Lift drag

[seyss]

Hello,

Since 1.0 enabled lift drag I modified my craft as shown below.

However in the end I ended up with the same performance... the negative impact from the extra weight for the aerodynamic parts pretty much nulled the gains from reduced lifted drag.

What are you guys doing in your crafts? Making them aerodynamic always?

Best regards.

[n0xiety]

You need good twr and go fast in atmsphere to be able to feel the effects of aerodynamic crafts. Besides are you doing a gravity turn starting immediatelly after takeoff? The more you stay in the atmosphere the more you start feeling the effects of it. I recommend not to use nose cones tho since they are only deadweight. Only use the smallest ones as a finishing touch. Use mk3 adapters that works as a cone. You can literally create the whole aerodynamic part from fuel tanks thus hit two birds with one stone.

[cephalo]

Somebody around here said those large nose cones are broken, and your better off using other combinations of adapters and parts.

[imaspacestation]

Something like that is going to produce insane amounts of drag, and will be hard to fly into orbit. I once had to lift something that looked similar that was part of my space station which couldn't fit in a fairing and couldn't be broken down into smaller parts (without using KIS/KAS mods), so I had to fly it in a very different manner than usual.

With that much drag, you will have to go straight up for quite a while, almost to 20-30km or higher. Be sure you can stay stable during this ascent period because even a very low angle of attack can likely cause you to spin. Once the atmosphere has thinned out, you can start pitching over to the horizon, but be sure you still do this slowly and gently.

Of course this kind of ascent is very inefficient use of fuel, so you'll need more than usual to reach orbit, but you might not have any other choice.

Press F12 in-game to see drag-related arrows on the craft, that'll help you with the flight (the red lines are the drag, don't let them get too far away from the center of mass).

Alternatively, you can redesign your lifter to be much less draggy, but that payload will still need to be nursed into orbit.

[Eric S]

Something like that is going to produce insane amounts of drag

More specifically, the drag of that thing is going to be so high that the presence or lack of nosecones is going to get lost in the noise. Even just struts have a very pronounced effect on drag.

[cybersol]

Well you basically picked some of the worst nosecone parts around. Better would be advanced nose cone (1.25m stack) and rockomax adapter + advanced (2.5m above your kerbodyne adapters). Or even better but admittedly starting to look ridiculous is tailcones in place of the advanced nose cones.

I tend to use a high starting TWR around 1.7+ with a low profile (6* pitch by 38km). I also occasionally forget to add those aerodynamic pieces in my anxiousness to test new rockets. Using mechjebs deltaV loss calculation, I usually see the drag losses go up from half the gravity losses to about equal when I forget the nosecones. All in all that is an extra 400-500 dV to orbit for my typical rockets without nosecones.

On your rocket, with all that drag, you probably still won't notice.

[seyss]

Well you basically picked some of the worst nosecone parts around. Better would be advanced nose cone (1.25m stack) and rockomax adapter + advanced (2.5m above your kerbodyne adapters). Or even better but admittedly starting to look ridiculous is tailcones in place of the advanced nose cones.

are you talking about the Rockomax Brand Adaptor? it won't fit in that huge fuel tank..

[MarvinKitFox]

Adding those nosecones will reduce your drag on those big tanks, by something like 15%

Not really worth it, but it helps a bit.

The nosecones on the SRB are very functional, but are you really going to fly so far, so fast with them that it is worth it?

and, way above it all....

That monstrosity of structural girders and wheels in the airstream has 8-10 times more drag than the rest of the ship, combined!

It is possible to fly a thing like that, here is a link to my own even bigger but very similar monstrosity.http://i.imgur.com/D0qOn8h.png

The trick is to not worry about drag. Stay *below* 300m/s until you get so high that air does not matter.

Yes, this will cost you a lot of fuel in gravity loss, but that is actually less than the drag loss from supersonic scaffolding.

Plus, stability becomes a non-issue.

[seyss]

Thanks for the info. Is there a mod that shows the craft drag? something like Kerbal Engineer for drag

[cybersol]

are you talking about the Rockomax Brand Adaptor? it won't fit in that huge fuel tank..

Sorry I was not clear, I meant the kerbodyne adapter you already have plus a rockomax adaptor plus an advanced nose or tail cone.