For a lander, are these airbrakes backwards?

[smjjames]

What the title says. So, are they? I suspect they are......

Though I landed just fine with them like that anyways....

[lukethecoder64]

It does not matter which way, but IRL they are faced with the "tail" pointing upward/backward.

Hope this helps!

Luke

[Fearless Son]

If it was a plane? Yeah, those would probably be backwards. But as a lander? Nah, they are probably just fine.

Fully extended, airbrakes are equally effective whether they are forward or backward, or at least my experience suggests as much. Where you might get fouled up is if these airbrakes are being used as control surfaces instead of pure breaks. I am uncertain how exactly the game models the aerodynamic forces over them when they are not fully deployed, but I would intuit that the backwards ones produce force more suddenly than the forward ones, which might cause the craft to be over-compensating during atmospheric flight.

But realistically, the only time you would have to worry about that is when launching very heavy rockets with airbrakes as control surfaces. The rest of the time, it might as well be irrelevant whether they are backward or forward.

[Xannari Ferrows]

If the center of applied forces is above the center of mass, they are in the right place.