model is closer to real life or not.
IIRC, @NathanKell have tried to create cesna aircraft in game, to be with same performance as real life aircraft. Some moding on in game parts were made to adjust size and weight of parts to real life aircraft. After all that work, craft in game have very close performance as real life aircraft.

That was several KSP and FAR version ago and I no longer recall who, where and when mentioned it.

[*MajorTom*]

RSS/RO/RHeat/RFuels/FAR suborbital spaceplane (only russian engines)

RS-16 "Stratim"

 

[CanOmer]

On 20.07.2016 at 11:00 PM, tetryds said:

@CanOmer the vast majority of air breathing KSP engines are ridiculously overpowered, use AJE or engines balanced especially for FAR and everything will work a lot better.

@kcs123

If I build Bleriot what should be the thrust of engine in kN?

In Wiki, it says: 1 × Anzani 3-cyl. fan 3-cyl. air-cooled fan-style radial piston engine, 19 kW (25 hp)

Edited July 21, 2016 by CanOmer

[kcs123]

6 minutes ago, CanOmer said:

@kcs123

If I build Bleriot what should be the thrust of engine?

In Wiki, it says: 1 × Anzani 3-cyl. fan 3-cyl. air-cooled fan-style radial piston engine, 19 kW (25 hp)

Again, there is no accurate data, you can only estimate it if you assume that TWR is equaly poor, probably no better than 0.2

Usefull info from wikipedia is:

Empty weight: 230 kg (507 lb)

That is 0.23t and time that with g (rounded to 10 for simplicity) to get weight of 2.3 kN
Assuming that TWR is 0.2, you can calculate thrust as 2.3 * 0.2 = 0.46 kN

That is probably most optimistic thrust, because, empty craft mass was used for calculation, g is rounded to 10 and TWR was probably even lower than 0.2

[Van Disaster]

You might want to go look up details of microlight engines & the sort of thrust they produce, and then take a fraction of that to allow for a century of propeller development.