Aerodynamics Display. What do the colors mean?

[ayana]

If anyone could provide an explanation, or tell me where it's explained, that would be awesome.

[Tank Buddy]

Red is Drag

Blue is Lift from wing surfaces

Cyan is Lift from lifting bodies (non wing parts like fuselages)

Yellow is Lift from control surfaces*

*I think

[ayana]

Now how did I get lifting body lift to be unbalanced? Questions, questions.

[Claw]

The list above is correct, except that maybe "lift from lifting bodies" might be misleading. It's body lift, which is slightly different. Think of it more in terms of blutly ramming any object through the air at high enough speeds, vice a specially shaped aerodynamic body.

Also, can you be more specific about it becoming unbalanced?

Cheers,

-Claw

[ayana]

Going fast enough got a cyan arrow to pop up on one side of the craft, before things got really bad. I can have an image up later.

[Superfluous J]

If you're going super fast super low, any deviation from exact prograde can have surprising and devastating results. And it's impossible to maintain exact prograde, especially when going super fast, super low.

You can mitigate this with craft design, so with luck we'll be able to help with the image.

[Skorpychan]

It went wrong because of the cyan arrow. Explain what happened, post pictures of your rocket, and show us on the doll where the physics touched you.

[ayana]

I have no idea what might cause it, or if it's a bug.

[Skorpychan]

Okay, that's asymmetric lift from the rocket fuel tanks you have there. Which is... Interesting, considering it should be on both from what I see.

I notice, however, that you have wings stuck to wings without strutting. That could be another cause of the crash.

Have you tried using more struts? Because I think you should try more struts to see if it's a rigidity problem. But that's just my .9x thinking.

Any input from someone who knows about spaceplanes?

[Claw]

I haven't looked into the asymmetric lines from these pictures yet, but I can say from experience that the lines from the Aero overlay aren't exactly perfect. There are instances where the lift lines will go out the side. So if the craft isn't actually reacting to the lift in that picture above, then it's not really getting asymmetric lift.

The aero overlay was a debug option that ultimately was left available for users. So while it's handy, it won't always show exactly what the forces are doing. Though I think it been improved a bit from the 1.0.0 release.

It's important to note that there are lots of effects going on at high speeds. So seeing this one picture from low speed doesn't necessarily convince me of asymmetric reactions at high speeds.

Cheers,

~Claw

[Signo]

The asymmetric lift from mk1 fuselage is a kind of bug I encountered myself and there are a few topics around about it.

Here you can have another example of it and here the "bug report".

My issue below. The plane actually turns left so it is basically useless.

Edited August 1, 2015 by Signo

[Claw]

I'm going to move my conversation about the bug over to the other thread, since the bug discussion is off topic from the question posed.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/129181

Cheers,

~Claw