Mod to show airplane performance?

[guitarxe]

This might be a pretty long shot, but I don't suppose there are some mods that can tell me a bit more about my airplane's performance while I'm still editing it?Something to show me the maximum angle of attack at various speeds, drag and lift, etc, how it performs at which altitude and so on?

[TheMoonRover]

I believe the stock debug menu has at least some of this functionality. Press the modifier key (Alt on Windows, Right Shift on Linux, idk about Mac) and F12. Then click Physics. There're some fancy graphs and things on the different tabs there, but I don't know if it works in the editor.

FAR does that too, but it completely rewrites the atmospheric drag/lift model.

[guitarxe]

Hm, looking at FAR I think it has precisely what I'm looking for, but do you know if it's possible to have that without FAR's atmospheric model?

[SAI Peregrinus]

FAR's atmospheric model can't be turned off, but it's actually not nearly as much of a rewrite as it used to be. Post 1.0 the big change from stock is that the shape of your craft matters, instead of just the lift/drag values of the parts being added together. That makes a lot of cool things possible, like building oversized/oddly shaped cargo bays from structural panels. It also means some of the counterintuitive aspects of stock stop happening, so parts in front of others will actually shield them from drag instead of only having things shielded while inside cargo bays.

So try FAR. It's not as huge of a change as you'd think.