Official FAR Craft Repository

[Van Disaster]

Only consideration for vertical tail is "does it control yaw even at high AoA" - especially if it's a spaceplane. For horizontal control surfaces for spaceplanes I'll always recommend canards - pitching up results in positive lift across all horizontal surfaces. This would be a typical design of mine. Forward sweep means there's a natural tendancy to roll into yaw, the engine-mounted winglets deal with that completely.

Demo ascent ( empty, but you can see it has masses of spare power ): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RYGEBkrGBU

Drag-wise, a spaceplane is only hitting mach 4+ in very thin air so I've found it's actually not a big deal to have engines on the wingtips, never mind about shock cones. If you're building for RO earth and Mach 25 then I'm not sure why you're building a spaceplane, let alone a SSTO spaceplane.

Edited November 9, 2017 by Van Disaster

[Surefoot]

The problem with canards and forward swept wings, is the bad re-entry heat/mechanical resistance. Canards will take a lot of heat being out of the shock cone, and fw swept wings will take a huge load out of the slightest AoA bump. I'd rather stick to standard tailless delta, even though these tend to have lawn dart behaviour...

[Van Disaster]

2 hours ago, Surefoot said:

The problem with canards and forward swept wings, is the bad re-entry heat/mechanical resistance. Canards will take a lot of heat being out of the shock cone, and fw swept wings will take a huge load out of the slightest AoA bump. I'd rather stick to standard tailless delta, even though these tend to have lawn dart behaviour...

We don't care about divergent issues - wings don't twist. I believe the shock cone at Mach 5 is 11 degrees, so those canards would be inside anyway ( since when did that matter for heating? ) - but that also doesn't matter if you don't aim at the planet like a lawn dart. In fact here's part 2 of the video covering re-entry - it being a new plane of course I messed up the descent & overshot the runway by several hundred km, but that was just a matter of sorting the timing out.

 

Edited November 10, 2017 by Van Disaster

[AeroGav]

With Ferram, you can get more lift in the upper atmosphere at hypersonic speed, so heating is less of an issue because you stay out of it longer.    In the Gameplay Questions and Tutorials section,  there's a thread asking about re-entry angle and everyone is saying pitch up to 90 degrees radial out,  even though the OP was complaining about losing contro

The discussion then inevitably moves on to being unable to control landing point,   with folks coming down on the wrong continent and getting no recovery value on their expensive re-usable spaceplane.

I try to argue for a non-stalled re-entry angle but tend to get buried by the avalanche of "pitch 90 degrees" advice.     

Seems in this game, people handle re-entry in one of two ways

• put pointy cockpit on very front (rather than inline), then re-enter on prograde hold because hey, capsules re-enter on retrograde right?  Then complain when it explodes
• then come in at 90 degrees radial out, go into a flat spin, recover at 12km, land 4000km away from the space centre and get 29% recovery value.

 

1 hour ago, Van Disaster said:

We don't care about divergent issues - wings don't twist. I believe the shock cone at Mach 5 is 11 degrees, so those canards would be inside anyway ( since when did that matter for heating? ) - but that also doesn't matter if you don't aim at the planet like a lawn dart. In fact here's part 2 of the video covering re-entry - it being a new plane of course I messed up the descent & overshot the runway by several hundred km, but that was just a matter of sorting the timing out.

 

 

[plausse]

1 hour ago, AeroGav said:

With Ferram, you can get more lift in the upper atmosphere at hypersonic speed, so heating is less of an issue because you stay out of it longer.    In the Gameplay Questions and Tutorials section,  there's a thread asking about re-entry angle and everyone is saying pitch up to 90 degrees radial out,  even though the OP was complaining about losing contro

The discussion then inevitably moves on to being unable to control landing point,   with folks coming down on the wrong continent and getting no recovery value on their expensive re-usable spaceplane.

I try to argue for a non-stalled re-entry angle but tend to get buried by the avalanche of "pitch 90 degrees" advice.     

Seems in this game, people handle re-entry in one of two ways

• put pointy cockpit on very front (rather than inline), then re-enter on prograde hold because hey, capsules re-enter on retrograde right?  Then complain when it explodes
• then come in at 90 degrees radial out, go into a flat spin, recover at 12km, land 4000km away from the space centre and get 29% recovery value.

 

 

Sarcasm aside I tend to re-enter at 30-50 degrees AOA depending on the plane, and make sure that my control surfaces aren't stalled even if parts of the main wing is. When it works it gives a lot of supersonic lift, and allows for shedding speed high up, and doing s turns if needed. 

I tend to land with empty tanks though which makes it easier. Currently I am trying to make an SSTO with low landing speed and land it on laythe with (almost) full tanks. It's proving quite hard and I'm leaning towards a supersonically optimised shape with RATO, or something like that ...

[Van Disaster]

19 hours ago, AeroGav said:

I try to argue for a non-stalled re-entry angle but tend to get buried by the avalanche of "pitch 90 degrees" advice.    

If you can persuade them to stay attached to the craft and then not pull whatever they're attached to off as well, rear-mounted stalled control surfaces are going to haul your speed down in a bit more of a hurry than mine did.

There was one version of FAR which involved making a descent by going twice around the planet in the atmosphere thanks to there being so little drag...

@plausseFor Laythe the easy answer is to land on the poles - other than that you can land in the sea, or it is actually doable to land on open ground but really not easy.

Edited November 11, 2017 by Van Disaster

[MightyDarkStar]

"If it looks right, it flies right." 

This is a pretty accurate (I like to think) replica of the Hakwer Hunter F. 1, with a custom AJE Avon engine. I was almost shocked to see how closely it performed to the real deal, which I suppose just shows you how powerful FAR is.

Spoiler

Top Speed and Max Thrust, eerily close to the real deal.

I also made custom ADEN 30mm guns, they're a good laugh.

 

[Gordon Fecyk]

On ‎11‎/‎10‎/‎2017 at 8:35 AM, AeroGav said:

I try to argue for a non-stalled re-entry angle but tend to get buried by the avalanche of "pitch 90 degrees" advice.

Today I succeeded in gliding Matt Lowne's Blunderbird 6 across half of Kerbin's circumference after botching my re-entry, and landed on the runway. Thanks to Gav's advice.

Folks, take his advice!

The aero data display in FAR helped a lot. I used that to maximize my lift-to-drag ratio on re-entry, and even with that pointy Mk1 cockpit managed to glide safely home.

[Van Disaster]

7 hours ago, Gordon Fecyk said:

Today I succeeded in gliding Matt Lowne's Blunderbird 6 across half of Kerbin's circumference after botching my re-entry, and landed on the runway. Thanks to Gav's advice.

Folks, take his advice!

The aero data display in FAR helped a lot. I used that to maximize my lift-to-drag ratio on re-entry, and even with that pointy Mk1 cockpit managed to glide safely home.

The simplest thing is probably just to fly by temperature, another thing a gentle re-entry will let you do. If the temperature is static but below maximum you can descend a bit faster, if it's going up too fast just pitch up & level off a bit  ( that requires a bit of pre-emption ). If you keep a note of the average descent rate you can plot a better trajectory for the next one until you can pick the right re-entry burn location & time, and the re-entry pitch, and basically just leave the craft alone until it's time to start flying & not just falling.

You don't actually want to maximise L/D - you're trying to slow down!

Edited November 12, 2017 by Van Disaster

[Van Disaster]

So, ah, this is a very British piece of engineering: landing speed of 73kts ( runs out of control authority just before it stalls ), stops in not much more than it's own length, can put it down about anywhere & takeoff run is pretty damn short too, but:

Anyone know of either any kneeling landing gear, or ramp extensions? I know you could use adjustable gear & change the strut extension, but that is pretty clonky & potentially quite destructive. Using extra gear & retracting the mains also works, but it's a really inelegant solution.

[kcs123]

You might, but just might, build some additional "footsteps" with IR parts, once you have landed, retract main landing gears and raise/lower whole craft trough IR extendratrons and "footsteps".

I say it might works because autostruts from landing gears can cause issues with IR parts, it can only be avoided with very careful placing of IR parts and stock landing gears.

I build something similar but much more overweighted in KSP 0.25 or KSP 0.90, cant recall exact version. Similar idea to yours, just to adjust rear tail ramp for rovers to get in and out.

[Van Disaster]

Hmm - I too have had bad experiences with IR & anything related to landing gear... will give it a little thought.

Modern aircraft parts seem to finally be light enough that you can use a sensible wing area & still get some decent performance. Hurray!

That thing even has a Vr of about 90kts at sea level still

 

[Cratzz]

After having problems with not having Plume for some Engines (General Electric J79-GE-17A), i could finally do a proper Phantom. Atleast to My abilities . Props to @Canis Dirus Leidy for helping out.

Did a video of First flight

 

 

[Nixod321]

On 14/11/2017 at 12:28 PM, Van Disaster said:

 

That thing even has a Vr of about 90kts at sea level still

 

Never thought I'd see Dash 8 love here, haha

[Van Disaster]

4 hours ago, Nixod321 said:

Never thought I'd see Dash 8 love here, haha

Heh, well I live under the ( rather distant ) approach to our airport here - the carrier who's home it is is a pretty heavy Q400 user so I get buzzed a fair bit. There was a challenge last year involving shifting large numbers of Kerbals around so that gave an actual use for airliners & that thing's predecessor.

Also this nice looking thing

and this monstrosity too, so it was still very kerbal

[tetryds]

Oh, that reminds me of something I did a while ago.

528 bombs (250 lbs each I guess).

[Van Disaster]

Did you put all those in there by hand?

One of the aircraft parts packs has a Mk3-sized BUFF cockpit, that'd go well on there. I think it's SXT, but I can't be sure.

[tetryds]

I actually kinda put them by hand.

The bug where if you mirror a part with mirrored childs doesn't mirror the mirror forced me to manually place both sides of the plates.

It was also a pain to set everything up properly and in a way that doesn't explode the airplane and since BDA did not have automatic fast bomb deployment it took ages to fire everything.

The wings are stock and so massive that they bended, aeroelasticity was so intense that rolling was null or inverted past a certain speed.

Things are much easier with a single huge procedural wing part

[MightyDarkStar]

 

[Van Disaster]

Hm, think the wings are a bit off on that Scimitar, they had the same sweepback either side of the dogtooth. A bit of clipping on the engine tubes to shorten them too perhaps. Not a bad attempt though!

 

[Surefoot]

Yeah he got the body / fuselage quite right, impressive. Getting the wings and elevators perfectly matched is a lot easier.

Edited November 17, 2017 by Surefoot

[MightyDarkStar]

@Van Disaster @Surefoot Thanks for the kind words guys! The length is dead on 14.8m, the length of the real thing itself. The wingspan I'm not too sure of, but I've fixed the leading edge sweep of the inboard wing piece.

The same could be said of this Hunter F. 1 here, the length is exact but I'm not too sure about the wings.

Spoiler

 

 

 

[Van Disaster]

@MightyDarkStarI'd pick a more developed Hunter model, the F.1 was terrible ( well the engines were pretty terrible ). The wing seems ok for that one, the air intakes might take a little reworking - that V shape is quite distinctive, not sure how to do it properly though. I made a vague attempt last year sometime but didn't really put much effort in:

Spoiler

As for the Scimitar & getting proportions right in general, you just need to see where things intersect with whatever you're scaling the model around ( in this case the fuselage ) - I annotated the drawing to show intersection points with the fuselage so you can align parts of the wing. The blue lines are on top of the leading/trailing edges, they're not offset at all. It'll also help you align the engines.

Your tail needs a lot more sweep - think the current one looks more like an Skyhawk.

Edited November 17, 2017 by Van Disaster

[MightyDarkStar]

2 minutes ago, Van Disaster said:

@MightyDarkStarI'd pick a more developed Hunter model, the F.1 was terrible ( well the engines were pretty terrible ). The wing seems ok for that one, the air intakes might take a little reworking - that V shape is quite distinctive, not sure how to do it properly though. I made a vague attempt last year sometime but didn't really put much effort in:

  Hide contents

As for the Scimitar & getting proportions right in general, you just need to see where things intersect with whatever you're scaling the model around ( in this case the fuselage ) - I annotated the drawing to show intersection points with the fuselage so you can align parts of the wing. The blue lines are on top of the leading/trailing edges, they're not offset at all. It'll also help you align the engines.

I was quite lazy with the Hunter and just threw the intakes on. I'll sort them tonight. I made a Vampire a while back that had quite nice intakes, made by completely removing the the leading edge on the wing root and using control surfaces and tweak-scaled fuselage pieces and a few intakes. I'll get a photo up soon.

[Van Disaster]

If you want something more unusual to build have a look at the Hawker P.1121 - could have been absolutely stunning.

Spoiler

https://itdoesnthavetoberight.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/hawker-p-1121.jpg

 

 

Edited November 17, 2017 by Van Disaster