does anyone else dislike the new drag simulation?

[endl]

i made a large ssto, and from everything im being told (and my experience with far pre 1.0) this plane should fly, its got good TWR im doing a speed run correctly but i cant break 1 km/s on larger craft designs, only small planes work for me. ive come to think that its because i have a composite wing instead of a solid piece and the game is punishing my wing design with excessive drag, anyway heres some Screen shots with kerbal engineer stats that are relevant personally i think this design should be able to space

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[luizopiloto]

1.0.2 drag is unbalanced... it's the sum of individual parts configs not begin reviwed after a "fix" done in v1.0.1...

[panzer1b]

Its because of wings. KSP now makes it so you need roughly 1 wing area / 10t, any more and unless you need low speed performance, its gonna be sluggish at best.

Now im not going to say if this is bad or good, as it depends on what you want/are trying to accomplish. Personally its a good thing as needing lucridious amounts of wings just to take off was annoying and hurt the part count, now most vessels that are like 40t can get by with 2 deltas, and it just doenst take much (if any now that you can use body lift forces) to get something to SSTO. The only downside i see to it is that we nolonger have the ability to create appearance using wings, structural panels are too heavy and look like crap on a plane, and wings are bad due to the way the new drag works rendering additional wings to not only be dead weight, but acting as a airbrake for the whole flight.

Anyways, about your plane, try to cut down on the amount of wings, they are the most likely culprit to your inability to fly well.

[Slam_Jones]

(Personal opinion here) I was (still am) so unimpressed with the 1.x aero, that I installed FAR for the first time, just so it would make more sense to me. But that may just be me.

[endl]

yea i had a feeling cutting down on wing would fix it but then it would look strange, and unrealistic, i was considering using near, but its not updated for 1.0 i really dont want to use far as its getting to be too much for my cpu.

[Hcube]

I like the new lift and overall handlîg, but the drag is painful. Building a wing from many segments will create enourmous amounts of drag now since part occlusion only works with stuff attached on nodes.

Worse : when building a cluster of engines for your rocket using cubic octavinal struts under your rocket's tank, the cubic struts do not get occluded and neither do the engines, creating crazy drag at the bottom of said rocket. You can try it yourself and see it by activating the drag vectors. The rocket won't even need fins anymore.

[martinborgen]

Its not really unrealistic, to go 1km/h your planes wing should look more like SR71 or BellX.

[WOODY01]

yea i had a feeling cutting down on wing would fix it but then it would look strange, and unrealistic, i was considering using near, but its not updated for 1.0 i really dont want to use far as its getting to be too much for my cpu.

I do not agree it would look unrealistic if you reduced the wing parts. Your design is realistic for a plane designed to travel at slower speeds, faster planes use smaller wings to reduce drag.

Your wing design is more similar to aircraft designed to fly at slower speeds.

I think Squad needs to adopt procedural wings, that way the player can get the design they want without adding additional drag from using more wing parts to get the look the player wants.

[mikegarrison]

Its not really unrealistic, to go 1km/s your planes wing should look more like SR71 or BellX.

Seriously. That's about 2000 knots. Mach three at sea level, and hypersonic at high altitude. Show me any Mach 3 airplane with wings that look like the one you have in that picture.

[endl]

Seriously. That's about 2000 knots. Mach three at sea level, and hypersonic at high altitude. Show me any Mach 3 airplane with wings that look like the one you have in that picture.

my wing profile is actually more realistic then what "works" with the current drag balance

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as you can see the shape is pretty close to delta the only problem is that its a composite wing and the drag balance will not let it space

[stibbons]

No, as explained the only problem is a design that can't realistically reach the speed you want it to go. Look up designs, both on Earth and Kerbin, that can, and you'll find they look pretty different.

[sumghai]

That's a long wingspan you have there, endl.

Regardless of shape, long wingspans are generally optimized for altitude, range and payload capacity at the cost of speed. High speed aircraft, on the other hand, tend to have shorter wingspans (or even stubby wings like the X-15).

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

[little square dot]

The only downside i see to it is that we nolonger have the ability to create appearance using wings, structural panels are too heavy and look like crap on a plane, and wings are bad due to the way the new drag works rendering additional wings to not only be dead weight, but acting as a airbrake for the whole flight.

You can just make a copy of each wing .cfg, remove the ModuleLiftingSurface reference, and add a custom non-drag-y drag cube to override the default one.

Even if you're not familiar with .cfgs it should only take half an hour or so to make the changes, and you'll have decorative wings for life. =)

*edit: You'll have to change the part names as well, and you'll definitely want to alter the titles (the name displayed in VAB/SPH) in order to avoid confusing the non-lifty wings with the liftier ones.

Edited May 19, 2015 by little square dot

[SAI Peregrinus]

You can just make a copy of each wing .cfg, remove the ModuleLiftingSurface reference, and add a custom non-drag-y drag cube to override the default one.

Even if you're not familiar with .cfgs it should only take half an hour or so to make the changes, and you'll have decorative wings for life. =)

*edit: You'll have to change the part names as well, and you'll definitely want to alter the titles (the name displayed in VAB/SPH) in order to avoid confusing the non-lifty wings with the liftier ones.

Or write Module Manager patches. It's just as easy and doesn't change existing parts.

[endl]

That's a long wingspan you have there, endl.

Regardless of shape, long wingspans are generally optimized for altitude, range and payload capacity at the cost of speed. High speed aircraft, on the other hand, tend to have shorter wingspans (or even stubby wings like the X-15).

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

when you cant do that in a GAME thats when its no longer fun, if you force the game to become more hard simulation you will drive away the people who like to design from the game, if ssto all wind up looking pretty much the same because drag values only make one wing profile viable it will turn off alot of people. even then if you want to build a composite wing, even as a delta it doesnt work well.

[Tankman101]

when you cant do that in a GAME thats when its no longer fun

When airliners can no longer go hypersonic speeds then the game is no longer fun...?

Edited May 19, 2015 by Tankman101
A word

[regex]

when you cant do that in a GAME thats when its no longer fun, if you force the game to become more hard simulation you will drive away the people who like to design from the game, if ssto all wind up looking pretty much the same because drag values only make one wing profile viable it will turn off alot of people. even then if you want to build a composite wing, even as a delta it doesnt work well.

We've been at least confident that the aero simulation would change since I started in 0.20, and we've known with certainty that the old placeholder would change since at least 0.90. I don't know why this is such a surprise to people. The old aero system was one of the most requested things to be changed I've seen asked for in this game; people have always wanted it to be more realistic. Now that we have it, well, you all might want to consider learning to mod to make the game behave like you want it to. It's a time-honored tradition around here.

[FleshJeb]

You can just make a copy of each wing .cfg, remove the ModuleLiftingSurface reference, and add a custom non-drag-y drag cube to override the default one.

Even if you're not familiar with .cfgs it should only take half an hour or so to make the changes, and you'll have decorative wings for life. =)

*edit: You'll have to change the part names as well, and you'll definitely want to alter the titles (the name displayed in VAB/SPH) in order to avoid confusing the non-lifty wings with the liftier ones.

Hmm, maybe this will help me with my problem: Planes used to feel like lumbering bricks, they actually felt like multi-ton monsters. NuStock feels like flying RC planes--The sense of scale feels completely off. Before, I could purposefully design something that wouldn't generate more than 2-5Gs; now I can't seem to keep them under 10Gs.

I know NuFAR does that BS thing where it assumes the wing is optimized for whatever speed regime it's currently operating in. Do you think removing ModuleLiftingSurface would make them behave more like supersonic wings all the time? (i.e. a flat plate with a AoA for lift). Would a similar fix help control surfaces/airbrakes? They're way too powerful right now.

I keep seeing that term... What's a "drag cube"? How does this differ from sphere? I'm guessing the cube model has a different drag coefficient per face, and the sphere only has one?

[little square dot]

Or write Module Manager patches. It's just as easy and doesn't change existing parts.

That works too.

Although to clarify, making copies of .cfgs doesn't change the original part, nor do the changes require a plugin in order to work. Six of one, a half-dozen of the other really.

I keep seeing that term... What's a "drag cube"? How does this differ from sphere? I'm guessing the cube model has a different drag coefficient per face, and the sphere only has one?

I would ask you what a drag sphere is, and how it differs from a cube, haha..

I'm pretty sure your guess is bang-on though.

Edited May 19, 2015 by little square dot

[theend3r]

Get FAR, it works.

[magnemoe]

That's a long wingspan you have there, endl.

Regardless of shape, long wingspans are generally optimized for altitude, range and payload capacity at the cost of speed. High speed aircraft, on the other hand, tend to have shorter wingspans (or even stubby wings like the X-15).

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

This, reminds me of

http://www.acc.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/050207-F-2907C-253.jpg

This is in supersonic mode.

http://img.planespotters.net/photo/163000/original/85-0074-USAF-United-States-Air-Force-Rockwell-B-1-Lancer_PlanespottersNet_163279.jpg

Note that its only able to do mach 1.3 or something.

For an spaceplane you are only after hypersonic performance. You are willing to sacrifice low speed performance, braking parachutes solves the landing issue, you can use JATO boosters to get up to speed on runway.

An more radical idea is to use an rocket powered truck instead of legs during takeoff. Two benefits, you can easy reach 500-700 km/h fast, your landing legs only have to support the empty plane. Truck use its own braking parachutes and is towed back and reused.

[panzer1b]

I have to say that bugs and exploits aside, the new drag is actually FAR better then what the game was back in the old days. That said, i do have a few complaints especially towards 1.0.2, a fix that in my opinion actually made the game a little less balanced and fun, regardless of which one was more realistic.

Pretty much more drag makes an even bigger impact upon SSTOs. Right now i find absolutely 0 benefits to use them for anything except for career (which i dont even play myself) where money matters and you want to have 100% recovery of the craft. For everything else a rocket can lift more, gets into orbit faster/easier, and with fairings, even whackjob unaerodynamic junk can be brute forced into orbit (you might need to tweak the .cfg of the fairings to allow larger diameters when say trying to lift a refinery thats as big in diamater as the VAB). SSTOs right now, legit ones at least, have not that great payload fractions, and in general cannot lift near anything liek rockets. As for atmospheric planes, it is tougher to overheat to explosion, but this drag increase has had a minor if any impact on slower lower altitude craft, so those are for all intents and purposes unchanged from 1.0. High speed high altituders have been nerfed, but hey, i never actually made such craft unless they were SSTOs. Also, one more note about drag, its so high that you now actually still loose massive amounts of speed even above 50km (1.0 you really needed to be below 45 to get any real drag), and the sea level drag is so high right now that i can DEORBIT a capital ship that was NEVER intended for this, and it will actually come down at ~50m/s, low enough that most of it will remain intact. If this is in any what way realistic, then i guess KSP is the new sci-fi simulator where capital ships will NOT burn up at all, and they also WILL NOT crash at a high enough velocity to matter in any way whatsoever. Lithobraking is the new thing, forget those useless parachutes i can land massive frigates just like that!

Anyways, drag aside, i really dislike the new heat in 1.0.2. In 1.0, heat was a threat to most things that werent shielded and didnt go into a shallow aerobrake. Perhaps 1.0's heat was a little overboard, but thats what the settings slider is for, and right now even at 120% the heat is a utter joke. The other reason heat is a minor issue now is that the extra atmo drag stacked atop what i believe are just lower heat coefficients makes you end up slowing down way faster and not even reaching speeds where heat becomes an issue. Finally, i think some of the capsules could use a minor nerf to heat tolerance, so that you cant have a completely unshielded mk1 pod with a single chute come in from the mun or minmus and not even fry a little bit.

Finally, even if squad determines the new aero to be better, they didnt make any compensation to rocket engine ISP to help counter the 30% or so drag increase. With 1.0, and its very low dV of under 3000 to orbit, the ISP was in my opinion balanced, even if interplanetary vessels that didnt rely on nukes suffered from it. Now, you get those same ISP values with extra drag added ontop. I think they should uppo the ISP a hair to compensate, but thats just my 2c, its not like i havent adapted to 1.0.2, i just keep a 1.0 physics config aroyund when im screwing around and want to go 1500m/s at sea level with a rapier powered missile!

Edited May 19, 2015 by panzer1b

[K3RBAL KOL4]

New Aero is trash for rockets. worthless.. But excellent for planes.

[little square dot]

New Aero is trash for rockets. worthless..

It may need some tweaking, but trash? Why do you think it's that bad?

[KSK]

when you cant do that in a GAME thats when its no longer fun, if you force the game to become more hard simulation you will drive away the people who like to design from the game, if ssto all wind up looking pretty much the same because drag values only make one wing profile viable it will turn off alot of people. even then if you want to build a composite wing, even as a delta it doesnt work well.

Plenty of wing profiles are still viable. This thread is about a similar question and includes plenty of screenshots of very different spaceplanes.