Why does this happen to me?

[Monkthespy]

Do you ever have a time when you have an awesome looking design that works in real life (F-15) but in KSP it absolutely sucks? And then you are frustrated when you try to fix it, and, it never works, etc, and then you go on for hours just absolutely frustrated.

I tried building an F-15.

An hour later I was pulling my hair out.

[VincentMcConnell]

The KSP space planes are practically completely physically unrealistic.

There\'s a glitch with them in mine, though. No matter how stable the design, at exactly 6,000 meters, my plane pitches up to 90 degrees and oscillates back and forth.

[Monkthespy]

The KSP space planes are practically completely physically unrealistic.

There\'s a glitch with them in mine, though. No matter how stable the design, at exactly 6,000 meters, my plane pitches up to 90 degrees and oscillates back and forth.

...Not a glitch. Your wings are not producing enough drag due to the thin atmosphere. Large delta wings should fix this issue.

And on the unrealistically part, yes, yes they are. But currently, this is more realistic than we have ever been.

EDIT: 900 posts.

[VincentMcConnell]

It IS a glitch. I have downloaded people\'s crafts that are some very stable designs that other people can fly perfectly fine. They often also DO have delta-wings.

Kosmo-Not was having a problem where trim controls weren\'t working. Unfortunately, there\'s just a LOT of glitches with the planes it this game.

[Tosh]

That\'s weird, but I\'ve got some luck with realistically looking planes --

Like this one:

Or this:

Indeed, as well as their real-life counterparts, they do require helluva lot of setup before they even able to fly. Wings placement, incidence angle, dihedral angle, main gear legs... But when at last they fly -- they fly pretty well.

BTW here\'s quite a collection of realistic planes: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=12874.0. Most of them fly

[GeekyMe97]

I agree with your point, but I dont think you should get so mad about it ^^

I love spaceplanes the way they are though :3

[Frostiken]

Do you ever have a time when you have an awesome looking design that works in real life (F-15) but in KSP it absolutely sucks? And then you are frustrated when you try to fix it, and, it never works, etc, and then you go on for hours just absolutely frustrated.

I tried building an F-15.

An hour later I was pulling my hair out.

And F-15 was the first plane I tried to really make (mostly because they are what I \'do\'), and it\'s not easy. The problem is that the F-15\'s intakes are much wider at the front, but at the rear the engines sit much closer together. It\'s simply not possible to achieve that without \'cheating\' to some degree. This gives you two choices: 1) Straight engines with a large gap between them at the back of the aircraft... or 2) A large, obvious \'fault line\' in the fuselage where at some point you have to connect the much wider-spaced intakes to the narrower engines at the back.

I\'ve come up with a few designs but none of them really work good.

This isn\'t helped by the fact that the vertical stabs we\'re offered in-game are extremely tiny, and delta wings look like ass when used for that purpose.

Here is one design I\'m trying, which involves 1m spaced intakes but engines close at the back. The obvious problem here is that the rear profile looks awful because of the clear misjoin between the fuselage parts. Ignore the fuel pipes - I modded my delta wings to carry internal fuel. Incomplete design.

Here is another I\'m totally unhappy with, but features the closest joining of the engines you can perform without major collision problems. Incomplete design.

And here is the most complete fighter I\'ve made which is loosely based on the F-15E.

Note that I normally fly it with canards (which also jettison on capsule separation). It weighs so very much that it\'s almost impossible to fly properly without them.

By \'most complete\', I mean:

[samstarman5]

What should be considered is that aerodynamics hasn\'t been corrected to work as they should, yet. Otherwise we wouldn\'t be able to still float across the sky in a rocket with two dozen winglets attached to it. Once the kinks get ironed out to more aeroflight proportions, F-15-like planes will work more as they should.

[Frostiken]

Well right now, without canards, heavyweight planes fly like complete shit. Rear stabilators are extremely ineffective and I think that\'s a lot to do with problems related to center of mass.

I can\'t speculate on the nature of \'why\', but in real life canards sort of help pull the nose around while the stabilators push it - canards are by no means necessary, they just give you a bit extra bite in the turn. Stabilators are the primary method of pitch adjustment but right now that isn\'t reflected at all... stabilator-based aircraft just sort of lazily crawl up. Without canards some aircraft won\'t even get off the runway.

[Zephram Kerman]

By \'most complete\', I mean:

These designs look sweet!

How does that ejector seat work? Modified decoupler, or something else?

[Frostiken]

These designs look sweet!

How does that ejector seat work? Modified decoupler, or something else?

Well the whole thing is crammed with mod parts, but all it really is is the Mechjeb decoupler behind the cockpit and on the radome. Then I have the retro / ullage boosters from the K&W pack positioned to blow the radome away as well as blow the cockpit upwards. A strut-reinforced parachute deploys at the same time. Sometimes it rips off.

There\'s also a part in the Novapunch pack called the 'Explosive Bolt', a tiny little flat decoupler. I use that to separate the nose landing gear, because it caused problems when the cockpit got to the ground.

Oh and I managed to embed an AR202 Mechjeb inside the cockpit piece.

[boolybooly]

mmm I recognise the feeling, I have been trying to make a small space plane that will fly without ASAS and for the first time ever with KSP I am stumped, every design bar one yaws all over the place and the one design which doesnt yaw due to having trailing fins either flips over or the undercarriage collapses when it lands due to the craft randomly turning sideways.

As far as bug reporting goes its hard to see the wood for the trees but I think the very high cockpit drag numbers might be part of the problem. EDIT I was confusing myself here sorry.

ASAS helps a lot and angling the wings up a tad sometimes helps and moving them relative to the center of mass, sometimes it just makes it worse though. Its really hard to diagnose problems.

[Zephram Kerman]

Well the whole thing is crammed with mod parts, but all it really is is the Mechjeb decoupler behind the cockpit and on the radome. Then I have the retro / ullage boosters from the K&W pack positioned to blow the radome away as well as blow the cockpit upwards. A strut-reinforced parachute deploys at the same time. Sometimes it rips off.

There\'s also a part in the Novapunch pack called the 'Explosive Bolt', a tiny little flat decoupler. I use that to separate the nose landing gear, because it caused problems when the cockpit got to the ground.

Oh and I managed to embed an AR202 Mechjeb inside the cockpit piece.

Awesome. I\'ve got to get me one of these. Thank you.

Its really hard to diagnose problems.

I never expected aeronautics to be harder than rocket science. Who knew?

From now on, I\'ll just focus on beta testing the gravity and explosions systems.