Emergency Fighter Program (AKA Rathernotprogramm)

[Piloter]

Combine appreciation of small fighter planes / parasite craft, wacky late-WW2 German technology, late nights, hotel rooms, and life on the road with the work laptop, and...

Drawing from the Emergency Fighter Program (Jägernotprogramm) on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Fighter_Program), basically the Luftwaffe was getting its country handed to it by Allied bombing raids and was running out of supplies and time. So they tried to get some cheap, experimental, did I mention cheap ideas in the air in a hurry. Since we just passed the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain I thought I'd take a crack at some of these wild and crazy designs and folks with torque-wheel-powered Spitfires can shoot them down. So far I have 11 of them that I will post sequentially here. ONCE ALL OF THEM ARE POSTED I will put up the craft files.

Parts-affecting mods used:

Mechjeb & FAR modules

Ven's Stock Revamp

FAR

Rules: No more than an hour or so spent per design, and most of that swearing at KSP for no good sweep wings, stock, with the CoL at the correct point. No endless tweaking and optimizing, reflecting a real-world lengthy dev time. Nope, they have to be in the air and working properly within a couple of launches. Part clipping is sloppy and quick, I'm aiming for realistic design goals (climb time, endurance, speed, takeoff options) and manageable handling in the air (basic T&B and B&Z styles) at altitude and sea level, at a realistic range of speeds. SAS added to simulate a trained test pilot and not a huge time spent optimizing control surface responses etc.

Craft 1: Skoda-Kauba SK P.14, a ramjet monstrosity that required a rocket undercarriage to get up to speed.

http://www.luft46.com/misc/skp14.html

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This flies surprisingly well if it survives the launch--turn on SAS, pitch down and hold until ~60m/sec, let off and let it rotate at ~80, pop the gear off and let them explode then fly as normal. I needed the airbrakes to get the CoL/CoM in the right places for some unfathomable reason. Thrust limiter at 50 gives it realistic endurance and climb rates.

Craft 2: Messerschmidt P.1110 Ente

The P.1110 was a normal-enough looking craft, with an annular intake behind the cockpit for the turbojet. This was boring. The Ente was a special bird. By which I mean a special duck.

http://www.luft46.com/mess/meente.html

It had canards, hence duck, and looks like what a lot of folks make as a standard high-altitude interceptor / SSTO. This went together fast and I didn't put a limiter on it because there's a real shortage of data beyond a projected top speed of 1,000m/sec. Without thrust limiters I've gotten it up to 2,800 so yeah, maybe a little OP. Service ceiling around 23.5km, VNE is somewhere around Mach 3.7 (has a bad habit of coming apart explosively) and maneuverability is much better suited to boom and zoom passes as you'd expect. Flies pretty much without drama and honestly wasn't as much fun as I was hoping. The normal ones tend not to be. Don't worry, they get stranger from here.

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Craft 3: Junkers JU328

The Volksjaeger was going to be replaced, which makes sense if you LOOK AT IT WITH YOUR BRAIN. This was actually the winning design of the whole EFP, was going to be made into a stretched night fighter as well but never made it into production.

http://www.luft46.com/junkers/juef128.html

This one was a little frustrating. The swept wings part, again, would have looked great but due to them being an ancient part the CoL is at the forward wing attachment point instead of in the middle--therefore unusable. The wings on this look proportionally too short the way they're built. It glides very well. A little TOO well which is why I had to configure control surfaces as airbrakes. There's no real yaw control during landings so last minute sideslip is not recommended. Limiter set to 50-60 produces semi-realistic performance (13km service ceiling but the rate of climb is a HELL of a lot more than 22m/sec) but 100 makes it frankly a really fun plane. Turn and burn works better than expected with the wide swept area and it's agile enough--especially for an early jet fighter--to pull off some impressive direction changes in not a lot of space. Energy conservation is always a factor with the lower thrust but not as much as I was expecting. I can see why this design won the competition based on wind tunnel results. Rotation happens...eventually. At 50% thrust, there's not a lot of runway left.

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Craft 4: Heinkel HE 162E "Volksjaeger"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_162

http://1000aircraftphotos.com/Contributions/Visschedijk/Additions/Heinkel_He_162_A-2_3-view.htm

When you've a surplus of engines and a shortage of airframes, you get Kerbal-creative. This was designed to be a throwaway fighter and trials had severe glue problems as well as endurance problems--30 minutes. They were still fast (~550 mph at sea level) and with better range than the ME-163 rocket fighter. Notably the B variant was the actual inspiration for the minature fighter program...but it lost the cool wingtip dihedrals. The E variant, never built, integrated a mixed power plant, a BMW turbojet with a BMW liquid-fuel rocket mounted just behind the exhaust for 'boost power'. I built this as a RAPIER engine with a very limited oxidizer reserve.

The 162 was what got me started on this mad project. I built a normal one, read about the E, and made that my first EFP plane. You can tell because I bothered to put something in that looked vaguely cannon-like. Rotation happens around 60-70 m/s, where the ramjet should be building useful thrust (historically), then 1 activates the rocket mode to zoom-climb to operational height in no time flat. Or, if you've got the time, saved for later use. It maneuvers disgustingly well. In all respects this is a GOOD plane and has decent endurance at cruise. It's Wile E Coyote at its best but all the zany dihedrals actually bloody work...I have so much more respect for German engineering in general after being able to recreate things like this without massaging excessively. If I work on it further I'll probably smooth the gear in a little, but quick design time limits and all.

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Craft 5: Heinkel HE P.1078B

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_P.1078

http://www.luft46.com/heinkel/hep1078b.html

Tailless, twin-gondola, flying wing, what's not to like? This was hell trying to get together, finding a way that would blend fuselage and cockpit and intake without getting way too wide with the couplers and etc. I tossed a bunch of five-minute designs before coming up with this. Turns out that a fuselage with about 150 units of fuel weighs the same as a cockpit and nosecone. With the thrust limiter at something reasonable (~50-60) this flies surprisingly well, great lower-speed handling. With the thrust limiter at 100% it'll pull mad Gs, yo, without disintegrating. Heinkel was onto something here. Also possibly on something. I'm not terribly happy with the proportions but--see Emergency Fighter Program. A little fiddly with yaw but these things tend to be. Rotates north of 100m/sec, jettison trolley at ~1km.

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Craft 6: Heinkel HE.P1077

Another last-ditch effort. Prone pilot, four RATO boosters for takeoff and a jettisonable wheel dolly. Small, cruciform tail, near-vertical climb to combat height, all of 5 minutes of endurance. Very Kerbal. This one will boom and zoom to 12km (operational altitude) in about a minute after rotation, following which the fuel will last for about five minutes. It handles pretty respectably all things considered.

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Craft 7: Focke-Wulf FW 283

http://www.luft46.com/fw/fwta283.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke-Wulf_Ta_283

A low-wing interceptor with turboramjets on the tailplanes and a rocket engine for takeoff. I couldn't find a fast and decent way of replicating the sheer badassery of this (c'mon, it looks like something out of Crimson Skies) with the Mk 1 parts so I wound up using a Mk 2 setup. This resulted in a craft that is, yes, considerably bigger than the original, but looks oh-so-good. Given the whole limited supplies I think that a recovery mechanism for the rocket engine isn't entirely insane. This flies VERY well. It's fast. Good god is it fast, even with 50% limiters. Generally you're rotating at ~120m/s, climbing out at 45-60 degrees when popping the engine at 1km and already nearly exceeding Mach 1! The residual momentum alone that imparts to the engine and chute means you can loop around and fly underneath it a couple times before it splashes down.

I nearly cheated on this by spending more time getting it better after the first few launches. Hidden (sort of) struts and hidden (sort of) fuel lines, and control surfaces to mask ugly rear edges. There's a lot of turn-and-burn baked into this but without a good G-suit (vintage 1946) I wouldn't want to try it in combat. Honestly this is just FUN no matter what you're doing with it. As a side bonus (pictured) if you try to rotate too soon and tail-strike the engines off, the rest of the craft survives much better than most airplanes tend to.

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Craft 8: Focke-Wulf Super Lorin

http://www.luft46.com/fw/fwsuplor.html

This was a development of the FW-183 Huckabein, radically so, with ramjets on tailplanes and built small. I'm not a fan of the Huckabein or the high-tail Volksjaeger (not the one above!) just because they're basically the same design and they look weird and not aesthetically pleasing to me. This variant caught my eye and almost ran me over the time limit. Problem is, turbojets in KSP with Ven's weigh ~1.8 tons and that is a HELL of a lot of mass to put behind a physical airframe center on a short plane! I had to clip many, many, many tanks together to try and compensate (check out those bands). Once done it flew better than I had ever expected for something I figured was going to stay a display model. This gets a little bendy during manuevers but holds together better than expected. Struts on the tailplanes and boom to fuselage would probably help.

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Craft 9: Blohm & Voss P.213

http://www.luft46.com/bv/bvp213.html

Tiny, tiny, tiny. Part of the Minaturjaeger program and projected to use the pulsejet from the V-1 as a cheap source of motive power. (This joined the pulsejet HE162 and EF126 as contenders.) Wooden wing, two-part preformed steel fuselage, to embody the design philosophy that 'quantity has a quality all its own'. As a KSP quickie recreation, there's no SPACE to put anything. Tweakscale would have really helped here. There is heinous sideslip--exactly as you'd imagine--but otherwise pitch and roll authority are pretty good. The typical drunken weave involved with trying to keep one of these in a more or less straight line to intercept probably would've helped to avoid fire. With boosters and pulsejet on at once rotation is a little north of 80m/s. For some reason KSP won't let me equalize out the fuel in the boosters--I keep setting the one at 16.8 to 18.2 and it reverts every time afterward so the last couple ms of thrust may act to unbalance the craft a little. Has a realistic cruise endurance. Screenshots were hard to get, every time I'd let go of flight controls and swing the camera it'd try to plow into the ground. Not a terribly capable airframe and I understand why it was ditched in favor of the EF126.

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Craft 10: Blohm & Voss P.212.3

http://www.luft46.com/bv/bvp212.html

Swept-wing, tailless, external drop tanks, with an ideal range of ~4 hours on internal fuel. This integrated the intake duct with the fuselage structure in a very odd way. Looking at all the variants, this was the one actually presented and the one that seemed most 'cool' to replicate for funky dihedrals and so forth. Apart from a degree or so of sideslip wibbling this can do a very credible turn-and-burn approach, like everything with a wide wing sweep and comparatively thin chord. I may have gone slightly overboard with fueling, cruising at 6K or so takes a couple notches of power and gives the proper 4 hours of range. Down at sea level that increases to ~8 hours as measured by FAR's data calculations. With external tanks that number goes way, way, way up. I might see if this can be a circumnavigator someday. Service ceiling is a semi-realistic 12km, things get a little coffin-corner-y up there. Suggested Vmax is around 280m/sec although there's no compressibility problems approaching Mach. Rotates between 80-90 mps.

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Craft 11: Bachem 349 Natter

http://falkeeins.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/adder-affair-bachem-natter-feature-from.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachem_Ba_349

Oh boy, where to start. A point defense, vertical-launch, rocket interceptor, basically consisting of a rocket engine section which the Luftwaffe wanted back, a pilot that they could take or leave, and a nose full of HE (or rockets) to give to the Allied bomber formations. 60 seconds to operational altitude with quad additional boosters to be discarded at ~1km, and a theoretical ability to glide back down. This will hit altitude in the alloted time, and how, pitches down a LOT easier than up, and glides in a reputable fashion. I hated to use a part that wasn't stock, but the ablating engine from Ven's Stock Revamp proved perfect for this where the aerospike and T30 were both wrong. 1 engages and disengages the engines...after climbing to altitude and diving down on imaginary bombers, there is a little bit of fuel left to do whatever one wants with. For what it's worth this does well as a glider, as the real one did, and landings may be just as big a problem. I had to clip things all over to make this work and there's a real shortage of small surfaces so the tail was more work than it needed to be. As far as overall layout of boosters and control surfaces this is a little closer to the B variant for the 0.5 of you who care. Fun fact, if you don't cut off the engines for an apogee of 12km it'll hit 40. Landing is via parachutes...two for the engine, one for the pilot. Don't touch the stick during ascent, just turn on SAS and pitch to taste. Not responsible for dead zones causing hilarious chaos, especially in the yaw axis!

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Craft download: https://infotomb.com/noq6a

This was a hell of a lot of fun. Next time I'm on the road I may make a couple more 'bonus' wunderwaffe in this vein and post them accordingly. Give these a fly and let me know what you think! If you tweak them into production-ready variants, post 'em back up. If you stage elaborate KMP battles with these as the expendable mooks, post up photos.

Edited September 5, 2015 by Piloter
Last batch and craft.

[Piloter]

Added Ente, 328, 162E. Still to come, HE 1078B--the dual-nose beast, HE P1077--jettisonable landing gear and rocket boosters to get to speed, a little toy of a plane, FW 283 and Super Lorin--both flying and totally awesome, BV 213--high wing low engine, BV 212.3, all sweep and no tail, and the infamous BA349 "Natter" nutter, vertically-launched to great fanfare. All done and waiting to screenshot and post.

Edited September 2, 2015 by Piloter

[Piloter]

Added 1078, 1077, 283 and Super Lorin.

Still to come, BV213, BV 212, BA349, craft files.

[Piloter]

Added 213, 212, 349, and craft files. Whew!

[FungusForge]

I might just download the Natter and strap a bunch of BDA rocket pods and another decoupler to the nose.